Blender Guru » tips

Create Realistic Cracks in 2 minutes

Andrew Price — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:00:12 +0000

A few months ago I was modeling the building for my earthquake animation, when I stumbled across any easy way to create realistic cracks without pesky scripts, or plug-ins. It’s simple, easy, and it uses a powerful tool built right into blender. Trust me, when you see it you’ll be kicking yourself!

It is perfect for rubble, ceramics or splitting any object in two.

Who owns a ceramic picture frame anyway?

I am a man of my word. This video will literally take less than two minutes to watch:

Did you catch all that? Hope it wasn’t too fast!

Getting your work digitally printed

Andrew Price — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 14:31:02 +0000

Being that it’s Christmas, I decided to put my blender skills to the test by creating a Christmas card for my friends and family. It’s one of the first times I’ve gotten my work professionally printed, so it was all very new to me. The result wasn’t perfect but I learnt a few things that I thought I might share with you.

Learn from my experiences in the video below!

In the true spirit of Christmas, I’m also giving away the source file to my log cabin scene. Feel free to pull it apart and see how it was made!

In 2009, we’ve seen the biggest attendance on record for a Blender conference as well as the massive milestone release of version 2.5, so it has definately been a good year for Blender. A big thank you to the community and the developers for upkeeping the true spirit of open source. I can’t wait to see what 2010 brings.

Where’d that button go?

Andrew Price — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 17:33:06 +0000

When you open the brand new Blender 2.5 Alpha version, you will notice that a lot has changed. For one, buttons are now vertical, and most of them have new icons and names.

When they rebuilt Blender from the ground up, a few things were moved for the better. You know all those “industry professionals” that complain how awful the Blender interface is? Well these changes were designed to keep them happy. Most of your favourite functions are still there, just hiding.

This 2.5 interface guide should get you back on the straight and narrow. I have tried to include all the frequently used functions, as well as common blunders encountered when using Blender 2.5 for the first time.

Set Smooth/Solid

Previously…

Now…

Add Menu

Previously…

Now…

Join screen

Previously…

Now…

(similarly, dragging the cursor in the opposite direction splits the screen)

Spin/Screw/Flip Normals/Rem Doubles

Previously…

Now…

Background Image

Previously…

Now…

Logic buttons

Previously…

Now…

IPO Curve

Previously…

Now…

Move Header

Previously…

Now…

Buttons

Side-by-side comparison…

Window type

Side-by-side comparison…

Radiosity buttons

Previously…

Now…

Missing something?

There’s a chance that the button you’re looking for is not actually hardwired into blender yet. But fear not! Because a useful function has been added that lets you create your own button.

For example, I use the ‘Center New’ button constantly, but strangely it’s missing from Blender 2.5.

Here’s how to add it to your toolbar:

You can do this for virtually any function in Blender. So if you’re tired of looking for a lost button, this can provide a temporary fix.

That concludes the Blender 2.5 interface guide. Was it useful? Is it missing something? It is by no means complete, so if you think something should be on the list, drop a comment below and I’ll see if I can help!

5 Ways to Make Money with Blender

Andrew Price — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 12:05:24 +0000

You might be an artist, but that doesn’t mean you need to starve. Put your talent to a real world use and earn some dough!

1. Sell digital prints

Putting your work on the internet is great for publicity, but if you want to pay the bills, you’re going to have to put something in people’s hands. Back in the days of paint and canvas, the general public were snapping up art like it was going out of fashion… and it was. With most artists now using a mouse and keyboard, printed art is becoming a lot harder to find, leaving the general public with empty walls and thick wallets. The money is clearly out there, so why not tap into this already proven market?

Where to print:

Most of your local photo printing stores will offer a print-to-canvas service, but depending on your location, you might want to shop around.

ArtsCow – By far the cheapest, but it’s based in China, so expect around 5-6 weeks shipping time.

Lulu – Very useful for getting a printed copy of your portfolio in book form

CafePress – Prodomediantly for clothing, but they also offer large poster prints.

Office Works (Australia)

UPrinting (US)

PhotoPrinting (UK)

In the past I’ve even had luck approaching universities. Most keep large industrial printers on campus for their photography classes, and quite a few of them offer their services to the public. They aren’t in it for the money so their prices are considerably cheaper. This A2 glossy print for example, only cost me $10.

Where to sell:

If you’re looking to sell online, your options are unfortunately limited. There currently aren’t any dedicated websites to sell prints that I know of. eBay has a digital artists section, but it’s mostly filled with crap. You might think this to be a good thing, but when a buyer leaves with this engrained in their memory (notice the price tag), they aren’t likely to return. One option you might like to consider is selling art directly from your website. Nik Ainley gives viewers the option to buy a print of his work right off his portfolio. It’s subtle, professional and effective. His website has since recieved over a million hits, and I’d be willing to bet quite a few of those were buyers.

Your best bet in my opinion however, is offline. I knew a girl at work that approached a library to see if they would display her art. Surprisingly, she was not only accepted, but became their featured artist of the month, earning her a spot in the main gallery and seen by hundreds. It sounds silly, but showing your art in a place like that can be far more profitable than getting 50,000 views on flickr. People are far more likely to buy if they know it was made by someone in the community. So take your printed portfolio and walk around your area looking for galleries, libraries, trade shows, markets or anything that displays art in their front window, and see if they’ll accept you.

2. Sell stock images

As much as you might despise the 3d clip art your boss includes in the monthly newsletter – stock images sell. In my opinion, selling stock imagery is one of the easiest ways for a 3d artist to make money online. They take you probably an hour to knock up and they require virtually no extra effort once you’ve uploaded them.

Where to start

There are a few websites out there that sell stock images but none are as good as iStockPhoto. It’s well designed, has fair prices, a great quality content system and costs nothing to sell your work.

When trying to come up with a stock imagery concept, think back to your last meeting at work (the one you didn’t sleep through) and remember something your boss said. “The business is tanking” might be appropriate. Now simply create an image that he might display during the slideshow.

Upload it to iStockPhoto and watch the money roll in. There are no placement or account keeping fees, so it doesn’t cost you a cent to keep it there.

Here is the iStockPhoto pricing scheme for exclusive artists:

“Wait, what?!? 58c? How can I possibly pay the bills with that?”

Well that’s the good thing about stock imagery. It’s not like trying to sell art to collectors. You are dealing with thousands of wealthy businesses that need a picture to illustrate a point, and they need them NOW. The buyers come in droves. Case in point.

That’s a $2436 earned from one render. And that’s if every purchase was the smallest size.

Take a look at these successful 3d profiles to see what sells well: FPM, enot-poloskun, Petrovich9

3. Sell 3d models

This particular route involves marketing your 3d skills directly to studios. Not to get hired, but to help them save on costs. You see, when a studio starts production they have a deadline and a budget. If it is cheaper for them to buy a pre-made model of a car than to pay their existing staff to make one, they will.

The price range per model varies dramatically; you have your $13 swords and your $2000 steam engines. The more detailed the model, the more you can sell it for. But if you do go high detail, make sure you provide renders that show it, otherwise you’re just wasting your time.

“But is this really a viable method for making money?”

I was skeptical at first myself, but a little research at CGSociety revealed that some users are earning upwards of $32 000 in one year alone.

Where to sell:

4. Freelancing

This is no doubt the most popular route of 3d artists today. I’m sure you’re all familiar with the concept: pitch your skills to a business who need 3d work but don’t want to pay an expensive studio. It’s definately the fastest way to progress your 3d career. You get hands on experience and money in the bank whilst constantly adding to your portfolio.

The biggest hurdle in freelancing is obtaining business. Freelancers are a dime a dozen, and businesses know this. So you’re going to need something to make yourself stand out from the crowd. To be more specific: you’re going to need an impressive portfolio…

Creating a portfolio

Unless you’re a skilled websites designer, I’d recommend not trying to create your own portfolio from scratch. As I write this, there are hundreds of freelancers not getting any work right now, because their website is awful to use, broken or just plain ugly. Don’t stunt your potential before you start: stick with the basics and register yourself an account with any of these free services. They look fantastic and they’re easy to use.

CarbonMade – A clutter free, well designed portfolio template (here’s mine)

CGSociety – The CG hangout spot for industry professionals

Behance – Particularly useful for networking

Job Boards

Once you’ve created your portfolio you can either sit back and wait for the offers to roll in, or you can be proactive and look for work (I’d recommend the latter).

You might also like to check out the Monster list of freelancing job sites by Freelance Switch.

5. Sell Educational material

At the last blender conference, Ton Roosendaal said this:
“It is now more evident that studios and professionals are adopting blender. I’m getting emails from all over the world from professionals, small studios, big studios and film studios that have ideas and plans to integrate blender in their pipeline… That means that those people need support, they need training, they need servicing… If you know how to do training, you really can get work easily being a trainer.” Watch the whole 16 minute speech here.

It’s not only the professionals that should be considering this either, because at what point does someone become a professional? Is it when they’ve been part of the blender community for 5+ years? Or perhaps when they’ve released a DVD? My point is, just because you don’t know absolutely everything there is to know about blender, does not mean you don’t have knowledge of value to others.

Try writing a few tutorials and see how the community responds to them. If your responses are positive, there is no reason you can’t put it in an ebook and sell it.

Surprisingly some people have asked the question, “Is charging people to learn how to use a program that you got for free, morally right?” Of course it is. Consider a class on how to surf: The instructor was given the beach for free, yet he is now charging others on how to surf that beach. Do people frown and tell him how immoral it is? No, because they know that by taking the class they are saving themselves months of painful trial and error by trying to learn it on their own.

So don’t feel guilty. The program may be free, but your skills are not. People are more than happy to pay for good training.

Where to sell:

Blender e-shop

Amazon

Have you made money with Blender in the past? How did you make it? Leave a comment below!

Create a Rule of Thirds overlay in Blender

Andrew Price — Thu, 21 May 2009 16:30:24 +0000

Most professional cameras these days come with a built-in ‘Rule of Thirds‘ function that overlays a 3×3 grid over the viewfinder. This allows photographers to quickly and easily line up their shots for optimal composition. So why not set up blender to do the same?

To start, you will need to save the following image to your hard drive:

(click for big)

In the bottom left hand corner of your 3d view, click View>Background Image.

This will open a dialogue box. Click the single button that says Use Background Image. Then click the Load button that appears.

Navigate through the folders and select the image that you saved earlier to your hard drive.

Finally drag the Blend slider to 0.00 and hit the Premul button. This will enable the alpha channel in the PNG we loaded.

Close the Background Image box and you’re done!

If we flick to our camera view (Numpad 0) we can see that the 3×3 red grid is now overlaying our viewport. How easy is that?

The lines will blur slightly depending on how far zoomed out you are, but the basic outlines are there. The best part is, if you change the resolution, the overlay will shrink and stretch to fit, meaning you will always have optimal composition no matter what size ratio you choose!

Remember: If you want blender to load these settings upon start, press Ctrl + U.

I hope you get some benefit this quick blender tip! You might also like to try overlaying the Golden Mean, (an alternative to the rule of thirds). Many believe that the Golden Mean is the perfect dimension ratio to add energy and motion to your picture. More on that here.

25 Useful Blender tricks that aren’t so obvious

Andrew Price — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 18:37:26 +0000

Automatically add a number to the end of your .blend filename

In the ‘Save As’ window, press ‘+’ to add a number to the end of the name. This is very useful if you are saving multiple versions. If there is a number already in the name, blender will automatically increase that number by one.
Preview textures

The feature you always wanted was right under your nose! Simply Hold Ctrl whilst clicking the ‘Load’ button to take advantage of thumbnail previews. This feature however, is currently in an unstable state (which is why it hasn’t been made official yet), so use it at your own risk!
Changing the camera

Ctrl + NumPad 0. This also works on non-camera objects as well, making it very useful for positioning spotlights.
Copy any attribute of another object

In object mode: Ctrl + L brings up a menu that allows you to copy the attributes of any other object. This includes Materials, IPO data, Mesh Data, Lamp Settings as well as copying the object to a different scene. For example, if you wanted to apply the same material to 300 cubes at once, quickly select the cubes using the Box tool (B) then whilst holding down Shift select the object you want to copy, hit Ctrl+L and select ‘Materials’.
Switch to the opposite side of the viewport

Ctrl + 1,3 or 7 will show you the opposite side of the respective orthographic view.
Loop Select

Alt + Right Click on the edge that you want to select, Blender automatically finds and selects all vertices in that row.
UBUNTU USERS: By default Alt + RightClick opens a menu built into the OS. To change this you will need to go to System > Preferences > Windows and change the ‘Movement Key’ to either Ctrl or Windows Key.
Change brush size and strength on the fly

Whilst in sculpt mode, Press ‘F’ to change the brush size and Shift + F to change the Strength.
Camera Flythrough

Select Camera – Shift+F. The blender devs were even nice enough to include the controls in the header:
Quickly compare changes by storing a render in the buffer

Blender allows you to store one render in a temporary buffer in order to quickly compare changes you have made. To make use of this, render a scene then move your cursor to the render window and press ‘J’ this will switch to the previous buffer, make some changes to your scene and re-render. Now when you press ‘J’ again you will flip between your current render and the past render.
Render a small portion of your scene

Only making a slight change to the scene? No problem, switch to the camera and press Shift-B. This will bring up a cross hair allowing you drag a square over the area you want rendered. To turn this off, press Shift-B again, and drag outside the camera window. Alternatively you can go to the scene panel and switch the ‘Border’ button off.
Reset 3D cursor

Lost the 3d cursor? Hit Shift + C. To lock the view to that point, press ‘C’.
Change the default blender scene

Tired of having to set up your favourite lighting scheme everytime blender boots? Hit Ctrl + U to overwrite the default scene with your current one.
Merge Vertices

Alt + M. To speed this up even more, follow it with ‘5‘ to select Collapse from the menu.
‘Beauty Fill’ a hole in your mesh

Shift + F. It’s not always pretty, but it gets the job done.
Select an object behind another

Alt + RMB. No more accidentally selecting the wrong object!
Quickly switch screen modes

Ctrl + Left/Right Arrow cycles through your screenmode presets in the top bar.
Select all connecting vertices

In edit mode: Ctrl+L will select every vertice that is connected to that vertice. This also works in the UV unwrapping screen, making it one of the most useful features ever.
Rotate object as trackball

Press ‘R’ twice
Reveal alpha mask

Pressing ‘A‘ in render window reveals the renders Alpha mask. Unfortunately there is no way to save the mask as of yet. But a work around is to copy the image to the clipboard (Alt + PrintScreen) and edit the window border out in an image editor.
Select vertices with Lasso Tool

Ctrl + LMB allows you to draw a lasso shape around the vertices you wish to select. This is a useful alternative to the Box and Brush Tool (B).
Resize objects based on their texture dimensions

Alt + V will take the dimensions of the image from the texture slot and resize the object according to those dimensions.
Scroll through frames

Alt + Scrollwheel allows you to quickly scroll through your frames
Select more than one editing mode (vertex/edge/face)

Hold Shift while clicking the edit mode selectors to select more than one mode. To change editing modes on the fly, press Ctrl + TAB.
Subsurf objects on the fly

Ctrl + 1 quickly adds a subsurf modifier into your stacker without having to go through the menus. To use higher subsurf levels, use Ctrl + 2, 3 or 4
Move sliders in 0.1 increments

Hold Ctrl while moving a slider to move it in 0.1 increments (hold Shift + Ctrl to move it in even smaller increments)

Have I covered everything? Leave a comment below if I’ve missed anything!

Blender Guru » tips

Create Realistic Cracks in 2 minutes

Getting your work digitally printed

Where’d that button go?

Set Smooth/Solid

Add Menu

Join screen

Spin/Screw/Flip Normals/Rem Doubles

Background Image

Logic buttons

IPO Curve

Move Header

Buttons

Window type

Radiosity buttons

Missing something?

5 Ways to Make Money with Blender

1. Sell digital prints

Where to print:

Where to sell:

2. Sell stock images

Where to start

3. Sell 3d models

Where to sell:

4. Freelancing

Creating a portfolio

Job Boards

5. Sell Educational material

Where to sell:

Create a Rule of Thirds overlay in Blender

25 Useful Blender tricks that aren’t so obvious

Automatically add a number to the end of your .blend filename

Preview textures

Changing the camera

Copy any attribute of another object

Switch to the opposite side of the viewport

Loop Select

Change brush size and strength on the fly

Camera Flythrough

Quickly compare changes by storing a render in the buffer

Render a small portion of your scene

Reset 3D cursor

Change the default blender scene

Merge Vertices

‘Beauty Fill’ a hole in your mesh

Select an object behind another

Quickly switch screen modes

Select all connecting vertices

Rotate object as trackball

Reveal alpha mask

Select vertices with Lasso Tool

Resize objects based on their texture dimensions

Scroll through frames

Select more than one editing mode (vertex/edge/face)

Subsurf objects on the fly

Move sliders in 0.1 increments