Essential Blender- P5 pdf

First, to make sure that you can see it clearly when it's created, LMB somewhere away from the icospheres, setting the 3D cursor.. In Blender, as in most 3D animation programs, animation

Duplication

Back to our atomic example To make the little atom have the right stuff inside, it will need three protons and three neutrons You could move the existing icospheres away from the 3D Cursor and add four more from the toolbox Or, you could make use of what you already have

RMB select one of the icospheres, then press Shift-D

Shift-D duplicates the selected objects The duplicate object is created at the location of the original object, and is put into Grab (move) mode Move the new object away from the original and press LMB to lock it into position Note that pushing RMB to cancel Grab mode after

duplication does not cancel the duplication A duplicate will still have been made, but will be

"hiding" at the exact location of the original For that reason, if you accidentally duplicate an object, it's better to get into to the habit of moving it away from the original, LMB, then deleting

it with the X-key

You need a total of six icospheres to make up the atom's nucleus RMB select one of the

icospheres you have so far Next, use the B-key area selection method to select the other two as well If you accidentally select the camera or lamp object, you can remove them from the

selection by holding down the Shift key and RMB (probably twice) on them until they are no longer outlined in pink Alternatively, you can press the A-key twice (once to select All, and again to deselect everything), then begin from scratch

When you have the three icospheres (and nothing else) selected, press Shift-D to duplicate all three at once

Using different views (Numpad 1,3,7 and MMB drag), the Grab/move tool and the x, y and z movement constraint hotkeys (or the manipulators!), move the six icospheres together to form a nice, messy, nucleus It doesn't matter if it matches the illustration or not The point is for you to start to become familiar with the tools you will be using all the time

Tip:

Shift-D duplicates selected objects

Figure 1.9: The completed nucleus

Moving On

At this point, it's best to spell out what goals we would like you to accomplish to get the big picture You still need to add three electrons and animate them so they fly around the nucleus It would also be nice to add some sort of animation to the nucleus as a whole, so it's not just sitting there in quantum laziness the entire time

Before you begin animating, you should adjust your workspace to one more suitable to the task than the one you've been using up to this point Do you remember from the Interface chapter that Blender's workspace is highly configurable, and that the default installation comes with several different screens, each suited to a different task? Now's the time to start making use of it

Use the Ctrl-Left Arrow hotkey to change working screens If you are using the default Blender installation, this hotkey will have placed you in a screen labeled "1-Animation" Alternately, and

a little more slowly, you could have chosen that option from the Screens drop down in the main header

Figure 1.10: Choosing the Animation screen from the header

Figure 1.11: The default Animation screen

Lots of new stuff here, but no need for panic In fact, the only really important stuff you'll be dealing with right now is the timeline, the 3d view (which you already know), and something called the Ipo view

Figure 1.11.1 The Timeline window

The timeline is pretty self-explanatory It is the timeline in seconds over which your animation takes place Controls on the timeline are simple as well Start and End represent the start and end frames of the animation, and can be changed by clicking on them and entering new values The

"play" button plays your animation in the 3D view Pressing it again halts animation The "skip to start/end" buttons do exactly as advertised LMB dragging within the timeline window plays through any animation you have created in other windows Moving through an animation by dragging the mouse over a timeline is known as "scrubbing"

The timeline can display either seconds or frames With the cursor over the Timeline window, the T-key toggles between these display methods Press the T-key and choose "Frames" for now (If you're completely new to animation and need an explanation of time in animation and what the term "frame" means, check out the "Frames and Time" sidebar.)

Frames and Time

In animation (and television and film), time is divided into Frames Each frame is a still image that represents a slice of time When played one after the other quickly enough, these individual frames give the illusion of motion

Different media have different frame rates For most film productions, each second in time is divided into 24 frames The common terminology is to say that film runs at 24 frames per second For North American television (NTSC), the rate is 30 frames per second (fps)

For European TV (PAL format), the rate is 25 fps

It is important that you know your target media before you begin to animate, as changing the frame rate mid-way through an animation can lead to poor results, as objects and effects animated

at a different frame rate will appear unnatural

animate it to grow and shrink Afterward, you get all the parts of your nucleus to follow that animation

Let's add an Empty to your Scene

First, to make sure that you can see it clearly when it's created, LMB somewhere away from the icospheres, setting the 3D cursor Then, use the toolbox to Add->Empty The Empty appears at the location of the 3D cursor, like any other new object

Figure 1.12: The toolbox, about to add an Empty to the scene

Now, let's do your first bit of animation In Blender, as in most 3D animation programs,

animation is accomplished by changing the location, rotation or scale of an object over time The markers that keep track of these changes are called Keys

In the Timeline window, make sure that the green time marker that indicates the current time is as far left as it will go This should put you on Frame 1 of your animation

Move the cursor over the 3D window and press the I-key A menu titled "Insert Key" pops up Choose "Scale" from the menu, as you are going to only animate the scale of this empty

Figure 1.13: The Insert Key menu, prepared to set a Scaling key

Back in the Timeline window, LMB around frame 80, setting Blender's frame counter to 80 Over the 3D window, press the S-key and scale the Empty up to twice its original size LMB to

confirm the change in scale Now, press the I-key again and choose "Scale."

You will notice that the timeline now contains two small yellow lines, one at the location in time

of each key you just set (i.e one at frame 1, and one around frame 80) Use the LMB to scrub the timeline between these two yellow markers Watch the 3D view as you do it You will see the Empty change scale as you scrub back and forth

As you can see, the Start and End frames for your animation are set to the defaults of 1 and 250, and you need to set a few more keys to fill out the space Continue positioning the frame counter

in the timeline with LMB, then scaling the Empty and inserting Scale keys for it As you will see, fewer keys in the timeline will result in slower animations, while dense groupings of keys will lead to rapid changes Remember to press the timeline's play button to have Blender play back your animation for you Really, it doesn't matter how many keys you insert, or how you decide to scale the empty in this step If you're the kind of person that needs detailed Instructions though,

try setting a new key every twenty frames, alternating between a large scaled empty and a small scaled one

Note: Another popular method of playing back your animation is to position the cursor over the window you would like to see animated (most likely the 3D view), and pressing Alt-A Pressing Alt-Shift-A will accomplish the same thing, but will run the animation in all windows on the current screen

Now you have your Empty shrinking and growing In the next step, you'll connect the spheres of your nucleus to it

Tip:

I-key brings up a menu of available properties on which to

set animation keys Alt-A plays animation in a particular

window

Parenting

In the real world, children inherit traits from their parents In the world of 3D graphics, you can give your objects parent-child relationships A child object will inherit certain characteristics (like scaling) from its parent: if the parent object scales, so will the child The child can have its own characteristics it can move, rotate and scale on its own but anything that its parent does, it will do too So, if you have an Empty with animated scaling like you just created, making that Empty the parent of your sphere nucleus objects should cause them to scale just like it

Before you do the next bit, let's make sure that nothing is selected Press the A-key twice to clear any selections that are currently made Use the method of your choice (RMB, B-key border) to select all the icospheres that make up the nucleus of your atom Then, holding down the Shift key, RMB select the Empty

Note: Something we haven't mentioned before is the distinction between "selected" objects and the "Active" object Notice how the Empty, which was selected last, is a brighter shade of pink than the other selected objects? This brighter selection indicates that the Empty is the "Active" object The Active object will always be the last one that you select Having an Active object is important when you will be performing an operation (like Parenting) in which one or more

objects will be linked or referenced in some way to a target object That target will always be the Active object

So, with all of your icospheres selected, and with the Empty as the Active object, press Ctrl-P and click through the "OK? Make Parent" message that comes up

Figure 1.14: The lines indicating a parent/child relationship are highlighted here

The icospheres are now the child objects of the Empty In some tutorials and references other than this book, they are said to be "parented" to the Empty, even though they are its children Although that is a common usage, it is technically inaccurate and counterintuitive so we will avoid it here

RMB select the empty, and use the G-key grab tool to move it around the 3D view (then RMB to cancel the move) The spheres move with it Use the R-key to rotate the empty and see how the spheres move with it again (then RMB to cancel) RMB select one the icospheres and move it around by itself (don't forget to RMB to cancel the operation) Child objects can still be moved independently, but follow the motion of their parents

Press the Play button in the Timeline window (or Alt-A over the 3D view) to see how parenting has caused the icospheres to inherit the scaling animation of the Empty

Weird, huh? The icospheres grow and shrink with the Empty, but their distance from the Empty changes as well That's not what you wanted What is happening is that the children are changing size, but they are changing size as though they and the parent Empty are all one large object,

growing and shrinking overall Let's change this so it works correctly If you wanted to, you could repeatedly use Undo (Ctrl-Z) to back step until the parenting relationship is removed Instead, select the icospheres and press Alt-P An "OK?" menu pops up, with "Clear Parent" already selected LMB to accept this (or you can press Enter on your keyboard for the same effect) The dashed lines that had been an indicator of the parent-child relationship have

disappeared, showing that the spheres are no longer the children of the Empty

To get the correct effect this time, you would like to put the empty in the middle of your nucleus,

so that when it grows and shrinks, the nucleus will follow it properly You could just use the key to position the Empty somewhere near the middle, but there is a more accurate way

G-Tip:

Ctrl-P creates a parent-child relationship between objects,

with the Active object as the parent Alt-P breaks the

parent-child link of a selected child object

Figure 1.14.1: The Shift-S snap menu

So, how do you get the Empty to the exact center of the nucleus? Select the Empty (only the Empty, nothing else!), press Shift-S and this time choose "Selection to Cursor" This option moves any selected objects to the location of the 3D cursor

You can see then that the workflow for precision movement in Blender is a two step process First, position the 3D cursor via selection and Snap "Cursor to Selection" Then, Select the object you wish to position and Snap "Selection to Cursor"

In the example above, you've used the Snap menu to position your animated Empty in the center

of the nucleus icospheres

Use B-key to select the icospheres The Empty, which was selected in the previous step, remains selected and is, in fact, the Active object, as you can see by its brighter color (If the Empty is not the Active object, hold down the Shift key and RMB click it to make it so.)

With the icospheres selected and the Empty as the Active object, press Ctrl-P to create a parent relationship

Figure 1.14.2: The spheres are now the children of the Empty in the middle

Scrub the mouse back and forth in the timeline This time, the scaling of the whole nucleus functions as you had hoped At this point, if you wanted some extra practice, you could create a new Empty and animate it to pulse in a different fashion from the first Then, you could make half the spheres the children of this new empty, leaving the others as the children of the original This would create a more complex and hopefully more interesting animation

Tip:

Shift-S brings up the Snap menu

Animation and Keys

Let's get a little more acquainted with Blender's system for creating keys for animation To do this, you will add an electron to your atom and make it travel around the nucleus

Figure OT.15: Set the 3D cursor away from the nucleus

Before you do anything else, let's make sure that you are looking at your atom from the front - if you aren't, then some of the following examples will not quite work Use Numpad-1 to go to a front view

LMB to the left of the nucleus, setting the 3D cursor there, so that your electron is created at a good location Use the spacebar toolbox to add an icosphere Remember to use the Tab key after the object is created, to get out of Edit Mode Really, you can add any kind of object you choose

to experiment with, but our illustrations will use the icosphere With the S-key, shrink the icosphere so it's a bit smaller than the ones already in the nucleus

Make sure Blender's frame counter is set to 1 (use the Timeline view for this) and that only the electron is selected Press the I-key and choose "Loc" (Location) from the Insert Key menu that pops up

Figure 1.15.1: A new icosphere added to be the first electron

LMB in the timeline to set the frame counter to somewhere around 60 Use G-key to move the electron to a position above the nucleus in the 3D view Insert another location key

Skip ahead to around frame 120, move the electron to the right of the nucleus and insert a

location key Finally, skip to around frame 180, move the electron below the nucleus and insert a key