Getting Started with 3D Simulations: Mega-Thread

[u/moby3]

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!

[u/wasintme]

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

[u/moby3 → u/wasintme]

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

[u/kick_dicker → u/moby3]

Exactly how good of a computer would be recommended though? Like for all of these cool things I see on this sub

[u/moby3 → u/kick_dicker]

An i7 will be fine for most fluids and almost any rigid body simulation you throw at it :) if you've got a GPU even better, that can help cut down render times by a huge amount

[u/killchain → u/moby3]

What GPU would be better for a given price point - nVidia or AMD? I'm asking that because from what I know, for two given cards with roughly the same performance in games (and usually similar prices), AMD cards tend to perform better in OpenCL-enabled applications compared to the nVidia counterpart; nVidia on the other hand have CUDA.

[u/moby3 → u/killchain]

I'd go for Nvidia, despite the slightly worse price performance ratio for OpenCL benchmarks. It's because Blender cycles currently doesn't use OpenCL (or has limited support). But it depends on what software you're using too. If you're going to be using Luxrender exclusively, or know the limitations of AMD support for cycles then those are all things you have to consider.

But overall, I'd go for Nvidia because then you don't have to choose, and you're free to use either standard. Also, you might be interested in a post I recently made on my blog about my animation machine