Film fans have come to expect blockbusters to deliver incredible wow moments. Commercial success often depends on highly anticipated, technically challenging animation scenes.

But big-screen visuals aren’t always the result of incredibly expensive animation tools. Blender is a free, open-source, visualisation tool developed 20 years ago by Dutch animation company NeoGeo and has evolved through community input across multiple computer platforms.

Blender is available for the Raspberry Pi, and pupils can also make great use of it to learn coding skills. Children at Elton Primary School in Cheshire recently embraced the opportunity to get hands-on animation experience when Craig Fisk, one of the volunteers at their Code Club, showed them how Blender works.

They were especially excited when they realised Blender is the building block for the 3D animation used in many games and films. Blender was used in superhero films such as Wonder Woman and sequences in TV show The Walking Dead.

Blender is also used in the visuals that complement the virtual reality of Google Expeditions. Pupils use a smartphone and a cardboard viewer to create incredible virtual journeys from the comfort of their classrooms.

Blender on Raspberry Pi: Model students

Projects hosted on the Code Club website allow Raspberry Pi users to create models and animations, such as making a car drive through a snow scene.

Craig says the pupils were so keen to use Blender that, once they’d mastered the basic controls to manipulate objects, they zipped through two projects in a single Code Club session. They then went on to master skills such as extruding and editing objects to create a 3D visualisation of a house, as well as creating an animated rocket.

Now that the group has worked through all the Blender projects showcased on the Code Club website, they are beginning to work on original animations of their own. Craig says, “My plan is to get them to work collaboratively to create a new scene which they will animate. Each student will build something to put into the scene, which we will then combine, and then they can all have a go at animating it.”