The Whole Process

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In The Blend, I break down 1 Blender technique each week in a micro-lesson.

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When I first got Blender, I had no clue what it was.

It was 3D. I knew that.

There were lots of buttons. I didn't know what any of them did.

All I had to go on was a tiny tutorial in the back of a coding book. The book showed you how to flatten the default cube and extrude the sides to make a crude bench.

I did that. But then I was lost.

Lost in Blender, with only the barest idea of what '3D' was. A bit like being lost in the desert and wondering what 'sand' means.

I did what lost people do: wander around. I pushed buttons. Clicked things. Confused myself even further.

Eventually, after a few months, I started figuring things out.

There were steps to the 3D process. First you modeled something, then you had to set up materials. Then there was the mystical, magical step of rendering.

Whatever that was.

One day I cracked the code. Pressed Render. Watched my first crude animation play.

After months of trial and error, I had finally figured it out. The whole process: I understood how it worked, what it took, and how to start again.

Don't do that.

It's a big pain. Trial and error is nice but pure trial and error is no fun at all.

Instead, keep reading. I'm going to break the '3D Process' into 5 stages. I'll explain what each one is, and the general steps that go with it.

This is not a detailed guide. It's just a general 'show you how it all works' kinda thing.

Stage 1: The Idea.

You have an idea. You want to create an image of a moderately beat-up 50-gallon drum. And you want to do it in 3D. You feverishly make a sketch on the back of the utility bill you forgot to pay two months ago.

Stage 2: The Modeling

You realize with dismay that your amazing idea is going to take real work. But you're up to the challenge, so you open Blender.

You start modeling. You work from reference images and carefully extrude, rotate, translate, select and scale your way to a compete model.

It takes forever. And it's not all fun.

Stage 3: The Materials

This is where you make everything look like what it is.

You create a material for your model. Each model's material defines what it looks like. The color, roughness, texture, and transparency of the model is all controlled by its material.

Sometimes you have to painstakingly paint (or download 😀) an image to use as a texture for a model. (A texture is just an image used in a model's material.)

Stage 4: The Setup

Now you set up your scene. You carefully arrange everything just how you want it. You check to make sure everything looks good through the digital camera you set up.

Then you're on to lighting. Because your scene is dark nothingness without light.

You carefully add digital lights to your scene and arrange them. You adjust their strength, their color, and their softness. You masterfully control light and shadow to create the mood of your scene.

Lighting is an art. I probably should have given 'The Lighting' its own stage. But then I'd have 6 stages, not 5.

5 sounds better.

Stage 5: The Render

You press a button labeled 'Render.'

Rendering is the process of digitally 'taking a picture' of your scene. Blender calculates how everything should look, from the point of view of the camera. It calculates how every beam of light would interact with every material. The exact color of every shadow.

In the end, you have a picture. Exactly as if you walked into your scene, set up a real camera, and took a real picture.

For an animation, though, you'll need to render each frame of the video separately. (That takes a long time.)

The bit of software that does the rendering is called the rendering engine. In Blender, you'll probably use the Cycles rendering engine.

Once you have the render, you're done. Finished. But....

Just because you can, you open your render in your favorite image editor. You adjust the colors a little bit. Tweak it to make the oranges really pop.

There. Much better.

Doing work on an image after the render like that is called 'post-processing.' But that's a long word, so everybody calls it 'post.'

Finally, you show your render to a friend, expecting praise for your amazing work.

"Wow," he says. "An....empty oil drum. Cool. But why?"

You just learned:

• The stages of the 3D process, from 'idea' to 'art'

• What 'rendering' and 'render' really mean

• What 'post' is

Have a great week. I'll see you again next Monday!

Weekly Render Prompt

This week, try making:

> Something broken. Anything from a cracked bell to a shattered window. 🪟

P.S. (unrelated) Love reading fiction? Check out Voyage. You get a new, original piece of short fiction every other Friday. (And it's totally free.)

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