[Find] Blender video editor.

solo

Lately I have been doing a ton of animation and video presentations, I also have a whole bunch of commercial products I use to get stuff done from Sony Vegas to Camtasia studio and they all work pretty well so far, however I recently downloaded Blender to start learning and stumbled upon it's video editor and I'm amazed at the ease of use (yes I said ease which is not synonymous with Blender)and the quality especially the ability to have so much control over final product.

The best thing is it's 100% free.

Here is a quick visual overview, there are tons of tutorials online which are also free.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCO-GcNAlAY

nickchun

Thanks for pointing that out. I play with Blender every now and then but had completely overlooked checking out this feature. I see that Blender Guru is trying to get the Blender interface improved which would be great.

Rich O Brien

I think we might have a convert.....

You'll never look back. It is the perfect partner to SketchUp.

Ive literaly tons of animations done in Blender that would have never being possible without purchasing something like Max or AE along with a high-end workstation.

Blender is by far an exceptional package for any serious 3D Artist or Studio.

solo

@rich o brien said:

I think we might have a convert.....

You'll never look back. It is the perfect partner to SketchUp.

Ive literaly tons of animations done in Blender that would have never being possible without purchasing something like Max or AE along with a high-end workstation.

Blender is by far an exceptional package for any serious 3D Artist or Studio.

Very baby steps on my side, finding time and a machine that is not working on a project is a problem most of the time. I found some beginner tutorials and I must say Blender is not easy to get the head around after all these years with SU. It has so many tools and possibilities that finding stuff and remembering where they hide is the hardest, then there is the GUI which takes time to get used to.

You picked it up extremely fast, wish I had that ability.

Rich O Brien

I picked one tutorial that was somewhat advanced and repeated it 10 times or more in my spare time.

I did it until I did not have to reference the docs.

I repeated that for another 4 or 5 tutorials until had had muscle memory in place for actions, locations and general workflow.

I now use SU in a manner that is more a proper 3D approach. I never use tools like CleanUp. I triangulate everything in SU. For me SU is a Zen type modelling. I've ditched 80% of my plugins because other apps are for higher level things.

I don't waste time trying to make SU do something that it just isn't made to do.

JQL

That makes total sense Rich.

Would you recommend Blender for architecture?

Would it have any more uses other than 3d for presentations?

Best regards,

JQL

Rich O Brien

@jql

Blender excels at ArchViz. You can even dimension.

http://www.blender3darchitect.com/tag/modeling-for-architecture/

This site is a gold mine.

You won't be running off bill of materials and reports but for straight up viz work it is pretty much on par with SU for ease of use.

Most people fall foul of the UI and walk away. I ignored the animation, physics and particle side of things for months. Just stick to modeling. Blender has components, groups, layers, outliner etc the same as SU.

It's scene management system is incredible.

SketchUp and Blender are the perfect partners if you ask me.

First thing you do in Blender is set the left mouse button to select things in the user preferences and you will be up and running in minutes.

I encourage every SU user to have Blender as part of the workflow.

People that use Blender find it harder to adopt to SketchUp because of its unconventional modeling methods. But SU to Blender users can easily swap and in the end become better SU modellers.

pilou

Blender for architecture? That's the beginning!
Take a look here

From the first book

JQL

Oh no!

Now that I was all comfy with Sketchup...

Thanks I guess...

JQL

dedmin

I also fall in love with Blender! There are tons of free videos to learn Blender:

solo

Interesting watch if you are using Blender or plan to learn.

http://www.youtube.com/v/xYiiD-p2q80

Rich O Brien

I think the next version of Blender [3] will be the one where the UI is addressed.

The old 'we use right mouse button' to save the user from experiencing repetitive strain is proving to be the biggest adoption issue for users.

But, compared with 2.4, the latest is pretty friendly if you ask me.

The amount of dxf/dwg files created in NURB apps that I get these days mean it is impossible to use SketchUp. In Blender I import, re-topo, UV map, export to SketchUp and probably reduce file size by 70-80%

I wouldn't say I'm a Blender fanboy but in terms of possibilities Blender is immense.