3D Typography in Blender with Rob Stenson

Typographics Conference (in-person) ticket holders can have a 10% discount on this workshop. Write to type@cooper.edu for the promo-code to take advantage of this offer before you pay.

Have you ever wanted to build a tower made of letters? Wouldn’t it be fun to knock it over and watch all the glyphs crash into each other? Or what about an entire paragraph of text that can float like helium balloons? And what if you took a really nice shallow depth-of-field photograph of those balloons as they flew away into an orange sunset?

This two-day workshop will focus on building and animating typography in three dimensions using the open-source program Blender and ST2, an extension that brings high-quality — and cutting-edge — typography to Blender.

We’ll begin with an introduction to Blender: making objects, moving them around in three dimensions, creating simple lighting setups, getting the virtual camera in just the right spot with just the right aperture and focal length. And then we’ll jump into typography with ST2: choosing fonts, animating variable fonts, making words crash into each other, filling letters with (virtual) helium, throwing letters into (virtual) pools of water, reflecting letters in (virtual) funhouse mirrors — the options are truly endless.

If time allows, we’ll also unlock procedural workflows in Blender, using both their Geometry Nodes visual programming language and Python for text-based scripting.

By the end of the class, you’ll have your very own photorealistic 3D typography animation.

What do you need to take this workshop? Just a laptop, an interest in graphic design, and a willingness to spend some time learning a somewhat odd program. (Blender is famous for its quirky — but powerful — interface.) Blender and ST2 are completely free and open source, but it would help if your laptop is fairly recent and/or powerful. Blender runs on almost all computers on Mac, Linux, and Windows, but it can get into trouble on older computers, and is in general more fun to use on computers that have some solid processing power. Here’s a page detailing the minimum system requirements. You might also want to be familiar with a video editing program (like Premiere or DaVinci Resolve) to put the final touches on your animations, though that’s more of a nice-to-have.

Day One

Morning

• Short presentation of Blender typography
• Blender basics
• Moving, scaling, rotating
• Adding light
• Adding materials
• Positioning the camera
• Configuring the interface

Afternoon

• ST2 basics
• Choosing a font
• Configuring a font
• A little physics
• Setting up a passive object
• Setting up our active objects
• Baking an animation
• Rendering an animation

Day Two

Morning

• Keyframing basics
• Camera, object, etc.
• Variable fonts in ST2
• Keyframing axes, etc.
• Rendering an animation (caveat emptor)
• Scripting
• Geometry Nodes
• Coldtype/Python
• Start thinking about what kind of animation you want to make

Afternoon

• Work on your own animations
• Present your animation (low res)

Rob Stenson is a designer-musician based in Monrovia, California. After studying architectural history at Columbia University, Rob worked for a time as a programmer in San Francisco before starting Goodhertz, Inc., an audio software company, where he currently works on audio plugin interfaces, a programming library called Coldtype, and lots of videos that combine typography and music. Rob also plays clawhammer banjo, enjoys looking at buildings, and would love to talk to you about replacing your gas appliances with electric ones.