You'll be able to look at an object and think of several ways to create it. You will perceive everything differently. As you walk down a street, you will be imagining how you might model it or render it in Blender.

One thing to remember is that there are no buttons in Blender that say "Don't touch". As long as you back up your files and use the Ctrl + Z keys to undo any mistakes, not much is likely to go too wrong.

Now, it's time to begin our discovery of Blender. Using Blender is as simple or complex as you want it to be.

Let's begin simply. To start, we will open Blender and render a scene. Rendering is like taking a picture in Blender. When you take a picture in real life, you have a camera, some light, and something or someone you are taking a picture of.

In a Blender scene, there is a camera, a lamp, and something to render. When you render, Blender scans the scene from the camera's point of view. It notes which objects are where, and what lights are available. It figures out how each object will be lit, what the surface of the object looks like, what part of the object the camera can see, how big it should appear to the camera, and other factors, and then Blender creates a picture. It's pretty amazing.

We'll dip our toe into Blender, just so you can see that using Blender is not difficult and that you can do it. Then, we will do a little background study on animations so that you will understand what animators are trying to accomplish in Blender. Then, using what you have learned, you'll be ready to learn more about Blender.

Go to http://www.blender.org/ to download Blender for free. There is a Download button on the main menu, which will direct you to the location from where you can download the latest version of Blender for your system. Blender runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Follow the instructions and you should have Blender up and running quickly.

To use Blender, you need to first check that your machine has certain minimum system specifications so that it is capable of running Blender. Here's where to find your system information:

The following is what Blender needs in order to be able to run:

Now that you have the latest version of Blender on your system, it's time to try it out.

Congratulations! You've now rendered your first scene in Blender. You can see the scene to be rendered in the preceding image. The cube is easy to guess. The dot surrounded by dashed lines is the lamp. The four-sided cone with a triangle on top is the camera, and there is a reference grid beneath the cube.

When the scene is rendered, as seen in the following screenshot, Blender shows you what the camera would see. The cube is colored gray because you haven't chosen a color. There is only one lamp in the scene, and Blender calculates where the lamp is and where the sides of the cube are. The lamp is not an object like a light bulb, so it is not seen in the rendered image, but its light is used to set the brightness of the scene.

While it's rendering, Blender figures out what portion of the light would bounce off a particular side of the cube and into the camera lens. Some sides point away from the lamp, so they appear darker. The sides facing towards the lamp appear to be brighter. Blender even does a trick that you don't see at all. Blender figures out which parts of the cube the camera does not see, and to save itself from additional work, it doesn't render what cannot be seen.

Rendering this image was simple for you. Blender doesn't get any more difficult to use; you just learn more things to do with Blender. In the following chapters, we will break down the sections into easy-to-do steps using Blender.

Mac users, thank you for making changes to the interface of your Mac. Now, you can use the standard Blender commands. These will pay off by making the using of Blender much easier and fun. You can still access the Dashboard via the Mac menu bar.

When Blender renders a scene, it brings up a special render window over the 3D window. Pressing the Esc button closes this window, returning you to the 3D window. Pressing Ctrl + Q closes Blender 3D down completely. Congratulations! Everything else about learning Blender is just an elaboration on this.

We are going to go into the past, back to when animation was young. We are going there because there are general issues that everyone encounters when trying to put graphics into motion. Early animations were simple, so it is easiest to see the fundamental animation techniques done and also see examples of where it wasn't done so you can tell the difference.

Back then, like now, animators were under pressure; they had a short time to turn out a completed animation. They ran into issues such as what was required to tell a story believably, what kind of look to give it, how to make it easy to do, and how to complete it before their deadline. They also had to answer questions such as how to tell the story, how to get all the art work done, and how to photograph it with a camera. A lot of the answers they came up with are now universal.

First, we are going to look at a Felix the Cat animation called Felix Turns the Tide that was made a few years after World War I. It was one of the seventeen different Felix the Cat films made that year (which equates to approximately one animation every three weeks). It was a silent animation and cutting edge for its time but pretty primitive by modern standards, as you can see in the following screenshot:

From the thought balloon, borrowed from newspaper comics, you can see that animation hadn't come too far from its roots.

It's a good place to start because they had figured out the mechanics of making an animation, but they were just beginning to learn the language of animation. In this book, you will learn both the mechanics of a Blender animation and how to do it well. It's a learning experience we will share with these pioneers—so we're in good company!

Felix Turns the Tide sure isn't as complex as Big Hero 6, but it's surprising how well they used their limited tools and told a story. This was only six years after cel animation had been invented. Cel animation revolutionized early animation because it allowed you to put different parts of an animated frame on different transparent layers of plastic cellulose, so you didn't have to redraw the entire scene every frame. However, the animation was pretty stiff, and the motion went straight from pose to pose. Their use of the camera reflected the use of films at that time, plenty of long shots and long takes. They also borrowed the visual grammar from comics with things such as speech bubbles and dotted lines to indicate where they were looking.

Animators are learning that their craft and technology is advancing. Walt Disney had lost its main character Oswald the Lucky Rabbit to Universal Studios. Universal also hired all of Disney's animators except Ub Iwerks, Disney's star animator. This was a serious blow to Disney. Therefore, Disney was desperate and they needed something to stay in business. In 1928, Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks created their first Mickey Mouse animation, Plane Crazy. It introduced both Mickey and Minnie. However, Disney could not find a distributor for it, so it did not get released. Their next Mickey Mouse movie, Steamboat Willie, was the first American animation with sound, and that opened up the market for Mickey. For us, since Plane Crazy was made as a silent film and retrofitted with sound, it showed how animators had perfected their skills in the period between 1922 and 1928 before the use of sound.

Animation has improved quite a bit in these six years. Now, the basic principles of animation are codified and used with good results. Instead of a static, stage-like establishing shot, we enter the scene following a cow, from blackness into a farmyard filled with activity. Objects are contorted surrealistically. There is no way to foretell where the story is going and the camera is used to immerse you into what is happening. When Mickey is flying along the road, Disney puts you into the action, giving you a view from the plane's cockpit instead of showing you what the airplane is flying through, heightening the action, but also saving work by using just a few lines and some colored background to achieve a hair-raising ride.

By 1938, the animation industry is mature. Felix ceased production in 1936. Disney released Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in December of 1937 and was beginning production on Fantasia. With the popularity of Popeye, Fleischer Studios had become the number two animation company and was working on Gulliver's Travels.

Goonland was made during the peak of 1930s animation. The principles of animation were well known and widely used. At the start, the secondary motion of clouds in the background is so dramatic that it almost makes you seasick. The anticipation of Popeye taking in an exaggeratedly deep breath prior to filling his sails with wind helps sell that it can be done. When he grabs the goony hair to disguise himself, it snaps and springs towards his hand. That is a follow through. There are fewer metaphors except when the goons fight and you see a cloud of fists and arms, or lines radiating from his face when Popeye sees his Pappy.

You just gave yourself an animation reference library to enjoy and study. As you learn animation, you may want to come back to them as references, to see how they solved animation problems.

It's time to meet Blender's great-great-grandfather. Originally, TV screens were used by computers for short-term data storage, but it wasn't long before people tried to connect the screens to computers just to make graphics. The amazing thing about this is that one man came up with everything in 1961. Ivan Sutherland put this system called Sketchpad together. It was the first real-time interactive computer graphics system; all others are descended from it, including Blender.

We just saw the grandfather of all computer animation programs. Similar to early ink animations, it was all done with lines. They had the basic 3D transformations so they could rotate objects and display a quad view similar to the Quad View in Blender, but there was no shading. You probably noticed there was no standard keyboard or mouse, but there was a box with buttons, switches on the computer, and a lightpen that they used. The lightpen was a distant ancestor of a tablet or a touchscreen. The data structures were very important. Blender definitely uses versions of the master drawings and instances, as you will discover. And yes, your cell phone has much more computing power than the TX-2.

By the late 1970s, a few companies are experimenting with video- and film-quality computer animation. One of the first was a company called Information International, Inc. or Triple I. At that time, they were doing some of the best animation in the world, which led to them being one of the teams that made the original Tron. Looking back, what is amazing is how simple the graphics are.

The first machine you saw was the FR-80 graphics recorder, the most advanced film recorder of its time. Next, you can see a digitizing tablet and a keyboard terminal. The two low machines in the foreground are disk drives. The multi-platter disks had an enormous capacity of 200 MB. Backing up data has always been a problem for animators. What are some of the ways you can back up your work?

This is quite an improvement over the work in Sketchpad but still very stiff. The work on color, lighting, textures, and post processing was all being done for the first time. The animation was still being done by people trained at Cal Tech, not Cal Arts. What is amazing is that this was a professional demo reel. Now, it might not even get you a job as an intern. Back then, it was mind-boggling.

The teapot was created in 1975 at the University of Utah and has become like the mascot of computer graphics. This was a very early use of it, and in this case, it was testing curved surfaces and shading. The teapot makes many appearances in films, including in Toy Story.

Back then, there were no such things as geometric primitives. Each object was digitized vertex by vertex in a similar manner to what was done in Sketchpad. However, the use of the digitizing tablet allowed much more flexibility and precision. The Peter Fonda bust was made by taking aligned photographs of him, mounting the images on a digitizing tablet, and then inputting each vertex one by one, based on the images. It was the first CGI image of a human in a major motion picture.

In the first demo reel, the animation pretty much consisted of objects floating in space. In the 1982 demo reel, the background becomes an integral part of the scene, and in the Adam Powers section, we have a simple character animation and the first mo-cap animation.

Bringing on a creative director, Richard Taylor, Triple I's animation started to have filmic qualities; the KCET animation was an early example of good motion graphics.

The team consisted of the same people, with the addition of an Art Director. So we can see that using principles of graphic design is starting to make a difference.

Not only are the models becoming more detailed as with the X-wing fighters, but now they are getting shaded. The Cindy model was the first shaded representation of the human figure. Like their work, you may start out simple, but your work will get better and better.

In 1984, Pixar was the first place that combined computer animation technology with traditional animation techniques. While the modeling and rendering were not much better than anyone else at that time, the use of the twelve animation principles revolutionized computer animation. When it was introduced, other animators were in awe.

The Adventures of André and Wally B was a landmark film in a number of aspects. It took ten VAX-11/750 super-minicomputers and a Cray X-MP/48 supercomputer to render it out, and it was the first computer animation to use motion blur.

More importantly, it was the first computer animation to have used animation principles seriously. For example, in Squash and stretch—when Wally gets ready to chase André, he first squeezes front to back and then straightens out as he flies. Here is a list of the animation principles that were used in this film:

The trees are an application of a master object and instance as invented by Ivan Sutherland. Their coloring sets the tone of the animation, and their smooth-rounded shapes contrast with the spiky-busy background. Those gloves on André's hands look suspiciously like Mickey Mouse's gloves.

You can see the difference between this and the Triple I animations. This animation was such a breakthrough that the Association of Computing Machinery had John Lasseter write a paper called Principles of Traditional Animation Applied to 3D Computer Animation for the July 1987 issue of Computer Graphics.

There are a lot of great animations to look at. You can never watch too many. If you have time, watch any Pixar short films you can find. You might also want to check out the following films for a better idea of the range of animation that was happening back then. Do you see differences in the animation styles of the Americans, the Europeans, and the Japanese?

VintageCG on YouTube has a good collection of early computer animation. Some of the titles are:

Your greater understanding of animation will increase your ability to create it.

So far, we've studied the roots of animation and of computers. It's good to see that the great started humbly, and to see how things improved as they practiced. This gives us inspiration. It's the journey we are all on. The changes from Adam Powers to The Adventures of André and Wally B are impressive, as animation professionals moved in and showed the computer boys what using the principles of animation could do for their computer-generated animations.

It might seem odd, but if you watch animated shows such as Futurama and American Dad, in outdoor scenes or ones with cars, planes, and rockets moving in them, you can tell that they were originally created in 3D and were then colored to match the rest of the 2D animation. One director told me that his 2D animated show is all done in 3D but shot with a camera setting that flattens it out again. He finds it's faster to make it that way than with Flash or other 2D animation packages.

This is the market Blender was originally built for, back in the days when it was the in-house system at a Dutch advertising firm called NeoGeo. Blender is a good tool for local TV stations and advertisers because it can do a lot quickly and deliver quality results at a price that even the smallest TV station's manager will appreciate. Networks such as Azteca America have used Blender in some of their studios. Blender is good for schools and universities as well as personal video projects.

Blender has started to be used for feature films such as Plumiferos in Argentina and The Naughty 5 from India. In addition, short films such as Sintel show that Blender has the capacity to do it. Hollywood has been known to use Blender for pre-visualizing a movie before it's made, to figure out how the movie will look when they make it. Pixar uses Blender for its intern program.

This is a hot new trend in films. You need to have two cameras render the same scene from slightly different locations, just as if your eyes are slightly apart. However, the cameras have to work in sync with each other. Think of how your eyes shift if they were to go from threading a needle to looking at mountains in the distance. Blender can do this as well as any other 3D animation package.

Blender is good for rendering complete animations or for making graphics to be used in Flash, gifs, or HTML 5 animations.

Blender has its own Game Engine. Therefore, it's good for making your own games and showing what you can do. You can also export Blender files for use as assets with other game engines such as Ogre, Unity, and CrystalSpace. You can find out more at sites such as www.blenderartists.org.

The Blender Game Engine and Blender's physics packages make it possible to make your own flight and driving simulators.

Nowadays, we are seeing digital signs almost everywhere, from HD monitors in McDonalds to the building-sized signs in Las Vegas. With user-selectable resolution, you can make animations in Blender to whatever size you need, for whatever use. The files can then be uploaded to the Web and distributed to displays all over. This is a quickly growing market for advertising companies.

Because the Python language allows using a scientific data set, anything from weather to a rocket to medical simulations can be animated. NASA uses Blender at some of its locations as does the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

With animation for the legal system, the models are often simple though realistically proportioned. The clients are paying for accuracy, not fancy graphics. Blender's physics engine can help you make realistic animations. You can make car crashes, track bullets, and help when a crime comes to trial. It's an in-demand way to use your animation talents.

Clients of a multi-million dollar project want to see what they are getting before they spend their money. This is a very specialized use of Blender and other 3D animation systems. You can give your clients either a high resolution video walkthrough or use the game engine to make it interactive.

Blender can output a virtual reality .X3D file to create virtual reality on the Web that can be used interactively on most browsers.

A set that you see behind the TV personality may not exist at all; it might be a set modeled and rendered in Blender.

The Blender game engine can be used to make interactive illustrations or lessons, or Blender can provide graphics for Flash or websites.

For anything from dinosaurs to the moons of Saturn, 3D is probably the best way to demonstrate what can't be seen directly. This can be used to show others the ideas in your head and the visions you see, taking them to places that are too small, too large, or too dangerous to visit in reality.

If you do good work and can demonstrate it, many employers don't care what software you use. I know of one animator who perfected his Blender skills while serving in Iraq. He took what he did to the big studios and soon he was working on major Hollywood films. Get involved in animation social media groups. Check out other animators' portfolios.

Blender can be used to design and create real objects. Real copies can be made using 3D printers when you export your Blender files in an STL or X3D format. You can find out more about this in Blender 3D Printing Essentials by Gordon Fisher, which is published by Packt Publishing.

Q1. Blender cannot be used for which of the following purposes:

Q2. Blender is not used by: