Teaching Blender (Lesson 2 Outcomes)

MUSIC USED: SENSITIVE - Mothica

The college I'm attending has a good amount of people interested in learning Blender and so I have offered up some free time to teach students and teachers interested in Blender outside of our timetable. As of writing this I haven't taught the second lesson yet but this project will be updated when I have with students' work.

The intention of the second lesson is to introduce simple animation as well as exploring Blender's latest expansion: geometry nodes. I don't wish to go into super complex geometry nodes for obvious reasons, but also I wish for opening lessons to be a learning experience as well as "Hey, look at what Blender can do". The reason behind this is partially to give students a bit more confidence in exploring random things, but I also feel as though people go to Blender for a specific reason whether it's modelling or VFX or animation etc and end up feeling it can only do that one thing they came for. The reality is that Blender can do basically everything except be a game engine.

In lesson 2 they will learn simple geometry node manipulation, node-based animation, animating cameras, using multi-cam setups, noise modifiers on their animations (this one may be skipped due to it being a bit fiddly and may end up being the straw that breaks the camel's back).

I was struggling to come up with a simple yet cool idea for teaching geometry nodes but YouTube recommended one of Default Cube's videos at the perfect time, and that is where the idea comes from: www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0Ilyo3qYak