Blenderole

The biggest difference Blender bones have is that each bone is not one object. One armature is actually made up of ‘N’ bones. When you link the mesh to a skeleton you use just one armature. And you don’t do that with a skinning modifier, but with an armature modifier where you specify which armature the mesh is connected to.

Another difference is that the envelopes are set on the bones, not on the meshe’s armature modifier. You use normal scale (’S’ hotkey) to scale the sizes of the enveloopes. ALT+S though scales the falloff ratio of the envelope.

Where to find weight paint.

Painting weight is just like any other software. But instead is done on the mesh object. It’s better to have already an applied armature, then simply go to Weight Paint, like on the picter. There will be one more panel with the configuration for the brush. You can also hit ‘W’ to have the envelopes applied to the weights and go on from there.

Quickest procedure to create a chain of bones:

. Space, Add, Armature;

. Position this one bone over the length you want the chain to cover;

. Go to Edit mode (either through the UI or the with TAB)

. Press W to subdivide the bone into many others.

You can also add bones by going to Edit mode, pressing space, then Add/Bone. They will be on different hierarchies, if you want to add one bone to another chain, select both and press CTRL+P.

If you ever need to place the 3d cursor over at an exact coordinate:

Quite usefull if you need to get the pivot point of an object somewhere.

Ok, so the toon material on Blender is far from featured. It supports just two colors and a specular, where elsewhere you can get a wide variety of control over the shades. It can have edges for the shades, but you don’t have much control about their shape or size. But you can get something like this:

Hafunui, at blenderartists.org, posted an internesting workaround of the shading limitations using the ramp. I will use this to give a quick tour on the material editor:

. Preview: the usual preview. Trust this as much as you trust the preview from any other 3d software. (which is, not much).

. Links and Pipeline: technical stuff (will update this later), but you can see the object linked to a “nose” object.

. Ramps: the ramp shader. the trick here, for the toon shader, is using the third colorband next to the one before, which has the same value as the first. the material tab has settings for a plain color only.

. Shaders: actual shaders. here’s where you could find the toon shader (used, with 0 on all channels, on the specular)

The way you work with shaders in Blender is to choose them on the shaders tab, tweak the settings and material colors, and that’s it. Besides that you have a node system underneath everything where you can make much more interesting materials. This topic might be covered again on this blog but much more in the future.

Now it begins to get confused. There’s no way to move freely the pivont point (the pink dot) of an object, with a gizmo for example. You have to position first the 3d cursor to your liking then center the pivot to the 3d cursor. PLUS, sometimes the pivot is called “object’s origin”.

Extremely essential to this, thus, is snapping. Done through SHIFT+S. Options are clearly self-explanatory, but you have to understand what you are moving (Cursor to Selection means moving the 3d cursor to what you have currently selected, a vertex for example). After you’ve placed the cursor where you want the object’s origin to be, you use one of the following buttons:

Fortunately, you don’t have to go through all this when you want to just rotate/scale an object with a different pivot. On the pivot mode options, bellow, you can quickly change which pivot point to use:

References used for this post are:

Blender Underground post by penix1 with an in-depth explanation of Blender Objects Origin
2min video tutorial from Josh (3DMacDaddy)

All this is usefull if you are going to use Mirror, because it mirrors on the object’s origin point.

And if you want to rotate the pivot, you actually have to use a script named Object/Scripts/Axis Orientation Copy.

From Blender3dClub:

Most use keys:

G - Grab/move selected items.
S - Scale selected items.
R - Rotate selected items.
X - Delet menu. Many options.
E - Extrude a vertex, edge or face.
B - Box selected items.
B - again..  ’Paint Brush’ select items.  Mouse wheel will adjust the size of the brush.
A - Select all (Deselect all).
K - Loop cut mesh faces.
Z - Switches between ‘Solid’ and ‘Wire Frame’ views.

ALT M - Merge menu
CTRL Z - Undo.. multible times if needed.
CTRL W - Save.. like any software, it crashes sometimes so save your work often.

And the very important: N, for the transform panel (the image below is for when on OBJECT mode, edit mode transform panel is diferent).

On the Blender manual there’s also a long list of modeling tools.

TAB: changes between edit mode and object mode. Obviously, object is for whole object, edit to edit the object.

CTRL+TAB: allows to change between vertex, edge or face edition mode.

Subsurface is here:

In Ubuntu the alt key moves windows. Change that at System/Preferences/Windows. If you are using GL Desktop (Compiz) you might also change that there (System/Preferences/GL Desktop).

To navigate on the viewports: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/The_3D_Viewport_Window

The defaults, resumed are:

MMB: rotate

Shift+MMB: pan

Ctrl+MMB or scroll wheel: zoom

The rotate view feels completely different from Max/Maya because the default option is View rotation as Trackball instead of Turntable. You change that on the Preferences menu, dragging the top panel down a bit, so you can change this options:

Basic views can be changed on Numpad:

I’ve been using 3d Studio Max and Maya professionally on the companies I’ve worked for quite some time already. I’ve known of Blender ever since it started, but could never afford some time to learn and use it extensively. Recently at home I’ve switched to Ubuntu and decided to use both to create a personal short animation focused on facial animation.

This “blog” will be a collection of resources on switching from Max/Maya to Blender. A kind of “lazy guide for experts”. Blender is extensively documented, but those with some experiences don’t need to learn how to open a file and waste quite some time digging through the same techniques to learn the important points. I will try to keep this organized using tags and categories, so use them extensively.