Tutorials for Beginngers

This introduction to blender documentation prepared by Michael Cai will be useful for students new to 3D programming.

Here is the link to the shared document. And here is the link to all shared Blender files.

Use this link to convert the Google Doc tutorial shown above to a dw content. https://cgcookie.com/ offers many Blender tutorials. </panel>

Useful tips for creating objects in the Blender night sky

A preliminary version of the celestial sphere simulation by using NASA HDRI maps as the Blender World Background Texture was created and the tutorial on how to create such “Night Sky World” is shown in Simulating Celestial Sphere in Blender.

  • You need to download relevant NASA star maps and link them in the node editor to see the starry background.
  • In Blender rendering, because we are rendering only the changes of the background pixelated images (and no 3-D object), we can turn off ray tracing (Render → Light Paths → max bounce = 1) and set the cycles render's sampling to be 1 (Sampling → Render → Max Samples = 1). Then, it should take less than 10 sec per scene (~20 min rendering for 240 frame animation).

See these examples for creating a virtual, realistic, night sky in Blender:

  • Check this 3D Star Map Add-on in Blender which uses a dataset of real nearby ~3,000 stars. This also shows how to simulate a night sky (i.e., celestial sphere). A free demo version has 299 stars without constellation markings. ⇒ This shows a good tip on how to display texts on the scene (text fixed with respect to a camera)
  • NASA image as the HDRI background with constellation lines: Blender-Night-Sky ⇒ This demo also provides a Blender file that shows tips on how to use dynamic camera control (i.e., dynamically changing camera position, origin [i.e., camera field-of-view], etc.)
  • Blender 3.? and later versions provide a Geometry Node which can be used in simulating a planet in a orbit around its central star. Check this tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9haf_JsqKlY. Using orbital elements from JPL (https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/planets/approx_pos.html), one can do a decent planetary orbit simulation.
  • Check this GitHub page https://github.com/markus-ebke/SolarSystemSimulator showing a Blender package for simulating Solar System from orbital elements.
    • This package can simulate an orbit of a planet around a central star with all user-configurable physical parameters (mass, rotation rate, rotation axis tilt angle, orbital elements, etc.).
    • This package also display animated orbital elements annotations in the 3D render.

Simulate/Visualize Orbital Motions

Blender Add-ons for Space Scene

Python in Blender

Good tutorials from YouTube on Python in Blender