After learning the basics of blender the previous week, I started delving into some of the really cool aspects of the blender; Rigging and animation. This was a particularly long section that involved numerous new concepts, such as creating an armature to build a relationship between the different limbs of an object, in this case, a lamp:
![Lamp](http://www.leoszeto.com/portfolio/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Lamp-272x300.png)
The lamp is designed with different pieces in mind so that when it comes time to animate, we can utilize Blender’s IK (Inverse Kinematic) feature to automatically pose for us.
![LampWithGemTimeline](http://www.leoszeto.com/portfolio/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/LampWithGemTimeline.png)
The section also explored the shader models, which allowed for complex representations of an object. In this case, a gem was added including a glass-like, translucent property.
![Using the node editor to create complex shaders](http://www.leoszeto.com/portfolio/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/LampWithGemNodeEditor.png)
All of these things together create a scene that was photo-realistic, with the correct lighting and reflections. This was achieved using a method called Ray-Tracing, which is computationally very expensive, but produced very good results.
![LampWithGemRendered](http://www.leoszeto.com/portfolio/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/LampWithGemRendered.png)
Creating that frame took my GTX960 GPU about 2.5 minutes to compute. Combining the animation feature with the render enables someone to make short films using this method. I created a 6 Second Video of Lamp and Gem , which ended up taking about 7 hours for the computer to create (I put the computer to work overnight to crank this out). It is possible for it to be faster using multiple computers or a better GPU, but for something simple like this, it’s good enough. It was a joy to see the finished product as I woke up the next day!
There’s definitely a lot of fun to be had with 3D modeling using Blender. Although the tool took a little to get used to, once I understood the quirks I was able to make things happen very easily. I highly recommend that anyone who is interested in 3D modeling to take the course that I took (Search Ben Tristem and Blender on Udemy).