Complete Blender Creator - Section 5 - Animated Lamp

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In This Section

1 Section 5 Introduction

• Mikey and Ben Introduce the Animated Lamp Section.
• Mikey gives a quick run through of what is coming up in the next section.

3 Your Section 5 Assets

• 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.

4 Being Lean

• 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.

(Updated 16/04/2018)

5 Cycles VS Blender Render

• 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.

6 Dedicated Graphics Cards

• 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.

7 Installing CUDA On Windows

• 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.

8 Installing CUDA On A Mac

• 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.

9 Setup Blender For GPU Rending

• 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…

10 Lowering Your Cycles Render Time

• 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.

11 Creating A Backdrop

• Decide on a scale.
• Create a basic environment for our lamp.
• Run through a couple of options.

12 Lighting With Cycles

• 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.

13 Rendering A Small Area

• Show you how to render just a part of your scene.
• Great for those with slower machines.
• Great for complex Scenes on ANY computer.

14 Using Curves To Generate Geometry

• Using curves makes it infinitely editable.
• Changing the bézier handle type.
• Generate a 3D object by defining curves.

15 Creating Geometry From A Curve

• 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.

16 Altering Curve Resolution

• 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.

17 Existing Geometry To Create New

• 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.

18 Design and Considerations

• 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.
• (Updated 01/01/2018)

19 Introduction to Armatures

• Learn about the armature object.
• Add an Armature to your model.

20 Revisiting the Mirror Modifier

• 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.

21 Adding Bones To Our Armature

• Learn how to add additional bones to an armature.
• Understand that a new bone does not have to be connected to the previous one.

21a Applying Transforms With Animations

• Quick Reminder
• If not done can have some very confusing issues
• Remember Edit mode for editing

22 Pose Mode

• 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.

23 Rest Position and Pose Position

• 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.

24 Constraining Bones Movement

• Be able to lock movement to a single axis.
• Constrain the degree of movement possible.

25 The Solidify Modifier

• Create a 3D object from just curves.
• Give the new object thickness using the solidify modifier.

26 Introduction To The Node Editor

• 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.

27 Lamps vs Emissive Materials In Cycles

• 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.

28 Auto Inverse Kinematics (IK)

• 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.
• Auto IK ignores any existing bone constraints
• (Updated 19/02/2018)

28a Auto IK Constraints

• We have lost the use of our bone constraints
• Replace now with IK constraints instead

29 The Timeline

• 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.

30 Key Frames

• 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.

31 Setting Up The Camera

• 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!

32 Rendering An Animation

• 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.

33 Rendering Across Multiple Blenders

• 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.

34 Creating A Video of Your 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.
• (Updated for 2.79 9/6/2018)

35 Exporting Your Lamp Model

• 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.

36 Vertex Groups

• 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.

37 Re-Rigging Our Model

• 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.

38 Exporting The Final Model

• Export the model and test it.
• Just watch if you don’t have Unity or Unreal installed so you can see the process.

99 End of Section 5 Wrap Up

Mikey talks through the end of section wrap up.