Complete Newb

Hi all

New to Blender so please don’t shout too much. I have done a basic tutorial on Youtube and it seemed to go ok and I like what Blender can do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzMEltQGhfk

Just a couple of questions:

  1. How artistic do I have to be?
  2. Not knowing much about blender yet, but is it possible to download a robot from Blend Swap and create a stop go animation?

I would eventually like to do something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLyhbqBJB_o

Thanks for any help.

  1. That is depending on what you do. You should have good ideas (what you actually have) and some artistic skills like to know where the eyes are positioned in the face are useful, but if you don’t want to sculpt a face you don’t need that knowledge it.

Almost everything made with blender is art. Not in sense of a painting but more like a movie or maybe photos (which is art in my opinion). You should know some art-rules (e.g. 3-Point-Lightning, 180°-rule for animations, golden ratio) but they are explained in the most blender tutorials (Very useful for 3D-Renders at all: http://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/understanding-composition/

  1. Yes it is possible, but I wouldn’t recommend to do that as your second work with blender (if you have no experience with other 3D software). Look for tutorials about advanced modeling, because you will always need modeling; the same with materials. In the next step you should try camera tracking and animating. If you spend a few minutes on blender every day, I’m sure you will be able to do something like this soon!

Thanks for the reply.

I have been looking at camera tracking on blenderguru with this excercise, but I have yet to get past the tracking markers as when it tracks, it cant find the marker.

I will get there eventually. I think I am more of a special effects fan, so the tracking excercise suits me. Perhaps I am being a bit keen with the transformer!!

Thanks for the reply.

Blender has a pretty steep learning curve, and in the beginning you may feel a little overwhelmed, but you’ll get past that fairly quickly if you just keep at it with tutorials (make sure though that the tutorials are for your version of the interface!!!).

I agree with learning the basics first, but that said, using an already-existing armature for a robot isn’t that tricky. Work on the basics of Blender for a couple weeks and then check out a tutorial on working with armatures. :slight_smile: And once you understand how to access and rotate the bones to change how your robot is standing and are comfortable with that then you can look up a basic animation tutorial (the short of it, how animation works isn’t intuitive - that is, you’re not just going to guess how to do it - but once you know how it’s quite easy; virtually everything you can tweak / assign in blender, you can keyframe to a specific timepoint, and for properties that can be interpolated between, Blender will do that for you on the in-between keyframes).

Now, if you want to do anything trickier than that, such as incorporating physics in your robot’s interaction with his world, that will take significantly more practice than just manually choosing exactly where everything is at what points in time (but you can do that in blender - rigid bodies, soft bodies, fluids, etc).

If you haven’t found this site yet… I’d highly recommend it - most of what I learned about blender I learned from them. They have great free tutorials and their paid ones are absolutely great if you have the extra money. I only bought one for $60 by the great Johnathan Williamson and I don’t regret it at all: http://cgcookie.com/blender

As for “how artistic do you have to be” - well, that depends on what you’re doing. A paintbrush is useless in the hands of someone who can’t paint (like me). Similarly, Blender is useless in the hands of someone who has no sense of spacial proportion. I have much more trouble making 2d representations of 3d objects (like painting or drawing) than I do making a 3d representation of an object and allowing the computer to make it 2d for me… (mind you - I could never make stuff like they do on Blender cookie - but I only like making low-poly objects for games which has a bit higher leeway for imperfection)

It Depends
The “software limit” is your knowledge in your head, not have limits actually to artistic things.
But for a beginner the software is little hard.
And it requires basic procedures, like:
The simplest would be:
make a Low Poly and then a Hight Poly
UvMaps
materials
composition
light
and not always in that order.
But the software is very technical and isn’t friendly for a beginner.
However the results are fantastic.
Cheers

ps:horrible english sry, anyway i no have time to learn my “3” non native language, but is little comprehensive.

Thanks for the replies and the advice.

I am slowly getting to grips with the very basics of Blender and I think once I have an idea what does what, then I am sure I can progress to a higher level of learning.