Electronic Portfolio Development

Mid-Term Project

Submitted to

Qazi Akhyar Ahmed

By

Jawad Jafar

F2017-191
 About
Animatrix, 'The Blender Dimension', is a blog website created by Jawad Jafar, an
independent 3d Artist and Film Graduate from Beaconhouse National University ,
Lahore, Pakistan. This Blog is all about learning and spreading the knowledge about
Blender, helping 3D artists to navigate through the 3rd dimension.

This page will help you to start using Blender from the very basics of this software
and grow to create amazing 3d art. It is a guideline to the software with regular
updates and fun content. Hope this will be helpful to as many people as possible and
assist in growing the Blender community.

Jawad Jafar

Hey guys! I am Jawad Jafar, a film graduate and an animation enthusiast. I have been
working for 4 years in this field, creating different films and other animated content
including sci-fi game trailers, 3d animated films and animated commercial
advertisements. Most of my work is based on hard surface modelling. I have created
this blog so that people like myself, who yearn to learn more about 3d and explore
more into the concepts and process of 3d animation via Blender.

Check out my YouTube channel to see my work and find some help using the
tutorials I post regularly.

Thank You.

Contact

Email: Animatrix@gmail.com
Phone: +92-324-8785922

Post #1
Camera Animations in Blender

Camera animations in Blender have gone really advanced since its advent. I would
say that I have a lot of friends who are great cinematographers. Whenever they sit
with me on this software and I get the camera settings on, their mouths start watering.
Blender gives you a wide range of camera sensor sizes from a simple Sony camera to
Red Helium and Arri Alexa. All of these cameras are at your disposal in Blender. It
also gives you an option to shoot your animation video on filmic logs, which is a
general log video to match the dynamic range of each camera and its sensor size. This
allows filmmakers to color grade their renders with the same freedom as they have in
a live action film shoot.
In Blender, you can use camera constraints, jibs, rigs and all sorts of camera
equipment in a digital scripted form and even the option to do a handy camera
movement which is a very key camera movement when it comes to cinematic shots.
In blender, the camera settings allow you to have motion blur, and adjust these in
different sorts of settings like aperture settings and aperture blades. The lenses that
you use can range around any focal length from high to low. There is also an option to
switch from perspective view (real time) to the orthographic views which are digitally
ideal and actually impossible to create in real life.

Cameras can be parented and moved along curves and other empty objects which
allows a cinematographer to make precise movements according to their planned
shots list. This is something you don't get in a normal live action shoot that easily.

Another great aspect of camera animations in blender is that you can use the
composite tabs to make the lens and renders anamorphic and even add chromatic
aberrations in it. These kind of effects are really hard and expensive to achieve in real
life. You can literally place the camera anywhere. Even f you want to place it inside a
volcano, you can. If you are a 3d artist and also a good cinematographer, there is a
wide range of options for you to achieve an amazing look right at home without
leaving for big and heavy productions. You don't need millions of dollars to achieve
that look when you have blender.

There will be further posts after this related to camera animations in which I will
share a lot of tutorials to use different and amazing camera animations with lots of
helpful tricks and tips. So stay tuned and keep supporting this blog. Thank you.
Post #2
Blender v/s Cinema4d
Which software is better? This is going to be a question that will always remain with
us as and people will keep asking. Well, there is no definitive answer to this, so as to
put an end to this tug of war. People who use and love Cinema4d will keep loving and
defending it. Same is that case with the people who use Blender. All we can do is to
point down the advantages and disadvantages of these two softwares.

Both these softwares are high quality and amazing. Both these softwares have great
tools and allow a wide range of operations from modelling to photorealistic
renderings. The first difference between these softwares is that Blender is an open
source software which allows everyone to use it and not just high end studios. On the
other hand, cinema4d is a paid software and has become kind of the industry standard
as it has been present for a long time. The biggest advantage of cinema4d is that it has
been around for years and has a stable software that is why it is used by professionals.

The second big difference is the learning curve and complexity. Cinema4d is a much
more easier software than blender and it is easier to learn cinema4d instead of
blender. Blender on the other hand has a very easy and user friendly interface but also
very complex. It is based on a node based workflow which separates it from all the
other layer based softwares. This is the main reason that people find it a little harder
to learn but once you get your brain around the concepts, Blender becomes a very
much advanced software than cinema4d. Cinema4d also has a user friendly interface
and has a procedural workflow.

Blender offers DAE and FBX file formats to export and import which makes it a very
good option for game developers. In this way it becomes easier to maintain a nice
workflow between Unity and Blender. Due to blender's node based systems, it makes
an excellent team with Houdini and Nuke which are the industrial standards for VFX
and compositing.

In the end I would like to say that there is no one software that you can say is perfect.
Every software has its own pros and cons and they are all amazing in their own ways.
What matters the most is that people keep learning these softwares and keep a nice
learning curve in whatever software they use. For us, blender is the way to go
forward, but in case there are some tools and things in cinema4d and not in blender,
we can always learn cinema4d as a second software.

Post #3
The third dimension in blender is different

A lot of people have been asking me about the z-axis being upwards in blender which
is not a traditional way. Some think it might be a mistake but it is not. Blender
Foundation has kept it as it is for some undefined reasons but there is nothing to
worry about.

You must have learned graphs in your mathematics class during your high school.
You used to draw it on x and y axis. These axis are dimensions actually. The first one
is x-axis, second one is y-axis. Anything in this world exists in a dimension. These
objects are normally have their length on x-axis, and height on y-axis. When we talk
about a three-dimensional object, it means drawing the object as if it is just like
reality. In real life, everything is three dimensional. Let's say we draw a cube. It has
six sides in total. If you draw a cube on a page, it will be different than a box. A box is
drawn having only four edges or one face. While on the other hand, if we draw a
cube, it must be drown from a perspective point of view instead of a straight two
dimensional view. In this way, we can look at the cube as much more realistic than a
box with four edges.

What does three dimensional mean? It basically means that instead of just the two
dimensions, x and y, we have a third dimension, which is the object's depth. Depth is
something that defines how far away it is from the eye of a viewer. It might not be
visible from the front orthodox view. (Orthodox view means a perfect view with zero
deformity or change in the view angle. A straight angle of 0, 90, 180 etc.) Depth is
measured on the z-axis. It is usually drawn as an inclined line on the graph.

In all the 3d animation softwares like Auto-desk Maya or Cinema 4D, z-axis is the
depth of any object. However, in Blender, z-axis is not the depth. Instead, z-axis and
y-axis are interchanged. The y-axis, which is always the height of any object, is
changed to depth in Blender. While height is changed to the z-axis. the graph that we
used to draw in high school was 2d. In the software, we see an interface that supports
three dimensions. Normally we would look at this graph from a front orthodox view.
But in case of Blender, we see it from the top orthodox view. This is something that
can only be found in Blender. The reason behind this is far more technical. I am not
saying that the traditional front orthodox view was not correct. It totally depends on
the viewer but this thing is something that has made blender's interface much easier
than it competition. It is really just a matter of preferences but yeah, it works quite
well for me in this way.

Hope this was helpful in case you were wondering why the z-axis in Blender is
upwards instead of backwards. Contact us via email if you have any questions or need
further explanation. We will try to answer all your questions duly. Stay tuned for
more updates

Post #4
Cycles v/s Eeve

Blender is the only 3D software that is giving us not one but two render engines. Both
of these are in-built so no third party renderers needed. One of them is 'Eeve' while
the other one is 'Cycles'. Both of these render engines are great and provide amazing
results if used properly. In this blog post, we will discuss the basic differences and
where to use the specific render engine for its best use.

Cycles however, is a ray tracing render engine. It is used for the best and accurate
lighting possible.

Eeve

Eeve is basically the real-time render engine for blender. It give fast renders within
the time range of a few seconds. It uses mostly the CPU for rendering purposes and
give an instant view of how the render would look like. This comes at the cost of
quality when it comes to lighting. As there is no ray tracing, the lighting may seem a
little off in terms of photorealistic renders. However, we can overcome this issue by
using better shading and texturing materials. PBR textures can help and give you
better performance. Sometimes, cycles and eeve both give nearly the same results and
sometimes, eeve is even better. One of the main things about eeve is that it creates a
fake lighting system by using its quick algorithms. One of these aspects is ambient
occlusion. Ambient occlusion gives us a calculated amount of highlights and shadows
that might be created with lighting. Another aspect of this algorithm is screen-space
reflections. You can turn these on or off as per requirement. screen space reflections
help you create the impact of lighting on one material to another that is place close by.
Like the reflection that is created by light on a table where there is a steel or silver
object present on it.

Cycles

Cycles is the best. It gives amazing quality and is used mostly for photorealistic
renders and gives a great ray tracing effect. The only draw back it gives is the
opposite of eeve. While eeve gives renders in seconds, cycles gives renders depending
upon your number of samples. The more samples you set for render, the better your
render quality gets, but at the cost of time. Instead of seconds, it may even take days.
Less samples give you grains and noise in the renders. It is corrected up to some
extent by using the in-built denoiser but it is always better to take more samples so
that the quality is not compromised. For this, you need a better GPU. Nvidia GTX
3070 is one of the best options but pretty expensive. You can also reduce the render
time by playing around with the ray tracing and lighting settings in render tab. Also,
the topology plays an important part in render timing. The more complex your
topology is, the more time it takes to render. So keep your topology on point, not
giving any extra loops or faces than needed.

Blog Promotional Strategies.

I will use the following promotional strategies to promote my Blog.

 Advertising my blog page with its link on Instagram and Facebook.

 Collaborating with different 3d artists.
 On YouTube via video tutorials that would be linked with the blog to further
understand the concepts.
 Weekly Newsletter via Email.
 Giveaways.