Preserved Topic: any advice from a complete novice?

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I just picked up Blender and am following tutorials and manuals I'm managing to scrounge up on their site. Problem is, I've never even opened a 3D program before so a ton of the terminology that's taken for granted flies right by me.

about all I've managed so far (with an admittedly small effort) is to add objects, pull the little edit points around, add a lamp, add some materials and textures (which look awful) and Rotate Scale and Grab. That's it. I'm not sure how much further I can go with the weak manuals available (all I've found is at: http://www.blender.nl/download/index.php) and complete lack of experience and terminology knowledge. Anybody have any clues to good resources for Blender and complete and utter noobs to 3d?

Jason

[This message has been edited by JKMabry (edited 03-11-2002).]

Yah, Im another "blender blended my brain" type. Im not sayin you are Jason, but.... 3d stuff is werid.

. . .

Well not knowing other 3d apps may be an advantage with blender. I have use Imagine, lightwave, raydream and l others and just can't make squat with blender. I just can't get a handle of it's interface to different. Looks like a nice package I may have to try it again someday. There are two books on blender you might try the local book stores.

jstuartj

The main blender site has a few good links to tutorials, and you could also do a search on google for "blender tutorials". Keep at it, and you should be able to get the hang of it.

If you have any trouble with specific terms, let me know what they are and I'll help out.

Also, here's a link to a previous thread about a few blender renders I did, http://www.ozoneasylum.com/Forum11/HTML/000330.html

The prog is a bit tough at first, but it is pretty powerful considering it's mostly free. You get a modeler and a renderer in one package, and the animation engine is pretty good too.

IzZaaay! just what are you sayin there man?!

Silence, yeah, saw that thread before I posted here, chock fulla info that was :P Thanks tho man, I may be hitting you up.

One specific question I'm sure you can help me with: How in the name of all that is holy do you get a window bigger than 320x240 or whatever it is, the default little buggah?! That's killing me, although it doesn't matter much until I figure out what to do with the rest of the program.

gracias

Jason

LOL, I came into this thread thinking, "I'm a complete novice! Maybe I can help!" Silly me.

nevermind on that last question, answered it myself: buttons window (F10) on the right side, the animation side, under "game frame settings" the sizeX and sizeY buttons.

strange interface indeed :P

silly you indeed, silly me indeed. Um, throw out some random Blender knowledge if you like, no matter how novice I'll bet you know something I don't

Jason

In blender, hit F10 or click on the display buttons icon. On the right, it will say SizeX and SizeY. You can shift-click on these to change the dimensions. Also, to the right of that, clicking on PC or any of the other buttons will bring up default settings for those mediums.

Also, under the panorama button, click on 100% to do a render at full size. Under render, the OSA button is for Onscreen Anti-Aliasing. 8 should be a good setting for that (meaning 8 passes).

Now, if you click on render it will just render the scene in a window. To get some type of output you need to do a few things.

First, under play, shift click on End and set it to 1. That way start is 1 and end is 1. Next, there is a button to the left of crop to set the output file type. Jpeg should be fine. Once all this is done, click on anim and it will output the render to whatever directory you've set and it will be a jpg file. You may need to add an extension to the filename.

Oh, and unless you haven't figured this out already, you can hit ctrl-u to save your user preferences. For example, I like to have four working windows open. The fourth, the camera window, can also be used as the 3D window. Once I have these setup, ctrl-u and save your preferences. That way blender will always open up with this as the default.

excellent, I was looking for the preference setting just today to no avail. Thanks a million. I use basically the same layout except for the front view.

I also figured out a point to point basic animation thing so I'm getting a little more comfortable with it. I have a feeling I should spring for the manual if I wanna get anything serious done though.

I heard the interace for this app sucked so I was overjoyed to see the first tuorial I read regarding the interface say it was awesome. Turns out the guy that wrote the tutorial was lying. It sucks indeed. Nothing that can't be figured out with some practice though.

Jason