Hey guys, let's talk about some Blender resources!
OK, if you didn't remember when, in the first section of
the course, I was talking about a 3 Button Mouse, I still recommend
one of those. A Full Size Keyboard often helps,
as well so you've got the number pad on the side that you can use to
control your view. A dedicated GPU! Now, of
course, that's not going to be an option for many laptop users, unless
your laptop has already got one, but obviously, if
you've got a desktop, there is the potential of upgrading your graphics card
in order to get your renders done in much less
time. Now do bear in mind a dedicated GPU, we're talking
about the performance end of the spectrum, sort of mid level
and higher, just a basic dedicated GPU in your system
is not going to increase your render time. So make sure
you go, first, on the NVidia side probably a 960
970+ at the moment, at the time of recording they've not got anything new out,
and a similar sort of spec on the AMD side.
Recommended Reading! Well there is a lovely
Blender, sort of, crib sheet with an info graphic,
as it says there, with all of the shortcut keys on it. And "Learning Blender"
by Oliver Villar! We'll just have a quick look at what those two
look like!
OK, so as you can see here, this info graphic is pretty
awesome, it's got almost every key you'll
ever need on it. Not necessarily the best laid out thing,
I find it quite stressful going through there, but it is a very useful
sheet that you can print out and use. Now this is for version
2.76, which is brilliant! It's got everything we need on it,
so go and check that out! And the book, "Learning Blender" Hands On
by Oliver Villar, well it looks like this here.
A really good book, quite a short book, but it really gets you down
and into Blender really quickly. OK,
so let's have a look at a couple of Blender Extras!
There's blendswap.com, that's a brilliant place to
check out other people's work or even share your own, if you produce
something that you want to share with the community. And then, you've got the Blender
Demo Files! So let's go have a quick look at those!
OK, so here we are on www.blendswap.com!
You will have to sign up for an account, if you want to use it,
and it gives you a great place to share and also download
.blend files, as well. Do be careful, read the description of
any licenses, if you want to use someone's assets for your
own projects. Oh, if it's just a personal project, then sure go ahead and use
it, but remember to read the license agreements. We don't want anybody to get into trouble,
by using someone else's assets in
their project that they haven't asked permission for, so do read
those carefully! And the demo files themselves, on the Blender
website. So if you go to Blender.org and click
on Download at the top, and once you've done that,
along the middle of the page here we have Demo Files,
External Renderers, etc. Demo Files is right there and you can
check out some of the files that are available, see
what your computer behaves like with some
more of these highly
detailed Blender files. And of course, the BMW
Benchmark is quite a common one, used to spec
out a computer or check it and benchmark it against
other computers. And of course, this is the one we actually use in the course, as
well.
That's it for now!
Carry on Blending!