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Just recently I've been fiddling around with Blender in the hopes of creating some scientific animations with it. I've gotten the hang of the basics, but I'm st

Just recently I've been fiddling around with Blender in the hopes of creating some scientific animations with it. I've gotten the hang of the basics, but I'm struggling a bit with moving beyond toy examples. Would you mind sharing your workflow? It might help me to have a mental model of the full process of a typical animation.

knolan 8y ago
What type of stuff? I could record a video of a specific example for you.
- mitrettavrednik 8y ago
  If you have the time, I'd appreciate that a lot! I'm an EE with a focus in electromagnetics, so I'd be most interested in animating time-varying vector fields, and also wave phenomena. I saw in one of your other comments that you plan to put some of your other work on GitHub at some point. I'll make sure to check that out too.
  - knolan 8y ago
    Here are two quick and dirty videos. Apologies for the mumbling and the fan noise. https://youtu.be/uISK1RTTj84 https://youtu.be/uISK1RTTj84 https://youtu.be/ICLtxpTJBKg https://youtu.be/ICLtxpTJBKg There's a lot more you can do with Python scripting and addons. You can plot math functions as surfaces etc. There are probably a lot of possibilities with procedural textures and displacement maps.
    - mitrettavrednik 8y ago
      Thanks a bunch, those were helpful. You're clearly pretty fluent with Blender, how long ago did you start learning? Were there any resources you found helpful, especially for scientific applications? Most tutorials I've found are aimed more at artists, video game/movie animators, etc. I've been looking into the Python API and the animation nodes addon too, both seem pretty powerful.
      - knolan 8y ago
        About six years now. I remember initially using some official tutorials that weren’t great. These new ones are much better: https://cloud.blender.org/p/blender-inside-out/560414b7044a2a00c4a6da98 https://cloud.blender.org/p/blender-inside-out/560414b7044a2... The various Andrew Price videos were very helpful and once I had an idea of what feature I needed to use it made searching for tutorials easier. For specific scientific applications, I can’t say. I’ve used various Adobe tools and CAD packages over the years for making artwork for papers and presentations as well as being inspired by animation from video games, documentaries, 3b1b etc. One of my initial uses was rendering lambda_2 isosurfaces of turbulent structures from Direct Numerical Simulations. I’ve used the Python API to script some topology generation for 3D printing which is great. I’ve yet to use animation nodes because for the current series I’m working on I want to give the students blend files of the animations in vanilla 2.8 should they want to explore behind the curtain.
        mitrettavrednik 8y ago
        Awesome, thanks again for taking the time to answer all my questions!

knolan 8y ago

What type of stuff? I could record a video of a specific example for you.

mitrettavrednik 8y ago
If you have the time, I'd appreciate that a lot! I'm an EE with a focus in electromagnetics, so I'd be most interested in animating time-varying vector fields, and also wave phenomena. I saw in one of your other comments that you plan to put some of your other work on GitHub at some point. I'll make sure to check that out too.
- knolan 8y ago
  Here are two quick and dirty videos. Apologies for the mumbling and the fan noise. https://youtu.be/uISK1RTTj84 https://youtu.be/uISK1RTTj84 https://youtu.be/ICLtxpTJBKg https://youtu.be/ICLtxpTJBKg There's a lot more you can do with Python scripting and addons. You can plot math functions as surfaces etc. There are probably a lot of possibilities with procedural textures and displacement maps.
  - mitrettavrednik 8y ago
    Thanks a bunch, those were helpful. You're clearly pretty fluent with Blender, how long ago did you start learning? Were there any resources you found helpful, especially for scientific applications? Most tutorials I've found are aimed more at artists, video game/movie animators, etc. I've been looking into the Python API and the animation nodes addon too, both seem pretty powerful.
    - knolan 8y ago
      About six years now. I remember initially using some official tutorials that weren’t great. These new ones are much better: https://cloud.blender.org/p/blender-inside-out/560414b7044a2a00c4a6da98 https://cloud.blender.org/p/blender-inside-out/560414b7044a2... The various Andrew Price videos were very helpful and once I had an idea of what feature I needed to use it made searching for tutorials easier. For specific scientific applications, I can’t say. I’ve used various Adobe tools and CAD packages over the years for making artwork for papers and presentations as well as being inspired by animation from video games, documentaries, 3b1b etc. One of my initial uses was rendering lambda_2 isosurfaces of turbulent structures from Direct Numerical Simulations. I’ve used the Python API to script some topology generation for 3D printing which is great. I’ve yet to use animation nodes because for the current series I’m working on I want to give the students blend files of the animations in vanilla 2.8 should they want to explore behind the curtain.
      - mitrettavrednik 8y ago
        Awesome, thanks again for taking the time to answer all my questions!