Meta:BSoD/2006/Proposals/Introduction to the Blender Database
When a beginner makes his first steps within blender, he often fails to understand blender's object system trying to understand it based on false assumptions coming from past experiences. Those false assumptions will lead to a very painfull workflow, lots of frustrations, and a much steeper learning curve.
The blender's object system is usually the last thing a user will learn, because of the lack of documentation, and because they simply aren't aware that blender provides such a system.
My proposal is thus to make a complete guide of blender's object oriented system for beginners. It will start from the very basic (Object/edit mode) trough the essential (materials) to the complicated (parents, groups, external ressources)
The goal is that after reading this guide, the user will have a good understanding of the object system. This guide will thus be rather theoric, but it will always rely on practical examples and exercises.
目次
Scope and breakdown :
The data and the interface
- The first important thing that the user must understand is that the interface isn't the data itself but rather windows that can show you the data in a certain way.
Meshes and objects
- This chapter will take the mesh - object relation as a first example of the object oriented system of blender. What is the difference between object mode and edit mode ? Why is my object still there after I delete it's contents ? How does linked duplicate works ? Thas the kind of questions that will be answered in this chapter.
Links and datablocks
- Once the user knows how mesh and objects works, he knows enough to understand the concept of linked datablocks. This short theoric introduction will help the user to understand the next chapters.
Materials & textures
- This chapter will explain how materials and textures are linked to objects and meshes, and how you can efficiently manipulate them.
- Materials
- Textures
Parents and childs
- This chapter will explain parent and childs relationship. The subchapters will explain how these relations are used in blender.
- Bones
- Dupliverts
Groups
Groups in Blender
Appending and library data
Appending data between blend files
Overview
- This chapter will provide a cheatsheet of every type of blender
datablock, what kind of links they support, and how they can be used.
Deliverables
- It is hard to estimate how long will be this guide, but I expect it to be around 20 - 30 pages.
- Each chapter will have sample blendfiles an schematics to illustrate concepts.
- Each chapter will have exercises blendfiles. Those will help the user to test their understanding.
4) Biography :
My name is Frédéric Van der Essen. I'm from Belgium and I am in 2nd bachelor of Computer & Mechanical engineering at the UCL.
I have a quite long blender experience as a user. You can find several of my works in the blender.org gallery. My understanding of blender is quite deep, with some lacks in the animation system and the game-engine.
I already have contributed to documentation material for blender (QuickStart Guide, Video Tutorials, BlendFiles tutorials)
I also worked the past three summers teaching sailing to kids from 8 to 18 for the ADEPS/BLOSO, and I teach blender at my university.
My native language is french, and this proposal should give you an accurate insight of my english level.
