Blender For Dummies. Jason van Gumster
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1-2 shows rendered images from each of the open projects.
Figure 1-2: Open projects from the Blender Institute help drive Blender development (Blender Foundation, www.blender.org).
With the completion of each of these projects, the functionality and stability of Blender significantly increased. Much of the content of this book wouldn't even exist without these projects. For example, Chapter 13 starts with using Blender's particle system to achieve exciting effects along with hair and fur. Half of the content in Chapter 15 is focused on the node compositor, a way of combining and enhancing still images and animations. In fact, nearly all of Part III is devoted to features that were enhanced or directly added for one of these open projects.
All these projects continue to exhibit the strength of the Blender community. Each of them are financed in a large part by DVD pre-sales (and now Blender Cloud subscriptions) from users who understand that regardless of the project's final product, great improvements to Blender are the result, and everyone benefits from that.
Joining the community
Congratulations! As a Blender user, you're a part of our community. You're joining a diverse group that spans all age ranges, ethnicities, professional backgrounds, and parts of the globe. We are a passionate bunch: proud of this little 3D program and more than willing to help others enjoy using it as much as we do. Have a look at Chapter 18 for a list of community resources that are invaluable, not only for discovering the intricacies of using Blender, but also for improving yourself as an artist.
You can find innumerable opportunities for critique, training, discussion, and even collaboration with other artists, some of whom might also be Blender developers. I've made quite a few good friends and colleagues through the Blender community, both through the various community websites as well as by attending events like the annual Blender Conference. I go by the name “Fweeb” on these sites and I look forward to seeing you around!
Getting to Know the Interface
Probably one of the most daunting aspects of Blender for newcomers and long-time 3D professionals alike has been its unique and somewhat peculiar interface. It's arguably the most controversial feature Blender has. In fact, at one time, merely calling the interface a feature would raise the blood pressure of some of you who tried using Blender in the past, but gave up in frustration when it did not behave as expected.
Although the interface wasn't the primary focus, the interface updates to Blender added in the 2.5 series of release have made great strides toward alleviating that frustration, and the improvements continue through to today. As a small example, when you first launch Blender, the “splash image” provides you with quick links to online documentation, a list of recently opened files, and a choice of interaction presets if you're more familiar with other programs' hotkeys and mouse behavior. Figure 1-3 shows the splash image you're presented with when you start Blender for the first time.
Figure 1-3: The Blender splash image.
If you click anywhere other than the links provided by the splash image, the splash image goes away, and you're greeted with Blender's default scene, shown in Figure 1-4. If you're looking at the interface for the first time, you may think it appears pretty daunting. However, the purpose of this book is to help you get the hang of Blender (and its interface) with a minimum of pain.
Figure 1-4: The default Blender interface.
This book explains some of the design decisions in Blender's interface and ultimately allows you to be productive with it. Who knows, you might even start to like it and wonder why other programs don't work this way!
Fast to use versus fast to learn
One of the key things to remember is that Blender was originally designed as an in-house tool for commercial production. Working in that industry (especially television production) involves very short turn-around times and extremely tight deadlines. For these reasons, 3D artists have to work very quickly to produce high quality work in a short period of time. Blender has always been designed with facilitating this need as a primary focus. And because artists worked side-by-side with the developers, they could tailor the whole program to match the way they worked.
The upside to this approach is that the program evolved with the artists and enabled them to successfully produce great work at a blazingly fast rate. The downside is that, as with most things that are customized, Blender became somewhat difficult for new people to understand. This trade-off is what I mean when I say “fast to use versus fast to learn.” You can be extremely productive with Blender after you understand how it thinks. However, your first few projects with Blender (especially true in earlier versions) might be arduous. Of course, alleviating that potential pain is what this book is all about.
The first thing to understand about Blender's interface is its basic organization. Figure 1-4 displays a single Blender window. Each Blender window can consist of one or more areas that you can split, resize, and join at will. In all cases, an area defines the space of an editor, such as the 3D View, where you actually make changes and modifications to your 3D scene. Each editor can include one or more regions that contain additional features or tools for using that editor. An example of a region that all editors have is a header region at the top or bottom of the editor; the header typically includes menus and buttons to give you access to features in that editor. Figure 1-5 illustrates each of these building blocks of the Blender interface.
Figure 1-5: A Blender window contains areas populated by editors that include one or more regions.
Knowing this organizational structure, the next important thing to know is that Blender is designed to be as non-blocking and non-modal as possible. Areas in Blender never overlap one another (non-blocking) and using one feature of Blender typically won't restrict you from using any of the others (non-modal). As an example, in most software, if you want to open a new file or save your project, a file browser dialog pops up. This dialog is an overlapping window that not only blocks things behind it from view, but usually also prevents you from making any changes to your file. This scenario isn't the case with Blender. In Blender, the file browser is an editor just like any other, and it makes perfect sense to be able to make a couple of tweaks to your scene before hitting the Save button. Figure 1-6 shows what it might look like to have a file browser open while you make tweaks.
Figure 1-6: Doing those last couple of tweaks before finally saving.