I’ve been using the GIMP recently to draw some things, and I’ve discovered that there are some things that it can’t do easily. Specifically, I want to draw a three dimensional scene, and that requires textures and other images to wrap around objects in the main image. Like, for example, the label on a can of beans. While this is possible in the GIMP, I’ve not been able to produce really convincing wrapped objects in the GIMP. This is almost certainly my fault and not the program’s fault, of course.
Anyway, I started looking at alternatives, of which there are many. Few of them are free, but one of the best, according to my research, is Blender.
The GIMP doesn’t pretend to be a painting program. It is as its name says, an Image Manipulation Program. (The G stands for “GNU”, which I will not explain. I will refer you to Wikipedia instead.) So, it’s main purpose is to take an image, perhaps a photograph, remove any blemishes, any unwanted photo-bombers, and apply effects and merge images to form composite images.
One task that can be achieved pretty easily in the GIMP is creating text strings and positioning them on top of images. That is great for creating book covers, for example, and I’ve created a few using the GIMP. It is great for two dimensional tasks, but is not designed for building things in three dimensions.
Blender, on the other hand, is designed for creating three dimensional images. You can even fly or walk around them. A cube looks like a cube, a sphere appears spherical. You can see an example of the layout of the Blender screen at the head of this post. Unfortunately, reducing the Blender screen to this size makes it almost unreadable, but the cube can easily be seen.
So, Blender. I decided to try to learn Blender with the aim of creating images of three dimensional objects and “painting” them with two dimensional images to produce the effects that I wanted. I could then “render” them in Blender to produce images of the objects that I wanted, and then I could import them into the GIMP.
Blender is complex! Even the methods of navigating around the work area needed hard work to get my head around, and actually creating anything more than a simple primitive object such as a cone or a cube is hard.
If you go to YouTube and search for tutorials on Blender you will find literally dozens of them. I came across a series of basic tutorials which numbered forty one. If you perform an Internet search, there are thousands of Blender tutorials. It’s a very complex program.
It also has a quirky and very complex interface. For example, it doesn’t prompt you to save your work on exit, like many other programs, but if you forget to save, it has a way to recover your work from the previous session. This infuriates many people, and a search through the arguments for and against this feature can be entertaining.
Another quirk is that the “select” function is driven by a mouse right button click rather than the more usual left button click. This feature at least can be switched off if the user wishes.
Blender is most easily “driven” using hot keys, though the menus are there. There are so many hot keys and combinations of keys, that they are hard to remember. What does pressing Shift plus Ctrl plus the letter L do, for example? I don’t know, but it is probably something useful.
Anyway, I’m going to try to learn it, and I probably post some of my experiences with it here. So long, I’m off to read a 1900+ page PDF on Blender. It’s a beginner’s guide!
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