Shaping a three-dimensional world

5 January 2020

3D Graphic

3 min.

33

Questo articolo è disponibile in italiano

Years ago, I’d say about ten years ago, I tried to approach the 3D graphics environment to discover something new. I was able to make a few small creations, but nothing that excited me much.

I liked the results, but I probably thought the procedures were too difficult and for some reason I abandoned this way.

Managing a three-dimensional environment requires more effort than a two-dimensional environment: simply consider that while observing the work (created or being created), in the case of the three dimensions you have to “go around” it to fully evaluate it, but this is not necessary with a two-dimensional image.

I could never avoid noticing that there are hundreds of tutorials on YouTube alone to create the most varied things on Blender, so a couple of weeks ago I decided to start following some guides.

Blender is an open source and free software (and this makes it fantastic) with which you can create 3D scenes, model simple and complex shapes, manage textures and materials etc…
Among the functions that I like most there are the management of physics (clothes, fluids, rigid bodies and more) and particles.

To begin with, I took a Blender Guru course on YouTube created especially for those who are new to this software. I recommend it to anyone who wants to approach this world.

Don’t be alarmed if at first the interface of Blender is too complex, during the course everything will be explained in detail so that in the end everything will seem more familiar.

If after the course you want to increase your knowledge of Blender I recommend two channels on which to watch many tutorials: Blender Guru and CGGeek. Anyway, there are a lot more.

You can find other scenes I’ve created on my Instagram profile.

With great surprise and enthusiasm I discovered that Blender also has a machine learning algorithm to calculate the movements of the camera in a video in order to create movies with special effects and augmented reality. It is not even too difficult to do this, the following video explains how.

I did a test and I extrapolated some considerations: tracking the camera is not difficult, just track in a good way the reference points (trackers) for the software; much more complex is to reproduce the lights and colors of the real environment on the virtual one. Here is my result:

Blender 2.8, the current version, has a real-time rendering engine and another one that specializes in generating photorealistic images, so you can choose to prioritize rendering time or result quality. Also for this, as before, there are dozens of tutorials.

As far as I’m concerned I really enjoy working with Blender and I will continue to use it trying to improve my skills.

As a conclusion I insert the latest Blender Open Movie, which of course is made using only Blender. Wonderful, isn’t it?