Can someone please advise me how to get started with this stuff? I have been developing enterprise applications which is boring to all kids, including my nieces and nephews. I wish I could something with Blender etc. to impress those kids. I have found the documentation to be too intimidating for an absolute newbie. I am looking for a dummies guide for rendering. I am not looking to change careers; just want to pursue this to get an understanding and hook those kids into programming.
If you're interested in writing a renderer yourself (which is obviously way cooler than using some tools), I'd recommend first picking up either "Fundamentals of Computer Graphics" by Shirley and Marschner or "Computer Graphics: Principles & Practices" by Foley and Van Dam. Once you understand the basics of computer graphics and especially of shading and ray tracing, I'd recommend picking up "Physically Based Rendering: From theory to implementation" by Pharr and Humphreys which is an excellent book that explains the State of the Art of photorealistic rendering. Once you understand how physically based rendering, path tracing, BSDFs and all that good stuff works you're ready to write your own rendering (or to implement a new SIGGRAPH paper in the framework provided by the book). It's a lot of fun writing your own renderer and you'll produce some beautiful pictures.
As someone who has dabbled, I have to recommend the "Business Card sized Raytracer"[0]. Learning how it worked, modifying it, trying to make it faster or sharper, display different shapes, etc. may serve to whet one's appetite on the subject.
First thing I recommend is trying to get it to show your name[1] instead of the original authors initials.
I second the CG Cookie tutorials. Knowing nothing about Blender and little about 3D animation, I started watching tutorials on a Monday afternoon and finished rendering early Thursday morning, though I did little else besides work, attend class and sleep those days.
It should give you an idea of the sort of animation you can expect to achieve in your first week. The only thing I didn't make myself was the wood texture.
I started working with RenderMan in 1988/89. If you're a programmer then I think the RIB interface is even easier then using GUI tools like Blender. It can be very fun to play with directly. Feed the following text into `prman`.
Then check out the Steve Upstill book "The Renderman Companion", "Advanced RenderMan" by Tony Apodaca and Larry Gritz, and the spec[1] for reference.
You can learn a lot of creative skills, geometry, animation, math, and technology from this simple interface. Note how rotations are in degrees, and commands are easily human readable. The interface was designed to be useable by people as easily as by software ("WorldBegin", cute and intuitive). Key things to remember when playing around with the RIB interface:
It's a 'right handed' coordinate system, so use your right hand to model the axis (perpendicular index finder, thumb, and middle finder form the axis). Put your thumb along the positive axis to visualize things like rotation. Above I use a negative 1 x axis (vector) to rotate 120 degrees so I can visualize the direction of rotation by pointing my right thumb to the right (negative x axis), and the direction my fingers curl is the direction of rotation.
The transformation hierarchy makes it easy to control and reason about transformations without resorting to matrix math. Use that to create easy to manipulate groups. The relevant commands are:
# parent object
TransformBegin
Translate x y z
Rotate angle x_axis y_axis z_axis
Scale x y z
Skew angle dx1 dy1 dz1 dx2 dy2 dz2
# child object
TransformBegin
# Translate x y z...
# ... invoke geometry
TransformEnd
TransformEnd
There are a gazillion YouTube tutorials for Blender showing you how to make some very cool stuff. Some of the newer tutorials using Blender's Cycles renderer creates photorealistic images without much effort.
Just make sure that you get recent tutorials - there is probably stuff from pre-2.5 Blender floating around that would be confusing to anyone using newer versions.
This series of blog posts from Mike Farnsworth (a rendering fanatic and blender contributer) goes over how to create a "modern" ray tracer from scratch. Highly reccomended:
I recommend checking to see if there's a class available where you live. I used to teach a kids 3D modeling class using Art of Illusion (great beginner 3D app) up in Portland, and I know that there were adult classes for e.g. Maya available as well.
Since you're learning the fundamentals of modeling, lighting, rendering, and animation, it really doesn't matter what software you start with (really, it doesn't). In-person classes are amazing for learning about anti-patterns as you work on your projects. For example, just learning to navigate the various modeling views can be very tricky for beginners--many of my students would start arranging objects in a perspective view, and it was easy to point out the flaws in that approach early and get them back on a better path.
I have also been working my way through learning Blender. 2 years back, when I was writing a 3D game, I learnt Blender in the context of importing models, setting textures, material, exporting to the quake .md5 format.
Blender has a steep learning curve. Along the way I learnt some very basic modeling to build objects joining default shapes like Lego!!!
That was Round 1 of learning and that gave me an insight into what I needed. I enjoyed it enough to want to learn further, with a 'different' full time day job.
Now, I am working my way through cg-masters video tutorials (warning: these are $$ not free), but worth the money. The order in which I work through these are:
1. Master It. Vol 1 & 2 fundamentals.
2. Character Creation Vol 1, 2, 3.
3. Environment Modeling & Texturing OR Environment & Animation
All of the above at: http://www.cgmasters.net/training-dvds/
Now I would recommend: Blender MasterClass from NoStarch. I would recommend purchasing a paper copy of this book.
I have also been making notes of what I am learning through the cg-masters videos: https://bitbucket.org/dmsurti/learn-blender, snail like progress here, and no progress since Mar this year.
This was about books and videos. Don't forget the hardware. PLEASE buy a keyboard with a num-pad, I have the Logitech Solar which has this as also a great 3 button mouse, the Logitech Anywhere Mx. I have worked without this setup and it is a pain to work without these, in Blender.
This has been the way it has worked out for me. I hope it helps you figure your way out. It is a hard grind, but totally worth it, especially to keep the right brain happy and not starving, as we mostly do. And just like you I am doing this only for fun and not to change careers. Just trying to do the only right brain activity well.
On the topic of hardware, I've been rocking the tenkeyless keyboards for quite a while now and they work better than you might think with Blender. With a simple pie menu for changing views bound to the q key the numpad is pretty extraneous. If you want a good set of pie menus that's premade and ready to roll, Wazou's are pretty good. https://github.com/pitiwazou/Scripts-Blender
I do agree that a 3-button mouse is super necessary, though a Wacom or equivalent tablet is a better bet in the long run (much better for sculpting, concepts and texturing) and less likely to wreck your fingers.
Come up with an idea to work towards. Like making a model of a favourite toy from when you were a kid. Then trawl documentation and tutorials towards doing that.
Then repeat the exercise with something more complicated.
Keep doing this relentlessly and you will get good surprisingly quickly.
