So here I am once again looking at learning Blender. A quick scan of the web shows me how much there is out there to help me. After a quick search I find myself on blender.org looking at the main screen and reading about how great Blender is and it's free, etc, etc. Then I go to the download page and it tells me that I want the Windows Installer because I'm using Windows 7 (I know, it's old and not safe to use anymore, but this is all I have). The version I am downloading is Blender 2.81 but you can get older versions instead.
I click on the download button and I'm taken to another page, the download starts (with another click to confirm) and I notice the video at the bottom left that tells me about learning the basics of Blender. That's exactly what I need! The video is embedded, but I click on the YouTube button and I am transported to the Blender YouTube channel. The first video tells me that Blender is not only a 3D package, but also can be used for 2D graphics and animation, video editing and compositing (like After Effects). And now I'm hooked. This is going to be a fun journey. I'll take you through what I learn over the next million blog posts and hopefully you will learn along with me.
One thing it says on the download page is that Blender does not need to be installed. It is completely portable. Which is great and hopefully easier to setup too.
As I progressed through my course I had to learn about character animation. I was still very much a novice and really needed to put the time in to make somethng I could be proud of. However, here is my effort using stock characters that came with 3DS Max (I think!).
This was a lot of fun to make. I'd never done character animation before so I was quite pleased at the time, but I look back now and cringe a little.
As I progressed through to my second year of this new course I started Maya. I seem to have lost most of my Maya stuff but as part of my final year we did something called Matchmoving using real footage and graphics combined.
I ran out of time so I produced the effort below
After I finished my degree I did a Masters degree in Computer Games Design. This was the only course with any graphics in at that level. Passed that and then did nothing for ten years with all that knowledge. Didn't practice; partly because I couldn't afford the software. I had heard of Blender and tinkered with it but my head wasn't in the right frame of mind and I gave up. Until now. I am just about to finish another job and I need to get started on something that I have had my heart on doing for a long time. My ultimate goal is to produce some amazing short animations and short films with my own music and sound effects. Let's get started.
Welcome to my blog. This is a big day for me as I've decided to learn something new and it's about time. Blender is an open source graphics progam that has been constantly developed and updated over the past couple of decades (I think!) and is now a major contender to some of the expensive programs available on the market, such as 3DS Max, Lightwave, Cinema 4D and Maya, to name but a few. To learn any of these incredible programs can be hard and to master them requires a great deal of dedication.
My graphics background started back in the early 1990s when I worked with my brother running a video company. I had to learn some basic graphics and we had an Amiga 4000 at our disposal. The Amiga came with a graphics program but I can't remember its name. The results of some of my efforts at the time can be seen at the beginning of this video and others that may or may not still exist.
The title screen was made using the Amiga 4000 with me painstakingly copying an original drawing by a local artist and colouring and adding text. It was fun but the results by today's standards are very poor. Here is the screen in question.
I was even able to do some simple animation using basic stop motion techniques and I think some keyframing, which I will talk about in a future video. Anyway that was it for a number of years. No more graphics from me until I bought my first PC in 1997. It came with Windows 95 and 'Paint'. I struggled to get any real sense out of Paint and if I had been arty enough I would have been better just using a piece of paper and a pencil. For the next few years I tinkered with various demo programs of art packages that were attached to the front of magazines and even some full programs that came free, but I was never dedicated enough to achieve very much.
Then in 2003 my chance came to do something more substantial in graphics. The job I had at the time was probably my favourite job of all the jobs I had had, teaching adults IT in a relaxed and casual setting. Unfortunately, the government funding for free IT courses had come to an end and I was soon to be out of a job. At this stage I had always wanted to do web design so I enrolled on a degree course at my local university which looked right and I started in September 2003. I breezed through most of the first year but was disappointed by the lack of graphics involved in the course I was on. Luckily, a stroke of luck happened as I sought to change courses. A new course had just been advertised called Digital Film, Animation and 3d Technology. It was a degree course and some of what I'd already done meant that I could change courses and be credited for a couple of the modules.
This was where I wanted to be. Although being a mature student in my 30s made it sometimes uncomfortable to mix with other students during group work, I enjoyed the course. We started by learning 3DS Max 5, Photoshop and After Effects. Wow! I was hooked, but by now I had a young family and things would be harder to do at home. In the second year of the degree we learnt Maya and the change from 3DS Max was hard at first but I eventually found that I preferred Maya. I was not interested in doing graphics for games. I was more interested in films.
Well here is one of my basic efforts from my first year using 3DS Max.
