Blender newbie

Support Compositing and Post Processing
#1

Hello Blender community! My name is Isaiah Colon, and this is my first post on the Blender and CG Discussions Forum, and I am a complete beginner to Blender. I downloaded Blender on my Windows 7 Laptop because I was looking for a free, widely-used and decent animation program for 2D videos, and I found Blender :). I have began to watch tutorials and have learned some of the controls, but I have many questions :slight_smile: so I was hoping that a forum for Blender would help out. Ok, so first off, the animations I plan to make I want to convert into video files that I will upload to my Youtube channel. My planned method of animation is drawing every single frame in the program Paint and saving them as jpg. files and then putting those into Blender. Would that work? If so, how would I do it? Again, I am a complete newbie to Blender so I am not familiar with much of the programs mechanics, although I have learned simple mechanics like rotating the screen animation view, deleting objects and moving the camera. I also have a question about the point of view cursor (the circle that moves when you left-click just in case that is not it’s name). How do you lock it in a position on a laptop? I know the control is Shift-X to pull up it’s menu, but it is not working on my laptop so I am assuming it is the laptop’s keys. How would I lock it to the center of the point of view plane?

So here are my main questions for now:
- My planned method of animation is drawing every single frame in the program Paint and saving them as jpg. files and then putting those into Blender. Would that work? If so, how would I do it?

  • How do you lock the point-of-view cursor into a position on a laptop? I know the control is Shift-X to pull up it’s menu, but it is not working on my laptop so I am assuming it is the laptop’s keys. How would I lock it to the center of the point of view plane?
#2

Moved from “General Forums > Blender and CG Discussions” to “Support > Compositing and Post Processing”… you’ll see why in a moment.

First, JPEG is a lossy compression format. You would be better off saving those frames to a lossless format such as PNG. This also give you the benefit of an alpha channel if you want to layer your animations.

Furthermore, depending on the drawing style you’re using, you may want to consider using Blender’s Grease Pencil feature to draw your animations and skip using Paint altogether. Aligorith has some examples of Grease Pencil animations on his blog.

Short answer: you can’t. But the bigger question is “why are you in the 3D View at all?” If your workflow is to draw frames in another program in and pull them into Blender for assembly, then the bulk of your work should be in the Video Sequence Editor and not in the 3D View. Using the VSE, it’s as simple as pulling in your frame sequence (they’re numbered sequentially, right?), setting start/end values, adjusting output parameters, and Rendering the animation to a video file.

#3

I’ll add some more general information to what was already told.

What is Blender? From the main site:

Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation.

3D modeling in Blender is mainly focused in polygonal modeling.

Blender basics. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0AfIdK08E7_PKsXOO_yuAql9b3hdcwPR

You can use 3D mechanics to build 2D animation, the end result often is 2D anyway. But for purely drawn 2D animation you have a bunch of image editing and painting programs that have animation capabilities. Photoshop has it, Krita will have that, or 2D animation programs that can do vector graphics and interpolation such as Synfig Studio or raster such as Pencil.