Blender for Academic Papers

Over the past three years, I have been learning more and more about using Blender to generate results for academic papers in Computer Graphics. At the same time, I have been sharing what I have learned in different venues and formats: internally with my colleagues, as an SGP course, as a text guide, a video or an interactive tutorial. As of July 2023, the last version of this was my 3-hour workshop at Graphics Interface 2023 in Victoria, Canada. In preparing for this workshop, I updated, reformatted and extended my previous publicaly available guides and combined them into a single course.

Full, updated course

The course has three parts that you can access here in text format:

1. Rendering a static figure using the Blender GUI
2. Rendering an animation using the Blender GUI
3. Rendering static figures and animations using Blender scripts

Previous editions

In 2022, I gave an earlier version of this tutorial as a video course at the Symposium on Geometry Processing (SGP) Graduate School, which you can watch here. Also in 2022, a text version of my static-figure-rendering tutorial was published by the SIGGRAPH Research Career Development Committee, which you can access here.

Other

• Here’s a note about a common bug that occurs when upgrading from Blender 2.9 to 3.0.