Chapter 1: An Introduction to 3D Art

By Roland Hess
If you are completely unversed in 3D art, then this introduction is for you. If
you already know what you're doing and are just using this book to get yourself
up to speed with Blender, then skip right on to Chapter 2, The Blender Interface
. (Of course, if you did that you would miss out on a fantastic analogy for 3D a
rt that might give you inspiration some day when your mouse just doesn't want to
do its thing and all you can think of are chrome spheres and checkerboard plane
s.) Please note that the screen shots and references to Blender in this chapter
are not tutorials - they are simply general examples of what can be done. You wo
n't find step-by-step instructions on how to recreate them. We'll get to all tha
t later.
Taking Pictures of Tiny Little Houses
3D Art is little more than building a model and taking a picture of it.
Figure 1.1: A street scene created with miniatures and raw materials.
Did you ever build a little setup with toy houses, put miniature figures in it,
maybe snap off twigs and bits of bushes and stick them in clay to look like litt
le shrubs? Did you take a picture of it, close enough to the ground to try to ma
ke it look like the town was real? Did you spend countless hours in your room as
a kid trying to make the whole thing as realistic as possible, while all the ot
her kids taunted you and called you the "Hermit King?"
Okay, maybe that was just me.
But that, minus the taunting, is the essence of 3D art. Creating and taking pict
ures of models. Admittedly, 3D Art is a much deeper topic than that, but that is
where we'll start.
Raw Materials
If you were going to build a diorama of a downtown street, what would you need?
Boxes, for the buildings. A knife or scissors to cut windows and doors, or maybe
just a marker to draw them on, depending on how fancy you want to get. Colored
paper and odd bits of cardboard to make things like the road, the sidewalks and
curbs, the trash bins and benches. Maybe if you were feeling lazy, you'd just bu
y a couple of miniature benches and street signs from a hobby shop. If you were
feeling especially clever, you might make a mixture of glue and colored sand to
simulate roofing material. You'd need a couple of clippings from live plants to
stick around as trees and bushes.
Figure 1.2: Some of the raw materials you would use to build a diorama.
If you had all of that, you could build yourself a nice little street scene.
When it was built, and it looked the way you wanted, you could set a digital cam
era on the ground, frame up the picture in the viewfinder and snap away. You cou
ld move the camera to get shots from different angles. If you really wanted to,
and you had built things properly, you could have some action figures taped to
sticks running around the place while one of your friends recorded it with her n
ice digital video camera.
Working in computer generated 3D art is almost exactly like this, except that yo
u don't risk slicing the end off your finger with an artist's knife.
First, you build your model. Then, you paint it. Then you arrange all your model
s where you want them and start snapping pictures.
Building Models
In 3D art (commonly referred to as CG - Computer Graphics, CGI - CG Imaging, or
simply 3D) almost all models are built from triangles. It may not seem so at fir
st, because many modeling tools let you work with quadrangles, curves, bevels, m
athematical surfaces and a bunch of other stuff I'm not even going to mention. B
ut in the end, it's all triangles. Why, you might wonder? Remember all the times
that you've smacked your computer and said "stupid machine"? Well, you were rig
ht.
Figure 1.3: This is a triangle.
Computers are stupid. Way down in their guts, all they understand are triangles,
so that's what you're stuck with. Fortunately, computers are really good at cal
culating and drawing triangles, and there are a lot of very smart people out the
re (like the people who wrote and maintain Blender) who know how to build tools
that make it so easy for you to work with triangles that you often don't even re
alize that's what you're doing.
And so, from triangles, you will see that you can build a quadrangle.
Figure 1.4: These are quadrangles.
With triangles and quadrangles (quads, for short), you can build anything you li
ke. A box for a diorama street scene. A monkey. Something beautiful.
Figure 1.5.1: A simple 3D model, showing its triangle construction on the right.
Figure 1.5.2: A monkey head (Suzanne, Blender's mascot), showing triangles.
Figure 1.5.3: Detail of "Miracle" by Robert J. Tiess
The tools that have been developed to help you work with triangles let you move
their corners, their edges or the whole thing at once. They let you duplicate th
em, smooth the angles between them, split them apart and weld them together. The
y let you push them around like clay, order them in rows or rotate them in space
around an arbitrary axis.
Let's take a look at some of the shortcuts and tools that are available to you
when building 3D models. (The following is not a tutorial, so we don't recommend
trying to do this yet. It's just a sample of the kinds of things you can do.)
Modeling Tools
In Blender, as in all 3D graphics applications, you have access to a number of d
ifferent very basic models to help get you started.
Figure 1.6.1: The primitive shapes accessible through the toolbox.
Figure 1.6.2: Some of the available primitive shapes.
From this beginning, you can use the other tools to grow, shape and refine your
model. If, for example, you wanted to take that cube and build a 3D plus symbol
out of it, you could use one of the most popular modeling tools available: the E
xtrude tool.
Figure 1.7.1: A standard cube, with the top face selected.
Figure 1.7.2: The top face, extruded upward.
Figure 1.7.3: Two of the sides and the bottom face selected.
Figure 1.7.4: Those faces extruded, to form a plus (+) symbol.
Now, you might want to change the shape of the plus symbol, making each arm grow
in the middle. To do something like this, you would use another popular tool: t
he Loop Cut tool.
Figure 1.8.1: Loop Cut tool in use on the top arm.
Figure 1.8.2: Loop Cut made around the center of each arm.
Figure 1.8.3: End and center faces scaled down to make a nice new shape.
In the last illustration, you shrunk (scaled down) the quads on the ends of the
plus, and the ones that made up the center, giving you a nice new shape. Now, yo
u might think the edges are too sharp, so you use a combination of the bevel too
l and the smooth tool until your model looks like this:
Figure 1.9: A beveled, smoothed plus symbol.
Okay, you might be thinking, I only see a few triangles there.
Figure 1.10: The plus symbol with triangles made visible.
Ah. There they are.
Blender, like most 3D packages, offers you dozens of modeling tools that you can
combine in an almost infinite variety to produce any kind of model you can imag
ine. Try doing that with a cardboard box.

Materials
Let's go back to your little cardboard box model of the street. If you just stic
k a bunch of plain boxes in a row, it's not going to give a very good illusion o
f a street. To make it better, you need to make the boxes look more realistic. L
et's say that you want the Post Office to look like it's made of brick. You have
some options: 1. draw bricks directly on the box with markers or paints; 2. fin
d a picture of a brick wall, cut it out and glue it to the box; 3. make an actua
l brick-like surface out of glue and red sand, apply it to the box, and painstak
ingly carve the mortar lines into it.
Of course, to do a good job, you'd have to finish the rest of the box. Paint tri
m around the door and window holes. Maybe cut and fasten rectangles of clear pla
stic to make windows. Come up with something neat for the shingles. For a nice l
ittle detail, you can draw a little sign on the door that displays the office ho
urs.
So, how does this translate to 3D? In 3D, you define and apply different materia
ls to your models, just like you would for your diorama.
In Computer Graphics, you can get your materials in a variety of ways. First, yo
u must tell the computer what kind of properties you want your material to have:
should it be shiny or dull? Rough or smooth? How should it react to light hitti
ng it from different angles?
All of these questions are answered by using different Shaders. In Blender, you
can choose from a variety of shading models, each suited to slightly different t
asks.
Figure 1.11.1: Ball with Lambert shading. Basic shading model.
Figure 1.11.2: Ball with Oren-Nayer shading. Good for rough surfaces.
Figure 1.11.3: Ball with Minnaert shading. Good for velvets and cloths.
Figure 1.11.4: Ball with Toon shading. Simulates cartoon-style coloring.
Once you've chosen the basic properties for your material, you move on to defini
ng things like colors. If you just want the whole thing to be a uniform color, i
t's pretty simple. If you want to get more complex, though, say, to make your ma
terial look like bricks for example, you need to add Textures. And just like tex
turing a diorama, there a number of ways you can obtain digital textures.
You could use a digital photograph of a brick wall. You could use Blender's text
ure generation tools to make a simulation of brick. You could use Blender's 3D p
ainting tools to paint bricks directly onto the surface.
Figure 1.12.1: Rendered wall using photo texture map.
Figure 1.12.2: Rendered wall using procedural brick texture.
Figure 1.12.3: Rendered wall that has been painted on directly.
Of course, there are a few more things to worry about than just that. You have t
o tell Blender how to orient the texture on the model, so things look right.
Figure 1.13.1: A bad angle and scale for this texture.
There are other properties and things that you can do with materials, such as de
fining transparency, reflection and bumpiness. You can even use the texturing to
ols to affect settings other than color: your brick texture could be used to def
ine brick-shaped areas of greater or lesser transparency, different levels of sh
ininess or bumps.
Figure 1.14.1: Transparency map
Figure 1.14.2: Specularity map
Figure 1.14.3: Bump map
Thus far, you've made your models and told Blender how you want them to look by
defining and applying materials. There's one more thing you need to do before yo
u start taking pictures.
Lighting
You've no doubt seen model railroad displays of varying quality, often at a scie
nce center, a museum, or in your weird uncle's basement. One of the things that
makes a model set come to life is proper lighting. There is a model railroad dis
play in the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania that covers over
four hundred square feet. The lighting of the miniatures is impressive as each
street lamp, railroad crossing, street intersection and building is lit with pai
nstaking detail. Hidden lamps help to make different sections appear to have dif
ferent seasons. Other lamps and miniature interior lights cycle to simulate day
and night.
Lighting can make or break a scene. Great lighting can make the most simply buil
t and textured model look like a real physical object, despite its other deficie
ncies. Bad lighting can lay waste to hours of careful modeling and texturing wor
k.
Figure 1.15.1: A very simple box model with no textures, lit well and rendered t
o be fairly realistic.
Figure 1.15.2: The same model rendered with a non-shadow point light source.
Blender, like most other CG applications, gives you many options for lighting yo
ur models, allowing you to create setups that mimic natural conditions (Sun and
Hemi lamps, with something called Ambient Occlusion) and studio settings (Spot a
nd Area lamps), and from there to create lighting schemes that would never be po
ssible in the real world, but that can, as you'll see, help to give drama and de
pth to your scenes. Lights can be set to different colors and intensities, can b
e set to cast shadows or not, and can even be set to only affect certain objects
, leaving others alone.
Snap Away!
So now, you've created your models and textured them. You've decided how to ligh
t everything. It's time to start taking pictures.
In the world of 3D graphics, this is called Rendering. Usually, you create a cam
era object, aim it and adjust it like you would a real camera, then tell the 3D
application to render the image that the camera sees. This is where everything w
e've talked about up until now comes together.
When you tell Blender to render an image, the first thing it does is to break up
your models into triangles. Don't worry - you won't see the triangles. However,
recall that triangles are (mostly) the only way the computer understands geomet
ry, so triangles it is! Once Blender has made its own internal model of everythi
ng based on triangles, it does some calculations to determine how to cast shadow
s from different light sources and a few other things.
Then, it starts to generate the image.
Digital images, whether computer-generated, scanned, or captured with a digital
camera, are made up of a grid of Pixels.
Figure 1.16: Digital images are made of pixels, which can be seen when zoomed in
.
Just to give you an idea of pixel sizes, the computer monitor you're using right
now most likely has a dimension of around 1024 x 728 pixels (almost 750,000 pix
els!). U.S standard television broadcasts at 648 x 486 pixels, while the Europea
n standard is 720 x 486. A 3 Megapixel digital camera will take shots in the ran
ge of 2000 x 1500 pixels. A nice glossy magazine cover image will be around 2700
x 3600 pixels.
When you first run Blender, it defaults to rendering images at 800 x 600 pixels.
For each of those pixels, your 3D application decides which triangle from your m
odels is the closest to the camera, which lights affect that particular point on
the triangle and how much, and what color it should be, based on the chosen sha
ders and texturing options from the Materials. Once it has all of that figured o
ut, it stores that result in the image. When it has calculated a result for ever
y single pixel, your image is done. Rendered.
If you're new, you get something like this:
Figure 1.17: A first attempt at using Blender.
If you are a Living Legend of CGI, you get something like this:
Figure 1.18: Still from the HD version of Elephants Dream.
And now you have a pretty (or not) picture of your model. That's great, but what
good is it? Well, for many uses, architectural visualization, making fake produ
ct shots for marketing campaigns, doing artwork for personal enjoyment, it is en
ough. A nice still image is the end.
But, for many others, this is not the end of the process. You might need things
to move. It could be as simple as moving the camera around your model to show of
f your hard work. If you wanted to really show off, you might make the models of
 trees appear to sway gently in the wind and have the striped pole on the barber
shop spin slowly. Then, a car speeds down the road. Chased by a huge boulder. Ch
ased by a giant, three-headed robot.
That's animation.
Animation
In CG, there are basically three ways to create motion.
The first is to tell certain objects (like a car) where to be, and at what time.
Essentially, you say:
"Car, I would like you be at this side of the street when I start rolling the ca
mera, and over at the other end of the street three seconds later. Can you handl
e that?"
And the car says: "Dude, I'm not real! I'm not even constrained by the laws of p
hysics. I can do anything you want!"
And you say "Awesome!" because it really is.
Animating by telling things where to be and when to be there is called Keyframin
g.
Each rendered image that makes up part of an animation is called a Frame.
And so, to animate with this method, you go to a Frame (that's the "when") and s
et a Key (that's the "where") for the location of the object. To make the Car ex
ample a little more technical, you would go to Frame 1 in your 3D application (t
he start of the animation), use the application's tools to put the car at the be
ginning of the street, and set a Key. Then, you would move the application's tim
e counter three seconds ahead in time, move the car to the end of the street, an
d set another Key.
Rendering all of the images that represent those three seconds of time, then pla
ying them back in sequence, will show the car moving from the beginning of the s
treet to the end.
The second division of animation, Character Animation, is really just keyframe a
nimation - the same basic procedure of telling "where" and "when" is used - but
as it requires a different set of skills, it is usually thought of separately.
What kinds of different skills? Well, the method of animation we just discussed
is good for moving objects around that don't change shape. It's pretty straightf
orward: the object starts here, goes somewhere else, and ends up over there. May
be it topples over onto its side. That is considered "object level" animation, a
nd more or less, anyone with half of pint of imagination and visualization skill
s can pull it off.
Character animation is different. Some people might think that character animati
on is most akin to the clay and model based stop-motion animation popularized in
a glut of Christmas specials and sometimes bad/sometimes brilliant motion pictu
re and television features. Not so.
Character animation is a combination of technical skill, imagination, acting abi
lity and puppetry. Yes. Puppets. There is a reason that a certain high-profile a
nimation studio's in-house character package is called "Marionette". A well set
up system of controls for character animation will react more like a complex pup
pet than anything else.
In Blender, the structure that controls character animation is called an Armatur
e. Armatures can resemble skeletons:
Figure 1.19: An armature skeleton appropriate for character animation.
Or something a bit more esoteric:
Figure 1.20: The "Ludwig" rig by Jason Pierce.
The odd shapes floating over the head are the face controls, which act exactly l
ike the controls on the large-scale multi-operator puppets used for motion pictu
re and television special effects.
But those skeletons and additional controls still function under the same princi
ple as object-level keyframe animation. Place the Arm bones where and when you w
ant them and set a Key. Move the eyebrow controllers to make a goofy face at the
right frame and set a Key. Play the whole thing back and each bone and controll
er will hit their spots at the times you told them to, making a (hopefully) bril
liant character animation.
The clever armature and controls move the (equally brilliant) model you've alrea
dy built of a person, causing it to not only move from place to place, but to ch
ange shape as it does so. This change in shape is called Deformation.
Figure 1.21.1: A rig in rest position with a character mesh around it.
Figure 1.21.2: When the rig is posed, the mesh follows.
None of this is limited to human beings, though. You could make an armature that
was just a chain of four bones, attach it to a model of a soda can, and keyfram
e the armature so that the soda can wriggles around on the ground like worm. Or
hops about like a kid jazzing on four bars of high-test chocolate.
The third method of animation is called Simulation or Procedural Animation. Thos
e are just different ways to say "the computer figures it out for you." All natu
ral processes, like a block wall collapsing on itself or the motion of poured wa
ter splashing into a glass, are governed by the laws of physics and can, with a
greater or lesser degree of success, be simulated by a computer program. Often,
as in the case of water splashing into a glass, a computer can do a much better
job of animation than a human being can, because it can actually simulate the ph
ysics of the situation. The same applies to a falling wall of blocks or a flag f
lapping in the wind.
Since these are physical simulations, you have to tell your CG application the b
asics about what you're simulating, which usually include values for gravity, el
asticity, mass, wind, etc.
Figure 1.22.1: Rigid Body Physics: A block wall in mid-tumble.
Figure 1.22.2: Fluid Simulation: Water pouring into a glass.
Figure 1.22.3: Soft Body Physics: A flag in the wind.
In addition to built-in simulations like these, (Blender has rigid body physics
- think bowling balls falling down stairs; soft bodies - think an overweight sto
mach jiggling when slapped; and fluid simulation built right in) many 3D applica
tions, including Blender, allow you to write little programs (usually called Scr
ipts) that can control and generate animation. These can be as simple as a scrip
t that makes objects follow the contours of the ground, or as complex as full ap
plications that can produce and animate large-scale battle scenes.
Figure 1.23.1: Objects littered around a terrain by a script.
Figure 1.23.2: A large-scale combat simulation.
Sidebar on Art: Let's Talk About Art.
Don't expect Blender, or any other 3D application for that matter, to substitute
for a lack of artistic knowledge and skill. 3D applications are tools, and noth
ing more. In the hands of a skilled artist, they can produce moving pieces of ar
t. In the hands of a hack, they will produce junk.
Even if you have no artistic background though, all is not lost. There are some
basic rules for creating artwork that can be gleaned from a simple web search or
a trip to your local library. In my experience, 3D art is an interesting combin
ation of photography and illustration. From photography, you take the techniques
of lighting and composition. From illustration (painting, drawing, etc.), you t
ake all of the artistic decisions of working in a non-realistic medium. In other
words, at some point you have to decide what portions of reality you will try t
o reproduce, and what portions you will omit or only suggest.
For a better example of what I am talking about, use as a reference any of the 3
D animated feature films produced in the last five years. None of them could be
said to be completely photorealistic. In other words, reality does not look like
those films. And yet, as we watch them, we are drawn into their shorthand for r
eality, and our minds fill in the blanks.
It turns out that your toughest job as a 3D artist is exactly that: decide which
portions of reality you will omit or imply, and which portions you will recreat
e. The rest is mechanics.
End sidebar.
Conclusion
In this mental exercise, you've made models of buildings, lampposts and a street
. You've created and applied appropriate materials to everything. Lights are str
ategically placed to give a realistic feeling of being outside on a sunny day. C
ars, boulders and robots are zooming down the street. Now they're smashing into
the wall of the post office, whose bricks tumble realistically to the pavement b
elow, coming to rest beside a little burbling fountain.
We set the frame counter to 1 and place the camera.
Now, all we have to do is press the Render button.
It's that easy.
Really.
Well, okay. It isn't.
But now that you've had your introduction, let's start learning how to actually
do this.
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