Rendering: Once you’ve gone through the process of building out and animating your scene, you’re likely interested in sharing the results. Not everyone has a copy of Blender (but they could, it’s free!), so the common practice is to render that scene to image or video. From the Rendering workspace, you can focus on refining those final output images, getting Blender to produce the highest quality output in the shortest possible amount of time. Chapter 16 covers rendering in more detail.
Scripting: Scripting in this case doesn’t refer to writing screenplays (though you could technically use this workspace for that. I have!). Instead, in this case, scripting is the process of writing little snips of code to automate steps in your process and generally make your life in 3D more pleasant. Writing scripts is a more advanced topic than this book covers, but there are plenty of online resources if you’re interested in learning. In any case, this workspace is what you’d use if you were writing scripts.
Sculpting: Modern 3D modeling tools have evolved to the point that they’re almost like working with digital clay. This way of working is much more familiar to artists with a traditional art background and Blender, being a modern 3D application, totally supports this approach. Use the Sculpting workspace to digitally sculpt your 3D assets. See Chapter 6 for more on sculpting in Blender.
Shading: The default materials in nearly any 3D application are flat and boring. It’s up to you to provide realism and interest to your objects’ surfaces. Chapter 8 covers the tools necessary to go through this process, and the Shading workspace is a critical part of that workflow.
Texture Paint: Whereas shading covers general material properties like roughness and reflectivity, texture painting is where you can really add a lot of detail and explicit color to your objects. The Texture Paint workspace is designed to make this process as straightforward as possible. See Chapter 9 for more on working with textures.
UV Editing: For the most part, hand-painted textures are flat images. Like the longitude and latitude lines on a globe, you need a coordinate system to map the pixels of your flat image texture to the surface of your object. That process, called UV mapping, is covered in Chapter 9 and makes use of the UV Editing workspace.
2D Animation
With the release of version 2.80, Blender has also become a full-fledged 2D animation tool in addition to being the “Swiss Army chainsaw” of the 3D world. These workspaces give a 2D animator the best possible work environment that Blender can offer. See Chapter 15 for more on animating in 2D in Blender.
2D Animation: This workspace very much resembles the Layout workspace used in 3D animation. The primary difference is that the 3D Viewport is configured to look more like a blank canvas than a 3D environment, and the rest of the layout is geared for animating.
2D Full Canvas: This workspace is similar to the 2D Animation workspace, but it’s more of a distraction-free approach. The drawing area in the 3D Viewport is maximized, and every other area in the Blender window is either removed or minimized as much as possible.
Compositing: Animation is animation. Eventually you’re going to be mixing images together. This workspace is exactly the same as the Compositing workspace previously described.
Rendering: Similarly, whether you’re animating in 2D or in 3D, your output from Blender needs to be rendered. This workspace is the same as the Rendering workspace already described.
Sculpting
Over the last handful of years, digital sculpting has become the way that the majority of 3D assets are created. If your primary interest is in digital sculpting, then the two workspaces in this section are the ones you most want to focus upon.
Sculpting: This is the same workspace described previously. This workspace is just easier to find than digging into the General menu.
Shading: If you’re sculpting, then you’re also probably interested in customizing the surface of your sculpted work, so the Shading workspace (just like the one already described) is quite handy to have at the ready.
VFX
Visual effects, or VFX for short, is the art of taking existing footage — often captured with a camera, but it could also be animation footage — and modifying it to achieve a particular effect. Maybe you want to make a daytime scene look like it’s happening at night or perhaps you want to put a dragon in footage of your front yard. That’s all VFX and the workspaces in this section are tuned to getting that job done well. Chapters 18 and 19 of this book go into more detail on Blender’s VFX tools.
Compositing: This workspace is the same as the one used in the General category as well as the 2D animation one. Compositing is at the heart of VFX work, so it makes sense to include it among this group.
Masking: If you’re mixing footage together, be it live action or animated, chances are good that you’re going to have to hide or otherwise remove something from the shot, be it the strings on a puppet or an entire house in a neighborhood. You do this with masking, and because you’re dealing with moving images, it’s a more involved process than you might be used to if you’ve only ever done something like that in a single image editor like GIMP or Photoshop. So Blender has a whole workspace dedicated to masking.
Motion Tracking: In VFX, you’re dealing with moving images. To make your 3D assets seamlessly integrate, it’s useful to track the movement in your footage. Blender has a built-in motion tracker, which gives you the ability to track the location of the video camera in 3D space as well as the movement of objects on screen. This workspace is tuned to help you use the motion tracker as effectively as possible.
Rendering: As with most work that you produce in Blender, it has to be rendered to output files that you can share. This workspace is the same one that has been described previously.
Video Editing
If you’re creating animations in 3D or 2D, chances are good that you’re not doing a single shot in isolation. It’s more likely that you’re interested in chaining a series of animated sequences in a particular order with a specific timing as a means of telling a story. That’s the nuts and bolts of video editing and the two workspaces in this category.
Rendering: This workspace is the same one described in preceding sections. Once you finish editing your video, you need to output the results to a video file of its own. The Rendering workspace is the best place to go through that process.
Video Editing: This is the workspace where you can do the actual work of editing video footage, whether it comes from external files captured by a camera or directly from Blender scenes. See Chapter 17 for more on Blender’s video editing tools.
Blender workflows
The main categories I just described in the previous sections — General, 2D Animation, Sculpting, VFX, and Video Editing — are more than just categories for nesting workspaces. They’re also Blender workflows. When you start a new Blender project