Introduction to Blender

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Welcome to the notes for a 3-hour workshop introducing the basics of Blender, written by Debbie. By the end of this workshop, we'll have covered the basics of: the Blender Interface, Shortcuts, Selecting Objects, Transforming Objects, Moving Objects, Adding and Removing Objects, Adding Modifiers, Creating Diffuse/Specular materials, UV Unwrapping, Lighting, Camera Positioning, and how to render with Cycles (Blender's ray-trace based production render engine). Finally, we will export the image and make it into a 3d pano for google cardboard. ALL IN 3 HOURS. CAN WE DO IT?

Set up your devices

Ideally, you should have a laptop with a dedicated numpad, but if you don't we can emulate it. It is advisable that you have a three-mouse button.

Keyboard

  • If you have a laptop without dedicated numpad, you can emulate the numpad by going to Blender User Preferences > Input.
  • Blender User Preferences SHORTCUT is ⌘ Cmd+,

Numpad.png

Mouse

  • If you don't have a 3 button mouse, you can emulate the three-button mouse by going to Blender User Preferences > Input.
  • Blender User Preferences SHORTCUT is ⌘ Cmd+,

Emulatemouse.png

  • Selecting 'emulate mouse' will mean that you can simulate the middle mouse button if you press the Alt key while using the left mouse button.
  • But please get a three-button mouse with a scroll wheel. Anything else is unnecessary self-torture!

Open Blender - It always begins with a box

  • Whenever you open Blender, it always starts with a box. And it will probably look like this...

Blender new.png


Editor Type: Controlling the Interface

  • Let's start by figuring out what we're looking at here.
  • When you open Blender, you might see quite a number of different panels.
  • The biggest panel on your screen is the 3D view (outlined below in orange), which has a small icon on the bottom left corner, looking like a grey cube.

Blender editortypeview.png

Open up Blender and try resizing the different Editor Type panels by dragging the small handles at the top right and bottom left corner. If you click and drag the small handles inbetween two windows without letting go, you'll see a large arrow showing you how the windows can be collapsed. And if you've messed up the view and and really want to go back to the Default view, you could create a New File ⌘ Cmd+N, or Load Factory Settings.
  • If you click on the icon on the bottom, you can see all the available Editor Types.

Blender editortype.png

Editor Type: Navigating and moving objects with the mouse

  • Left-mouse button: If you randomly clicked elsewhere with your left mouse button, your screen might look like this:

Blender cursor.png

  • The cursor defines where new objects will be placed in the scene. As you can see, your cube has an origin point. If you were to Create a new Cube now, the cube would appear with its origin at the cursor.
  • Middle-mouse button: If you click on your middle mouse button and drag around, this is what rotates your view around.
  • Right-mouse button: If you click on your right mouse button and drag around, your object moves around, but at this point maybe you don't necessarily want that, so let go and just press Esc to return your cube to its original position.

Blender axis.png

  • Let's take a closer look at how things are positioned in 3D space. Everything is actually placed on 3 axes - X, Y, and Z.
  • For easy remembering, RGB is mapped to XYZ, so when you see a red arrow, you know it means to move on the X axis, and so on so forth.
  • Refer to the axis diagram on the bottom left corner as well.
Practice moving the object around the scene by dragging it around using the arrows.

Snap Menu

  • Blender has a context-dependent interface, which means that the shortcuts and other features depends on what Editor Type (and Mode) you are in.
  • In practice, this means that it really matters where your mouse is hovering over when you press any shortcuts.
  • Let's try a shortcut for the Snap Menu, which will allow you to do things such as snapping the position of an object to the Blender cursor, or allowing you to reset the cursor back to 0,0,0.
  • Whilst your mouse is over the 3D View panel, press ⇧ Shift+s
Practice moving the Blender Cursor and the object around using this snap menu

More Essential Shortcuts

The numbers on the numpad are used to quickly move between views whilst in the 3D view. For the Rotate keys, every time you press it will rotate by 15 degrees.

Key Press Function Type of Function
1 Front View Go to a specific View
Ctrl+1 Back View Go to a specific View
3 Left side View Go to a specific View
Ctrl+3 Right side View Go to a specific View
5 Toggle between Perspective / Orthographic View Go to a specific View
7 Top View Go to a specific View
Ctrl+7 Bottom View Go to a specific View
0 Camera View Go to a specific View
9 Redraw Screen Go to a specific View
2 Rotate view on Y axis (Up) Rotate View
4 Rotate view on Z axis (Left, or in an anticlockwise fashion) Rotate View
6 Rotate view on Z axis (Right, or in a clockwise fashion) Rotate View
8 Rotate view on Y axis (Down) Rotate View


Add Another Mesh

  • Let's quickly add another mesh to this test scene
  • First, make a note of where your Blender cursor is. Place it in the position you want the new mesh to appear at.
  • Shortcut for the Add Menu: Whilst your mouse is over the 3D View panel, press ⇧ Shift+a

Blender addmenu.png

  • Your new object should now be on the scene and it will now be the selected object with a pink outline. If you want to select the original cube (or any specific object), you have to right-mouse-click on it to select it.
Now that you know how to navigate and move things around, add a few different meshes to your scene, and move them so that none of them are overlapping.


See also

  • Blender - My master notes for Blender