Introduction to Rendering: Science and Art with Blender

This talk aims to be a short introduction to the creation of images from 3d geometries, with a focus on the program Blender (blender.org), which dubs itself “the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems”. That is no understatement, Blender is indeed versatile, professional, and powerful— need to visualize a crystal structure or molecule? Or create a table-of-contents figure for a paper? Or a journal cover? Or an image or animation for a talk? You can do all that nicely with Blender, but, with so much power under the hood, the first steps in Blender can be quite daunting and one still needs to spend a fair amount of time learning to use it. Therefore, after some general remarks on software rendering, I will dive into a blender session to introduce the user interface and to show a few examples, so that everyone can judge for themselves if it’s worth the learning curve, be it for the sake of science or as a hobby. Do not expect a full Blender tutorial, this is well beyond the scope of this talk; I will, however, point at freely available resources for the interested scientist/artist.

Presentation (Recorded 2nd November 2011, 2.00pm):

MESA Seminar: Introduction to rendering

Dr. Matthias Meyer Biography

Matthias Meyer is a PhD graduate from Victoria University of Wellington. In addition to his research in Raman spectroscopy and SERS, he has dabbled extensively in open-source software including LaTeX, Inkscape, Python and of course, Blender. Matthias has successfully created journal cover artwork for several publications produced by MacDiarmid PIs.