After Day Two of the first week of SGI Projects (July 16th), Dr. Nicholas Sharp, one of the SGI Tutorial Week lecturers, gave the Fellows a quick glimpse into the powerful open-source program, Blender. Before we jumped into learning how to use Blender, Dr. Sharp highlighted the five key reasons why one might use Blender:
- Rendering and Ray tracing
- Visual Effects
- Mesh modeling and artist content creation *our focus for the tutorial
- Physics simulation
- Uses node-based and Python-based scripting
Operation: Blender 101
Although one could easily spend hours if not days learning all the techniques and tools of Blender, Dr. Sharp went through how to set up Blender (preferences and how to change the perspective of a mesh) to the basic mesh manipulation and modeling.
Even though we learned many different commands, two of the most essential things to know (at least for me as a novice) were being able to move around the mesh and move the scene. To move around the mesh: use two fingers on your touchpad. To move the scene: hold shift and use two fingers on your touchpad. My favorite trick Dr. Sharp taught was using the spacebar to search for the tool you needed instead of looking around for it.
An example of a mesh manipulation we worked on:
By entering edit mode and selecting the faces using the X-ray view, we could select Spot’s ear and stretch it along the X-axis.
Conclusions on Blender
For an open-source program, I was extremely shocked by how powerful and versatile it is, and it makes sense why professionals in the industry could use Blender instead of other paid programs. With his step-by-step explanations, Dr. Sharp was a great teacher and extremely helpful in understanding a program that can be daunting. I’m excited to explore more on how to use Blender and see how I can integrate it into my future endeavors beyond SGI.
Thank you again for your time, Dr. Sharp!
