Bounce, Tumble and Splash (Blender, PDF)

Year: 2008

Author: Tony Mullen

Publishing: Sybex

ISBN: 978-0-470-19280-1

Lang: Eng

Format: PDF

Pages: 403

Art and science have more in common than they are often given credit for. Although they tend to occupy far-flung corners of your typical college campus, they have always been closer in spirit than they sometimes seem on the surface. Both artists and scientists are highly creative people, and both can sometimes be a little quirky. At their best, both types can help us see the world in new ways through their work.

This book deals with what I think is a particularly interesting intersection between the worlds of art and science: the use of sophisticated computer simulations of physical phenomena for visual, expressive-that is to say, artistic-purposes. A huge amount of technical expertise has gone into the development of these tools, and in the hands of skilled and inspired creators, a lot of wonderful artwork can be created using them. I hope this book will help to bridge the gap between these tools and the people with the vision and the talent to use them most effectively.

In the last quarter of a century, the development of CG imagery has revolutionized how people think about the visible world. It is no exaggeration to say that in terms of technical methods applied to art, the recent developments in graphics are in the same league with the advances of the Italian Renaissance. It?s not a coincidence that many of the same phenomena that are now central to CG are the same things that fascinated the visionaries of that era. Optics, physical laws, geometry, and material properties have always been of interest to artists, and the underlying relationships between things in the world have always been the true raw materials from which art is created. There?s another common point between art and science: the way that even the most astonishing new ideas and methods become accepted and even commonplace over time. The technical innovations of the Renaissance, once found only in the work of the most brilliant artists of the era, are now so accepted and accessible that perspective drawing is routinely taught as part of grade school art classes. Advances in the sciences, likewise, begin by being comprehensible only to a few brilliant minds, and wind up being taught to school children. Newtonian physics, one of the themes in this book, is a perfect example.

An analogous thing is happening now in the world of CG. For years, the tools and technologies for creating high-quality CG artwork have been expensive and inaccessible to most people. Recently, however, this has begun to change rapidly, and Blender is a big part of the change. Now, students, hobbyists, freelancers, and studios alike have access to a powerful, extremely versatile 3D content-creation tool with no restrictions on using, distributing, or modifying it to suit their needs. Casual users can dip into Blender to see whether it suits their needs at no expense at all, and serious users can keep up with every upgrade, fix, and new feature patch even between official releases, all entirely for free. It still requires effort, skill, and resources to create top-quality work, and it always will. However, the availability of a free resource such as Blender has begun to lead to a considerable increase in the number of people who can entertain the thought of creating CG artwork. One of the artists who created work for this book began creating artwork in Blender at the age of 12. Few 12-year-olds can afford high-quality proprietary CG software.

To say that it?s an exciting time in the Blender world is an understatement. It?s hard to know where to begin when listing recent milestones. Releases have been coming frequently, with exciting new features being implemented at a steady clip. The recently completed Peach project, the creation of the new open movie Big Buck Bunny to follow 2007?s Elephants Dream, has pushed Blender forward once again. Blender is the most widely installed 3D modeling and animation application in the world, and has been making steady inroads into the CG industry. The perennial need for documentation and learning materials has also begun to be addressed, with a spate of commercially released books and training material including the Blender Foundation?s Essential Blender, an excellent series of tutorial DVDs, my own book Introducing Character Animation with Blender, which has been translated into Spanish and Japanese, and several other books and videos in the works to cover various aspects of Blender?s functionality.