Blender reference links

Render of 8pp gate fold, done with Blender Internal engine

Been experimenting with Blender these past few months, pretty incredible free/open source 3D software. Definitely a bit of a learning curve, but very addictive and satisfying once you get the hang of it.

Links to some of the more helpful tutorials and info I’ve found are listed below. I switched from the Blender Internal engine to Cycles recently for improved results w/ architectural rendering, so some of these links are specific to Cycles.

• Blender basics, including manipulating the view and shortcuts
• What to do if you can’t seem to pan/zoom around your scene any more
• Units in Blender, including metric and imperial
• Tips on creating an isometric camera view here and here
• On creating an infinite ground plane
• Putting different materials on different parts of a mesh
• Putting an image texture on a material in Cycles
• A basic mesh unwrapping tutorial, useful for UV mapping
• Comprehensive tutorial on modelling an interior scene
• Using an image as the world background
• Info regarding Ambient Occlusion
• Setting up external sunlight and other world settings for architecture with Cycles
• Adding lights to an interior scene in Cycles
• How to a shadow catcher in cycles, very useful for rendering meshes and their shadows only with a transparent ground in order to situate your scene naturally against a background image/photo (far and away the best tutorial I’ve found for this)
• Making a text hole with a Boolean modifier, useful for simulating routed text
• Avoiding noisy renders in Cycles
• Troubleshooting importing SVGs in to Blender that have been created in Adobe CC programs
• Importing a Blender mesh in to Three.js (the possibilities!!)

I wish that more 3D tutorial creators would take it easy with their background music and/or introduction animations…