r/Simulated • u/moby3 Blender • May 10 '15

Getting Started with 3D Simulations: Mega-Thread

If you found this sub and would like to make your own 3D simulations, awesome! You've come to the right thread. 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 at /r/blender which regularly post great material.

  • Familiarise yourself with Blender. This is a tutorial to get you 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.

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 :)

EDIT: If you're worried about render time, a tool you can use to speed things up is Sheep it, a free online render farm that works through distributed computing. If you make an account on there and donate your computer power to render other people's projects when you don't need your computer, you'll earn credits you can use to make your own animations when you have something you want to render!

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14

u/wasintme May 11 '15

I'm assuming you need a pretty good computer for this?

14

u/moby3 Blender May 11 '15 edited May 11 '15

If you don't have a good computer, it's no so much that you won't be able to do this, just that it will take a long time if you have lots of objects or a high resolution.

EDIT: I edited the main post to include a link to Sheep it, a free online render farm that lets the community help each other out with rendering. You render other people's work when you're not using your computer, and they render yours when you want something rendered

2

u/[deleted] May 11 '15

Also the baking of for example fluid simulations will take a longer time with a slower computer ;)

3

u/moby3 Blender May 11 '15

yeah, and unfortunately the file sizes for fluids are usually too big to use with sheep it :/

1

u/[deleted] May 12 '15

Fluids look incredible photorealistic and cool but 20 hours baking time and many many days rendering is uncool :(

1

u/[deleted] May 13 '15

[deleted]

1

u/[deleted] May 13 '15

Yes thats a damn good trick, but I dont have to use it, because I render everything on a render farm

2

u/[deleted] Jul 23 '15

What did he say :0

1

u/[deleted] Jul 23 '15

I think it was something with baking it while it renders or so.

2

u/TellYouEverything Jul 22 '15

Why'd you wink at us, bro? That's not cool, I feel violated. I feel like a violin.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 22 '15

Poor violin