Session 6: Blender and Presentations
The beginning of the end
Over the past five sessions you have:
- Learned how to squiggle with a 3D pen
- Learned how to do letters with a 3D pen
- Made character faces with a 3D pen
- Made a cube head face with a 3D pen
- Learned how to place, view, move, rotate, resize and put holes in a Tinkercad shape
- Made a 3D dice in Tinkercad using moving workplanes and grouping object
- Made a 3D avatar in Tinkercad
- And possibly made a character from your own head in Tinkercad
You’ve practised and got things wrong and fixed them and changed them, and all the things you are supposed to do when you are learning. You’ve been amazing and should be really proud of yourselves for learning something that isn’t easy.
Introduction to Blender
What is Blender?
Blender is like Tinkercad, but more detailed. Plus, it has a 4th dimension. Can anyone guess what the 4th dimension is?
Blender showreel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7TLwKwixZA
Vocabulary: Open source
Open source means the code is made public for free for anyone to use is any way. People who write open source code are literally writing code to make the world better. Sharing what they make and giving their time for free, so that other people can learn, can code faster and can benefit forever. It’s pretty magic.
Play with Blender at home
If you want to challenge yourself further, try out this excellent robot video series by Shapeways. Note that the interface is an older version, but the steps are all the same.
- Intro to Blender, including how to download: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWWgMWpXfnE
- Building the model: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t96wAzuD91I
- Preparing it for 3D printing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UOvG0b17XU
More Tinkercad challenges
Tinkercad is also free software. (But technically, not open source.) You can create your own account and Tinkercad on any computer with internet access. Here are a few challenges you could try:
- Create your bedroom in Tinkercad. Measure your furniture and walls, and make a scale model
- Create your whole school in Tinkercad. Instead of measuring, estimate the distances between the buildings and the size of the playground in proportion to the other buildings
- Create a board game on paper and then use TInkercad to create the pieces
- Make your pet in Tinkercad
Real life engineer presentation
Video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIpweLq_Rso
Talk by Tony Bobbin MA BEng CEng FIMechE, Head of Engineering - Arriva Rail London
Your presentations
Congratulations! You are an additive manufacturer. You have made something from nothing, from out of your own head.
You choose!
Free time with pens or Tinkercad until home time.