I am going to learn Blender because it intimidates me. I’ve had it installed on my computer for years now, but every time I open it I can’t get a footing to start. The plethora of options and menus are overwhelming. I will admit that the implied hubris in opening a program and hoping to understand it is totally accurate, but searching for starter guides and tutorials made it clear that I am not alone. Some of the most recommended starter guides I came across were focused on developing a mindset to approach the challenge of Blender, like Glen Moyes’ fantastic message To Those Learning 3D. In addition, a lot of my drive to learn Blender comes from masterful pieces of work like this or this which are well beyond what I could hope to accomplish as a beginner. It would be nice to one day be the World’s Greatest Blenderer, but for now I will focus on making things I think are neat.
Where to Start
Blender’s UI is surprisingly intuitive once the initial shock subsides. This video series produced by the Blender team does an amazing job in going over the layout in an intuitive way that empowers you to dive in and start playing around with the tools. I watched through the whole thing before getting to work, in addition to having it replay in the background as I did some work so that the terminology of the program could stick a little better. From there I wanted to find a project that was complex enough to keep me engaged but was still something doable for an introduction. I settled on these tutorials by Jonathan Kron to test out the liquid simulation and practice some primitive modeling.
The Great Fluid Bake Off
For my first project I decided to have the letter M appear using the fluid simulations built in to Blender. Well I actually wanted to do my whole last name but the first attempt at that was way too complex and crashed the program at first. To do this, the process was fairly straightforward:
- Add text to make an M in the font I want and extrude it into a mesh.
- Use a Boolean to cut that mesh out of a cube.
- Create a fluid inflow mesh and set the cube as a collider.
- Bake the fluid mesh.
- Hide everything else and shade the fluid.
- Play with lighting and camera placement and render!
However, though the number of steps was manageable, the tuning of each part took some time, especially getting the fluid to behave just as I wanted it to. I could do things like change the viscosity and surface tension of the simulated liquid, and on top of that change how the computer processed its motion every frame. I normally would enjoy tinkering with settings like that, but each time I wanted to see the results by baking the simulation, it would take about 10 minutes to see if it was what I wanted. Not to mention how the final render of the few seconds of footage took about 3 hours. Regardless, I spent the weekend messing with the settings and you can see my progression here:
I think my first render was a pretty strong start and I attribute that for why I could keep my focus and morale up through all the bake and render waits. The colors is a bit weird and there is some strange textures at the edges, but it all seems fixable!
I made the color a lot more bold, not just choosing a darker shade but changing how it interacts with light. Unfortunately that made the weird interactions between the fluid and the boundaries at the edges even more obvious…
Almost there! I was less strict on how the edges of the text cut away the fluid mesh so the strange wrinkles at the faces went away. But now there were some odd cavitation that popped up on some frames.
My “final” run avoided the bubbles by draining the M before the fluid could linger. I also wanted to “drain” the fluid away to make a clean loop so I added an outflow block at the base of the M and had the camera move away at the final frames.