Blender: designing and developing animations

Descrizione del corso

The course provides the basic knowledge to create and develop a project with graphics and 3D animations. Through the use of the 3D content creation software Blender, participants will explore the main features of the program, learning the underlying principles of 3D digital animation and acquiring the necessary skills to realize their own projects.

Programma

1. Introduction to Blender
• Blender and its features
• Opening and closing files

2. Managing the interface
• The user interface
• User preferences
• Windows and tabs
• Splitting and joining
• Screens
• Customizing the interface

3. Virtual world
• Scenes in Blender
• Layout and management
• Coordinates and reference system
• X,y, z axes
• Views, projections and perspectives
• Navigation in the 3D environment
• Panning
• Orbiting
• Zooming
• Fly mode
• The 3D cursor and its coordinates

4. Manipulation
• Selecting objects
• Move, rotate, translate buttons
• Structure changes and curved objects

5. Modelling principles
• Object mode and edit mode
• Tracing and modeling images
• Creating vertices, edges, faces and loops
• Extrusion

6. Editing
• Edit mode in Blender
• Mesh modifiers
• Edit mode: duplicating and reflecting selections
• Knife tool
• Smoothing
• Subdivide and merge

7. Materials
• Matching a material to a surface
• Materials tab
• Material properties
• Shaders
• Managing shadows on the material
• Shading/shadow
• The use of reflection
• The use of transparency
• Subsurface scattering

8. Mapping
• What is mapping?
• Uv mapping
• Enviroment maps
• Deafult texture
• Gradient texture
• Metal texture
• Customized texture

9. Lighting
• Introduction to lighting
• Light types:
• Point
• Hemi
• Sun
• Spot
• Area
• Light characteristics:
• Negative
• Color
• Energy
• Diffuse
• Specular
• Lamp properties and light softening
• Volumetric lighting and shadows
• Texture and lighting

10. Principles of animation
• Keyframes
• Timeline and movement management
• Interpolation curves
• Animations of different kind of objects
• Animation editing

11. Pose mode
• Armatures and bones
• Partial and global actions
• Complex animations
• Managing animation actions in pose mode

12. The camera
• Managing the camera as an object
• Camera movements in 3D space
• Camera view mode

13. Rendering
• Finalisation
• Setting the render time
• Preparing the render
• Render formats
• The IPO curves
• Rendering possibilities
• The final product