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Playing with Blender For Artists (Bforartists) - Easier way to learn Blender?
sorveltaja:
--- Quote from: vtsteam on May 07, 2025, 10:05:26 PM ---Nice work! :beer:
Can I ask, in your piston drawing earlier, what are the triangular sections under the crown?
--- End quote ---
At first I thought they are for cooling, but since when pistons had such? It would be interesting to know what kind of engine that kind of piston belongs to. But yeah, it's just random image I found on the net.
awemawson:
Some Land Rover engines have jets of oil played on the under side of the piston crown for cooling as I imagine do many other engines
sorveltaja:
--- Quote from: awemawson on May 08, 2025, 05:06:47 PM ---Some Land Rover engines have jets of oil played on the under side of the piston crown for cooling as I imagine do many other engines
--- End quote ---
Thanks for the info :beer:. I don't remember seeing that kind of cooling solution. But here we go, my knowledge about engines is limited to small, model ones.
What comes to mechanical animations, like gear trains, there seems to be several ways to achieve desired results. One that I'm particularly interested, is using previously mentioned rigid bodies where several objects react to other ones in "physical" way. It may sound like I know what I'm doing, but it's trial and error process. Although there are, no doubt, very sophisticated ways to achieve expected outcome, those are for advanced users; I just prefer the 'hands on' approach instead.
It's sort of like playing with lego blocks. Animated and/or simulated objects can be modified to affect the result, like in this video, which uses same objects that were in previous video, with added elements. I didn't expect such a result, but it's actually going to the direction I'm after:
In the end, again some critique (not to blame by any means) about Blender:
- Its user manual has almost 6000 (yes, thousands) pages, but it's more like a reference, as there doesn't seem to be instructions that newcomer could easily follow (that's probably why Youtube has zillions of tutorials).
- Some functions (like object's properties, and how it shows in the viewport) are scattered around, and usually it takes search on the net to find out where, and which terms to look for.
- Preferences menu (especially 3D viewport one) is like wild jungle, having hundreds of options to adjust UI colors, which is actually very good idea, but to find the element one wishes to adjust is not necessarily that easy.
In the end, Blender might be a great tool to just play with.
vtsteam:
I can see the attraction. about 15 years ago I first discovered the game Crayon Physics, which I thought was brilliant. It was one of the first things I tried to get workable in WINE on Puppy Linux.
The object and movement interactions are the fascinating part like Blender and 3D CADs, but the graphics are Grammar school level -- which I actually love. I like the fact that you draw the objects in real time -- talk about a simplified user interface!
sorveltaja:
Previously I haven't done much video editing, except simple stuff back in the days in Virtualdub. I was looking for ways to make a video, that has more than one videos in it. No need to look any further - Blender has its own video editor:
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On the upper left side is the folder with video files. On the bottom are the channels, where video files can be dragged. In the upper middle window videos can be scaled and moved, using same shortcuts (G for moving, S for scaling) as with the objects in 3D window. Output is rendered to .mkv video format, which is then ready to be uploaded to Youtube:
What comes to 3D rendering, from newcomer's perspective, there's an option to use OpenGL preview renderer to render the output of animation without any scene setup(lighting, cameras, object materials/textures etc). It basically takes series of screenshots of the viewport, therefore being very fast.
For some reason, its output (be it single image or video) has quite dim or faded colors, when actual 3D viewport is compared to rendered image. Maybe it's about some settings that I haven't yet found:
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