Blender for a Digital Popup Story Book?

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
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Greetings,

I’ve been making story books with Google Slides & LibreOffice Impress (PowerPoint alternatives) for a few years. I use these mainly for teaching, but my kids love them too. Over the last year, I seem to have maxed out the ability of these programs to help me convey these stories. Before I spend time learning a new program, I’d like to know if this is the kind of thing I can do with Blender, or if I should look for other solutions.

With these stories, I use the slides like book pages. Instead of a folded paper thing that slides or pops up, I use animations in the presentation program. For visual elements, I use vectors, gif’s, text blocks, WordArt. From what I can tell, my current stories have so many graphic elements that it is overloading the processing power of the program.

One of the important things with these “story books” is that I can make a little bit of the story come in at a time, or use a small animation to highlight the action in the story. These aren’t animated stories to become a video. Maybe augmented story books to help students learn is a better description. Is this something I can do on Blender, or should I look for something else? I’d appreciate any advice or opinions. Thank you.

I’ve linked an example below in case my description isn’t clear.

Thank You,
Jeramee

2

upbge can publish stand alone games / applications / stuff in eevee* / blender
https://upbge.org/

it’s a fork of blender

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Thank you for the suggestion. I’m still a bit confused.

Will upbge allow me to put the graphics into the page format with step-by-step animation like a presentation program?

Would this mean using Blender and upbge together?

Would the end product run through Blender, upbge, or be it’s own standalone app?

Thank you again.

4

Upbge is a game engine, based on blender 3.0

It replaces blender (its a fork of blender).

You press P to preview your game, and there is a way to publish standalone .exe

You can use logic bricks or logic nodes or python to create the actual book.

5

Thank you, BluePrintRandom.

My apologies for what may seem to be inane questions, but I’m a noob here.

Can I use Blender trainings to learn UPBGE?

How much programming will I need to learn before I can return to actually working on the stories?

Some of the stories I have involve decoding messages, so it sounds like UPBGE may be much more useful than what I was doing before. I’d just like to have a bit of a road map to understand what I’m getting into.

Thank you.

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6

We start at some point in are lives with different things. :slightly_smiling_face:

Sure can. At least for the non-game elements e.g normal Blender asset production.

Depends on how much you’re comfortable with. Currently we have logic-bricks and logic-nodes, two ways to code without programming.
Than we have the coding API; BGE and BPY. Those are written with Python. There is also OpenGL (BGL module) and the GLSL coding which you can learn at your leisure…

So UPBGE has two version types. UPBGE 0.2x (legacy) releases, or UPBGE 0.3x (current) releases.
0.2x are based on the old, Blender 2.7x releases, and 0.3x are based on the current, Blender +2.8x releases. As for the game-logic part, BGE/UPBGE is said to be one of the easiest game-engines to pick up. (overlooking newbies reacting to Blender’s daunting UI, but you are comfortable enough with it I believe)