Creating a presentation using Blender

Support Animation and Rigging
1

I need to make some presentations in the near future. The first one is for a good cause and I’d like to make a good impression. For that reason, I won’t be using something like OpenOffice Impress.

In looking for a tool to make an informative presentation with a soundtrack, I found that Blender may be the ideal tool for a Linux user to make an original presentation, even though it does not provide any specific help to do so.

I apologise in advance for this rather off topic animation question. I am reading tutorials now to learn the particulars, but I would be grateful if you could help revise the strategy I’ll take when making the video.

What I would like to do is use text objects and planes with images as textures to set up a ‘slide’ in front of the camera. Then, either move the camera to the next scene/slide, or move the text objects etc. elsewhere / delete them.

So, the timeline for this should be incredibly simple for my first one. Later I would like to explore Blender more to make a more impressive video (tutorials are sufficient).

My question is, what is the overall process for setting up such a simple set of transitions? I’ve experimented with taking simple objects, specifying a keyframe with IKEY, moving/rotating and specifying a further LocRot keyframe maybe 100 frames later.

This results in animation that is sufficient, however things will start to get complicated later when I’m on slide 10 and decide that some object earlier on should be on camera for longer.

Is there a more modular way of approaching this? I disovered the NLA window today, however as I read more I’m not sure if this is something I should be using. Edit: Non-Linear Animation. This doesn’t seem like something I should be using.

Your advice would be greatly appreciated. Unfortunately I have quite a tight deadline for this first (very simple) presentation as I’m not in my home country, but I’m confident that with your help I’ll get it out the door in time. :slight_smile:

P.S. If this is a success I will write some tutorials on this process. Powerpoint presentations take so much effort to look unique, that making simple informational videos using Blender could be very popular in the future.

2

i’ve done some presentations in blender.
i used python to control slide changes, and i also added some to get extra buttons on 3d view to go between slides etc…

about slides:

  • you can put slides in different layers, and toggle layers for visibility.
  • you can put slides in one layer, and move them (with script) to a visible layer one by one
  • you can put slides in different scenes and toggle those
  • you can put slides in one 3d space, and move camera (with script for example)

ofcourse you can do all sort of fancy animations too, and then just let script to jump from frames to another to playback the animation in proper orders… :slight_smile:

but, simplest would be to put these in different layers, where you can actually use number-keys in keyboard to toggle which slide is showing…

.b

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basse,

Thanks! I like the idea of programmatically manipulating the slide transitions. I will read up on the scripting framework, but do you have any examples of your presentation scripts that you could share?