CS 148 Fall 2020-2021 Due Date: Monday, 21 September 2020 by 7 pm PT
Follow the instructions carefully. If you encounter any problems in the setup, please do not hesitate to reach out to CAs on Piazza or attend office hours.
Be aware of the Checkpoints below. Make sure you complete each one since we will do the grading based on them.
<aside> 💡 What is Blender? Blender is a free and open-source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation. Examples from many Blender-based projects are available in the showcase. (from Blender website)
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<aside> 💡 What we'll do with Blender in this course? We will learn the basics of modeling, texturing, shading, and rendering inside Blender. We'll also use Blender’s API for Python scripting to write a custom raytracing render engine. Blender is well suited to this class because of its unified pipeline and responsive development process.
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Download Blender 2.90 from https://download.blender.org/release/Blender2.90/ and install it.
There should be a default scene with a cube, a light and a camera:
3D Viewport (yellow), Outliner (green), Properties (blue) and Timeline (red). From Blender documentation.
This is the default workspace for blender (see more at blender documentation):
Blender has a nice official introduction playlist for 2.8 on their youtube channel. They're compatible with 2.90. If you haven't used Blender before, please watch the first two videos to learn the basics of how to get around inside Blender. But don't worry, we will still provide detailed instructions below to help you get started. We have also included some links to Blender documentation if you want to further investigate the tool.
<aside> đź“– The default scene comes with a cube. We can add/delete objects in the scene. Blender stores some basic objects that we can directly add to the scene without constructing them from scratch. Here we will delete the cube and add a UV sphere.
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Move your mouse over the cube, left click to select. An orange outline will appear around the cube. Hit the Delete key to delete the cube.