- Mikey and Ben Introduce the Animated Lamp Section.
- Mikey gives a quick run through of what is coming up in the next section.
- This is the Lecture where you will find all of the files you will need to complete the Section.
- Please Download your Asset Pack now.
- Your files will come in a Zip file ready for extraction to your computer.
- We are going to do many iterations though to the end, even though the lamp won't be built fully!
- Later on rendering times are likely to be longer that the last section.
- We'll be making and testing the Lamp as we go.
- Blender Render is generally quick and you get a reasonable result quickly. - Uses CPU Only.
- Cycles is a physical based renderer is accurate but takes longer. It is designed for GPUs but runs fine on CPUs.
Why Use Cycles?
- We are going to use Cycles, since we are modelling a lamp!
- The two are not cross compatible, no switching.
- You can use other Renderers too, if you have access to them. We won't be covering these.
Render Time Difference
- I will be showing you 3 Clips of a 4 second bowling ball animation.
- Blender Render - 2 mins
- Basic Cycles Render - 15 mins
- Thorough Cycles Render - 4 hours!
Your Machine Specs : CPU
- Lots of different machine specs- vary massively.
- More Cores and Higher Frequency CPU.
- You are unlikely to hit memory limits when using CPU Rendering.
- You cannot use CPU and GPU at the same time.
Your Machine Specs: Graphics Card
- nVidia cards- any that support CUDA.
- AMD/ATi Cards - Support has started not complete.
- You may hit memory issues if using a GPU.
- If in doubt or having trouble switch to CPU rendering.
- Cycles runs with AMD/ATi and nVidia Cards.
- Install the latest drivers for your GPU.
- If you do not have a dedicated nVidia graphics card you can skip the next few lectures.
- This Lecture is for Windows machines, please skip to the next lecture for a Mac Setup.
- Show you how to check for your driver version.
- Make sure you have the latest Version of Nvidia's Drivers for your computer.
- Show you how to download nVidia's CUDA drivers.
- Check for updates - have to manually check for updates via system preferences once installed.
- Can install updates from system preferences in future.
- Optional, if you do not have a dedicated GPU, this lecture will not apply to you.
- You may find that your GPU is slower than your CPU at rendering.
- Your CPU is free to do other things…
- How to change your Render settings.
- You will have to run multiple tests.
- Different scenes will have different characteristics depending on there complexity, but in general will follow a similar pattern.
- Decide on a scale.
- Create a basic environment for our lamp.
- Run through a couple of options.
- Show that lamps sort of work in Blender.
- How to create a light source as geometry and then apply an emissive material to that object.
- Show you how to render just a part of your scene.
- Great for those with slower machines.
- Great for complex Scenes on ANY computer.
- Using curves makes it infinitely editable.
- Changing the bézier handle type.
- Generate a 3D object by defining curves.
- Refresh our knowledge on this.
- Converting our curve object to a mesh object.
- We can then perform mesh operations on it.
- We can choose to delete the original curve data if we want to.
- Culling Unnecessary Geometry
- We kept the curve data so have two options:
- Remake our mesh object, from those curves.
- Fiddle about with the geometry itself.
Which path to take?
- Both are OK- depends on stage of construction.
- We'll be altering the curve resolution AND the mesh!
- Tidy up the rest of our geometry.
- Use an existing face to create a new face.
- Separate immediately creating a new object.
- This allows us to match up parts of our model, even when they're not exact sizes.
- Design a rough outline for the lamp.
- Make it believable as an object.
- I have chosen a simple and raw design.
- Remember It can always be beautified later on.
- Learn about the armature object.
- Add an Armature to your model.
- Learn how to use another object as the point of reflection.
- Understand that it is the origin that acts as the point of reflection.
- See other objects rotational values change the axes of reflection.
- Learn how to add additional bones to an armature.
- Understand that a new bone does not have to be connected to the previous one.
- Be introduced to pose mode
- Understand that we use this mode to test our models movement.
- Know that this the best mode to be in to parent mesh objects to individual bones, and to make alterations.
- Understand the differences between rest position and pose position.
- You can see the rest position when in edit mode.
- How to clear the pose back to the rest state.
- Be able to lock movement to a single axis.
- Constrain the degree of movement possible.
- Create a 3D object from just curves.
- Give the new object thickness using the solidify modifier.
- Open up the node editor.
- Create some basic materials.
- Apply these materials to our model.
- See how adjustments in the node editor affect our model.
- Learn the differences between the two light sources when using the cycles engine.
- Understand that there is time and place for both.
- Use the blackbody node.
- Learn how to turn on Auto IK.
- Realise that this is a starting point and not perfect!
- Understand it applies to the whole rig.
- See that it allows us to control the connected bones all at once.
- Be introduced to the timeline
- Shown how to adjust the playback and rendering range.
- How to alter the Frames Per Second (FPS) of your animation.
- Understand what they are and how they are used.
- Be shown how to automatically add them and remove them from the Timeline view.
- Realise almost everything can be keyframed.
- Be able to use key frames to animate your lamp.
- Understand that the camera view is for our animation rendering as well as a normal rendering.
- Setup the camera ready for the Animation.
- Animate the Camera!
- Learn how to render your animation.
- How to stop the rendering.
- What settings to use for good results.
- How to preview an animation once it has finished rendering.
- Use multiple computers to render an animation.
- Learn how to use multiple instances of Blender to utilise the CPU and GPU on your computer.
- Decide on how many samples for the final animation.
- Be Introduced to the Video Editor.
- Combine your rendered images in to a final video.
- Explore various exporting options.
- Export the images to a movie file.
- Learn how to setup the FBX Export and understand why we use it.
- Realise that your model is currently only suitable for Blender. The Export doesn’t fully work in the model's current state.
- Learn what a vertex group is.
- Assign vertices to a vertex group.
- See that because we created our model in parts, it is really easy to assign groupings.
- Un parent your lamp meshes and join them together ending up with one mesh object.
- Rename your Vertex Groups and Bones so that they match.
- Test your new rig.
- Export the model and test it.
- Just watch if you don’t have Unity or Unreal installed so you can see the process.
Mikey talks through the end of section wrap up.