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Beginner’s Guide to Blender Simulation

If you found this post and would like to make your own 3D simulations, awesome! You’ve come to the right place. Here is a list of useful links and tutorials that you’ll need to get started. And the best part is, everything you’ll need is free and open source.

  • The first thing you’ll need to do is download Blender . This is the 3D software you’ll be using. It has a very friendly community on the /r/blender reddit community, and they regularly post great material.
  • Familiarise yourself with Blender. This is a tutorial for getting started. Just watching the first part in that series should allow you to follow these tutorials (but be ready for a lot of pausing and rewinding!). If you’re not feeling confident yet, watch the rest of the series.
  • This is a nice introduction to Blender’s physics system.
  • tutor4u has tutorials which are very easy to follow if you still don’t feel comfortable getting around Blender.
  • If you’re having problems with render time, Sheep It is a free online render farm that can save you hours of rendering, by sharing the workload across volunteer’s computers. When you’re not using your computer, you can use it to return the favour in exchange for credits (these will give you a higher priority when rendering subsequent projects).

Now you can choose what sort of simulation you want to make:

  • For tower collapses, I made a tutorial myself which also includes a template to help you get started right away.
  • Prefer fluids? This is a detailed tutorial that covers the Blender fluid simulator very well, and is easy to follow.
  • More of a smoke kind of guy? This isn’t a bad place to start. It’s long but nice and easy to follow.

Gleb Alexandrov and Andrew Price are my favourite YouTubers for Blender tutorials. Andrew Price is more oriented towards beginners, but both will help you with things like lighting and setting materials to make your renders really stand out. A great way to very quickly add realistic lighting to your scenes is with HDR panoramas, which I also have a tutorial for on my blog , with links to great quality panoramas for free.

Have any questions, or problems with these tutorials? Is there something you’d like to create that isn’t listed? Post a comment here 🙂

 

Published in Tutorials