Blender For Dummies. Jason van Gumster

Скачать книгу

2D animation one. Compositing is at the heart of VFX work, so it makes sense to include it among this group.

       Masking: If you’re mixing footage together, be it live action or animated, chances are good that you’re going to have to hide or otherwise remove something from the shot, be it the strings on a puppet or an entire house in a neighborhood. You do this with masking, and because you’re dealing with moving images, it’s a more involved process than you might be used to if you’ve only ever done something like that in a single image editor like GIMP or Photoshop. So Blender has a whole workspace dedicated to masking.

       Motion Tracking: In VFX, you’re dealing with moving images. To make your 3D assets seamlessly integrate, it’s useful to track the movement in your footage. Blender has a built-in motion tracker, which gives you the ability to track the location of the video camera in 3D space as well as the movement of objects on screen. This workspace is tuned to help you use the motion tracker as effectively as possible.

       Rendering: As with most work that you produce in Blender, it has to be rendered to output files that you can share. This workspace is the same one that has been described previously.

      Video Editing

      If you’re creating animations in 3D or 2D, chances are good that you’re not doing a single shot in isolation. It’s more likely that you’re interested in chaining a series of animated sequences in a particular order with a specific timing as a means of telling a story. That’s the nuts and bolts of video editing and the two workspaces in this category.

       Rendering: This workspace is the same one described in preceding sections. Once you finish editing your video, you need to output the results to a video file of its own. The Rendering workspace is the best place to go through that process.

       Video Editing: This is the workspace where you can do the actual work of editing video footage, whether it comes from external files captured by a camera or directly from Blender scenes. See Chapter 17 for more on Blender’s video editing tools.

      Blender workflows

      The main categories I just described in the previous sections — General, 2D Animation, Sculpting, VFX, and Video Editing — are more than just categories for nesting workspaces. They’re also Blender workflows. When you start a new Blender project with File ⇒ New, that project can be one of those five workflow types. Each workflow can be considered as a bundle of workspaces, with the workspace tabs along the top of the Blender window arranged in the basic order you would go through for that workflow from start to finish. Blender’s default behavior is to launch with the General workflow and put you in the Layout workspace, because layout is one of the first steps in a general 3D animation process.

      

In addition to clicking on a workspace tab to use it, you can cycle through workspace tabs by pressing Ctrl+Page Up and Ctrl+Page Down.

      

You can rename any workspace to any name you want by double-clicking its tab. The default workspace names work reasonably well for most situations, but as I work, I tend to customize a workspace to the point that I’m using it for something quite different from its original name. So in that case, I’ll often rename the workspace to better reflect what it is I’m doing. Get used to the idea of naming everything in your projects. Trust me, being in the habit of using a reasonable name makes life infinitely easier. It’s especially true when you come back to an old project and you need to figure out what everything is.

The workspace tabs at the top of the Blender window are arranged in an order that reflects the common steps in a workflow. However, that may not be the way you do things. Right-click any tab and Blender provides you with options to put the tab at the front or back of the list, duplicate it, or remove it altogether. As of this writing, you can’t reorder tabs by dragging and dropping, but hopefully that feature will come in future releases of Blender.

      Creating a new workspace

      To create a new workspace, left-click the plus tab at the end of the series of workspace tabs and choose the workspace that most closely matches the screen layout you want to work within. From here, you can make the changes to create your own custom workspace layout (like renaming it!). For example, you may want to create a 2D painting workspace or a multi-monitor workspace with a separate window for each of your monitors.

      

If you want Blender to always launch in a different workflow than the General one, you need to save a new startup file. This is basically a template file that Blender uses to store the preferred environment that you want to start in. For example, say your primary interest is 2D animation and you want Blender to always launch with the workspace tabs for that workflow; follow these steps:

      1 Start a new Blender session in the 2D Animation workflow by choosing File ⇒ New ⇒ 2D Animation.

      2 Choose File ⇒ Defaults ⇒ Save Startup File to set this workflow as your default work environment the first time you launch Blender.

      Customizing the Blender environment

      You can use this same method, outlined in the previous section, if you’ve fully customized your Blender environment to something completely different from any of the default workflows. When you use the Save Startup File feature, Blender saves your current settings, workspaces, and even 3D scenes to a special .blend file called startup.blend that gets loaded each time Blender starts. So any models you have in the 3D Viewport and any changes you make to other workspaces are saved, too. Fortunately, if you’ve made a mistake, you can always return to the default setup by choosing File ⇒ Load Factory Settings and re-create your custom layouts from there.

This behavior of saving a special startup.blend file is fine for setting up custom workspaces, but it has no influence on changes you make in Preferences (such as custom hotkeys or themes). Those kinds of changes are automatically stored separately when you make them. Your startup file doesn’t have any effect on changes made in Preferences (see the next section for more on configuring your preferences in Blender). This way, you can store custom workspaces without overwriting more important settings like keymaps and preferred add-ons.

      

When adjusting the layout of your workspaces, the menus and buttons in the header of an editor can be obscured or hidden if the area is too narrow. This scenario happens particularly often for people who work on computers with small monitors, but it can also sometimes happen on high resolution, or HiDPI, 2k and 4k screens. In this case, you can do three things:

        Right-click in the header area and toggle Header ⇒ Show Menus.The menus are collapsed into a single button with an icon consisting of three lines, sometimes called a hamburger menu. This frees up a little bit of space, but on smaller monitors, it may not be enough.

       Hover your mouse cursor over the header region and scroll your mouse wheel.If

Скачать книгу