I am after some advice please. I am a Sculptor who makes large kinetic sculptures from Aluminium etc. In the past, I have had someone use Fusion 360 to draw up and animate my Sculptures. The animation is put on a video background so that a potential client can see the sculpture in situ before it is built. This had worked ok in the past but I am wondering if Blender is not a more efficient way to do it. Here is a link to an earlier one. https://youtu.be/9tW8J8cFM2g
My question is: Can Blender do this sort of thing and can you feed blender a cad file to start with or a jpeg or whatever? I am looking for a more efficient way to do this stuff. Thanks very much in advance.
No. Blender cannot do anything. It’s just software. Doesn’t do much on it’s own.
You can use Blender to do this, sure. Easily. No problem.
Again, Blender doesn’t eat really. It’s just software, no need to feed it. You can import various formats to Blender many CAD formats amongst them. There are a lot of import-export add-ons for Blender so most likely whatever CAD format you are using you can find a way to import it. JPEG or any other kinds of images are also very much supported. So you can import things to work with in Blender. But it’s not like feeding it some data and it spits the result out. You work with it - that’s a very important distinction. It’s a tool. You are the one who is supposed to do something with it. Very important to understand. It’s up to you. Your responsibility. Not sure if I am stressing this enough…
You do obviously need to learn to use Blender before using it, like with any other software. Cannot use it if you don’t know how to. This involves learning information but also learning a lot of various skills(means you need time and a lot of practice to get good at the stuff, not only know the info). So it’s a process. It may take a few years to learn. But you can do a lot with a few months of learning as well.
Best way to start is to watch some video tutorials or video tutorial courses. Luckily, there are loads and loads of them for Blender on YouTube and elsewhere online. Once you learn the UI and basics and start working on your own stuff(as opposed to what tutorials teach) you can also get help here or in other communities. I think Blender Stack Exchange is a great resource for example if you follow the rules and ask specific questions providing all the context and explaining what you want really well.
Yeah, that video would be very easy to recreate in Blender. You can import the model in a variety of 3d or 2d formats, or you can quickly model it yourself. That love heart would probably take you around 1 minute to model once you know how to use Blender, and then maybe another 2 minutes to animate the moving parts. Blender can also create the photorealistic video or still image using it’s built in Cycles render engine, and it even has a compositor where you can push the realism to the next level. Perfect tool for what you need
To answer that question need to know how it was done previously. So you had someone else create and animate the sculptures in Fusion 360, then combine that animation with background video/images. How much work was that? And what did you think of the quality of the video?
Yes, you can combine 3D ‘creations’ with video footage in blender and get very good results.
But you have to know how to use blender to be able to do that.
So who would learn how to use blender? The person who did this in Fusion didn’t learn how to use Fusion over night…
Not sure if I am stressing this enough… 
