Isti's Blog » Blender

Mirror an Object in Blender

Isti — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 11:23:22 +0000

While I was playing with character modeling I needed to duplicate and mirror an object. I quickly googled around and found the following:

SHIFT-D
SX
ENTER

OK. I tried. Nothing happened apart from the duplication. It took me a while until I noticed I actually have to move the object after SX.

I made a series of screenshots about this:

This is the default scene in Blender:

Put your 3d cursor where you want to have the mirror:

I modify the default cube a bit to demonstrate the mirroring.
We will move the upper right vertex a bit:

Here is the modified cube:

Change the pivot to the 3D cursor:

In object mode select the object. Type:

SHIFT-D
SX
-1
ENTER

Instead of typing -1 you can just move the object, but blender will scale it X size.

Here is the result:

Blender Character Animation

Isti — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 13:27:13 +0000

I started to read the character animation tutorial at Blender mediawiki. My original plan was to read the whole document and start modeling after that while reading the tutorial second time. I couldn’t wait to finish the doq. So I started modeling I’m still modeling the head. It is much more difficult (for me at least) than I thought. I had a hard time to get a somewhat smooth surface. It is still not perfect, but I will go on hehe. Here is a screenshot:

Playing with Blender Lighting

Isti — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 06:44:56 +0000

In the former post I wrote I was not 100% satisfied with the lights in my former setup. So, I set up a similar rig from scratch. Now, this one is cool. Or at least I like it. It is much more flexible and gives better results. I can control the darkness of the shadows. Positioning the light is much easier. The former setup also had a drawback that the shadow gradients were not smooth at large resolution images. I simulate area light with a bunch of spots distributed on a plane. In the former setup the distance between the vertexes of the plane was too big. Now it is better. Here is an example (Click this image for 3200×2000 resolution):

Maybe the shadows could be a bit darker in this image.

Yesterday I have found a really cool tutorial about character animation at Blender mediawiki. It is also available in pdf format. I’m planning to read this trough and also do it in practice.

Blender Lighting

Isti — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 12:44:26 +0000

At the beginning I had huge problems with lighting in Blender. First of all it was very strange that only spots made shadows. Eventually I got shadows from somewhere else, too which confused me even more. Did I had some hidden spots? God knows. Finally I found some usable tutorials from blender.org. E.g.:

http://www.blender.org/documentation/htmlI/x5888.html

After reading this I managed to setup my own “studio” in blender and I have got satisfactory results with shadows.

I’m still not 100% satisfied but it is not bad for beginning. Here is an example:

Blender Windowed Mode in Ubuntu

Isti — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 12:27:02 +0000

When I installed Blender in Ubuntu it created two entries in the Applications/Graphics menu. One is for full screen mode, the other is for windowed mode. However the windowed mode didn’t work for me. So I googled around and found the following solution:

Open System/Preferences/Main Menu in Ubuntu

Navigate to Graphics

Right click on Blender 3D modeller (windowed)

Select properties.

Write the followings to the command field: blender -w -p 10 100 1024 768

Close and enjoy.

You can change the -p parameter values the following way: -p x y w h

where x,y is the lower left corner of the window. In this case it is 5px from the left of the screen and 100px from the bottom.

w is the width, h is the height of the window

Blender

Isti — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 06:57:22 +0000

Here is my new learning project. I will learn to make 3D images with Blender. I made 3D graphics before and I enjoyed it very much. I have used various tools in Windows environment. Last year I decided to use Linux and open source SW for my personal projects, so I had to find some alternatives. It didn’t take too much time to find Blender with Google hehe. So I installed it with the good old apt on my Ubuntu PC:

sudo apt-get install blender

It took me Blender 2.44. I started it and surprised. WTF is it?! Starting to use the interface without help is hopeless. I was really disappointed. I just closed it and started to look for something else. Google, Google, Google. Blender, blender, blender. Eat shit! 100 000 000 flies cannot be wrong. So I got back to Blender and did what I hate the most. I started to RFM. Or actually to watch tutorials. Do not misunderstand me. There is nothing wrong with tutorials, but I like to figure out most of the things myself. I simply learn better that way. This time it didn’t work. Fortunately there are some good video tutorials at blender.org:

http://www.blender.org/education-help/video-tutorials/

I watched the first 6 tutorials under “Getting started” and “Model/Material.Light”. Then hope came back I’m not convinced yet, but I didn’t give up!

Here is my first Blender rendered picture:

Well, I admit it is not a good picture at all. I was just playing around with basic objects. Creation, moving, sizing, etc. I also tried materials. Lighting is really bad on this image. I have to improve a lot on that. I also suffered quite much with the camera. I have to improve on that, too. Anyway, it is already an achievement that I managed to render something