This book does not come with a computer! To follow the exercises and make your own 3D animations, you’ll need Blender, a suitable computer on which to run it, and an internet connection.

Let’s look at this in a bit more detail.

Your animation workstation

The minimum and recommended system requirements to run Blender can be found on the official Blender website:

https://www.blender.org/download/requirements/

Nearly all new laptops and desktop computers will meet these criteria. Even if your machine is no longer the latest model, there’s a good chance it can run Blender perfectly fine as well.

Hardware

If you’re shopping for a new computer or an upgrade specifically geared toward 3D animation, I recommend putting your money toward a dedicated NVIDIA or AMD graphics card. A high-performance GPU is the most crucial computer part to help ensure your animations play back smoothly in Blender.

You will also need a mouse and keyboard. Blender makes use of practically every key on your keyboard as a hotkey, so a full-size keyboard with all the functions and number pad keys will be the most helpful. As for the mouse, that’s non-negotiable. You need a mouse with a left button, a right button, and a clickable scroll wheel in the middle. A touchpad will not do!

Operating system

Blender runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. If you have a choice and you’re curious about Linux, that happens to be the best operating system for Blender. Now would be an excellent time to try it out!

Put simply, Blender has all the technical requirements of a 3D video game. If you’ve got a computer that can play the latest games, an internet connection that can download them, and a mouse that’s fast enough to beat them, you’ve probably got all the hardware you need to make 3D animations.

Prerequisite knowledge

Though this book is written with the novice reader in mind, we’re going to skip the most elementary essentials and get straight to animating in Chapter 1. That means you’ll need some starting familiarity with Blender and computers.

Computer literacy

You must know what a file is, because we will be saving files to folders. Later, we will need to click on those folders and find the files we saved there earlier.

Basic controls in Blender

You can be a Blender novice, just not a Blender never-seen-it-before. Do you know how to navigate 3D space in Blender and look at the default cube from all sides? How about selecting that cube and moving it to a different location on a particular axis? Can you delete the cube and replace it with a sphere? If these tasks don’t sound too hard, you already have what it takes to tackle this book.

Finally, you must be able to download and install Blender on your own.

Blender

Blender is free to download and easy to install. The latest version can be downloaded from the official site blender.org, but every previous version is available as well.

For this book, I recommend downloading and installing version 4.0.2 here:

https://download.blender.org/release/Blender4.0/

Download the package that matches your operating system and install it. Using this version will ensure that what you see on your screen will be consistent with the instructions and screenshots of Blender in this book.

Blender is well maintained by developers at the Blender Foundation and in the worldwide community. Though updates to the software are frequent, the foundation keeps every previous version available online. Blender’s backward/forward compatibility is quite good, so later versions of Blender, such as 4.1, 4.2, and so on, may also work with the exercises in this book. This will gradually change as time goes on.