Blender 2.7 Tutorial #1 : Navigating in 3D & The Basics #b3d

hello and welcome part 1 of a video series and how to use blender 2.7 in this video I'm going to be talking about three things that you need to know to start using blender the first thing we'll be talking about is how to view and navigate through your viewport within the main 3d viewport window in blender choose your interface the second thing we'll be talking about is how to move and transform objects which includes moving objects rotating objects and scaling objects the last thing we'll be talking about in this video is how to add new objects so let's go ahead and go ahead and get started you'll notice that in this video I'm using blender 2.70 a and if you're using a new version that's totally okay I guarantee unless I come up with an update to this video in which case you'll see a big kind of banner or notification on this window right now that everything is exactly the same in any newer version of blender for the long foreseeable future let's go ahead and get started by clicking on the splash screen now on blogger first loads up of course you see the buggers default user interface and the main part of the screen the biggest part is this 3d View window when the scene first loads you get three objects you get a cube you get a lamp a light source and a camera now all other 3d programs like Maya or 3ds max they don't give you these objects they just give you an empty scene but when they first made blender they decided to give you three objects right away the first thing we're going to be talking about is how to zoom in and out and this is why or one of the reasons why you need to have a good wheel Mouse when you're using blender the most common question I get is do you need to use your mouse can we use a trackpad instead and the answer is sadly well you can use a trackpad but really it makes it very hard and cumbersome really for blender or any graphics program in general you need a mouse with and blender you need a scroll wheel because when you scroll in and out you're zooming in and out that's the first thing I want to show you when you scroll up you zoom in when you scroll down you zoom out now I'm using a Mac in this video and so with Mac by default comes that natural scroll direction which means that the scrolling up and down is reversed so actually when I scroll up I'm zooming out and when I scroll down I'm zooming in you might have that if you have a Mac otherwise it's scrolling up to zoom in and down to zoom out the reason why you need a wheel mouse specifically is that if you want to orbit around your scene in other words rotate your view to look at the other side of an object or the other side of your scene or the bottom or other angles of your scene you need to press your middle mouse button in like a button so pressing your wheel down like a button and then dragging your mouse in the 3d viewport will let you change your view and this is called orbiting okay you can orbit to see the bottom or any other side but I'll object and this is how you can see your scene in full 3d to make sure that everything is the way it should be and just look at your scene from different angles the last thing I'm going to talk about although the third way of manipulating you the viewport of your scene with your mouse is just like if you were to just to strafe left and right in a 3d first-person shooter game in other words when you step left and step right as a character it's called strafing in blender it's called panning and to pan you hold shift down and you orbit so you hold shift down on your keyboard and you press your mouse wheel down like a button and you drag left and right and you can even drag up and down and this is in case let's say you zoom in and you want to see your cube at this zoomed in level well you can then pan over and see the cube or you can even keep going or above or below the cube so panning with the shift key and orbiting is there is another way of navigating through your 3d viewport now blender is very keyboard shortcut oriented and a lot of the things I'll be talking about lunder have keyboard shortcuts including shortcuts to different views if you have a number pad on your keyboard of your computer in other words one of those number sections on the right side of your keyboard able to use those to change to your front view your right and left views your top view but if you don't have a number pad you can go ahead and go down to the View menu and you'll see different selections here for or items here for looking at your scene from the front and then you can go to the view and go to the top view but I'll use my keyboard shortcuts so the one number on my number pad and unfortunately this will not work on your number row I'll show you how to make that work in the next video when we talk about blenders using your interface and setup blenders preferences to work a little bit easier but for now if I press one on my numpad only it'll switch to my front view and you can see up here it says front ortho if I press three it goes to my right ortho view and seven goes to my top ortho view and you want me wondering well how do I get to let's say if I wanna see the front how do I see the back well if you hold ctrl it does the opposite of any one of those three things so I press hold ctrl and press one it goes to the back view press control and press three it goes to the left instead of the right view and hold control press seven it goes to the top or bottom view in this case top of seven control seven is bottom and so those are three really good useful keyboard shortcuts whenever people are starting off in 3d I recommend that they use these three views exclusively when they're doing any animation or doing any positioning or modeling of an object because things seem less distorted from these directions now I want to quickly talk about what the v key does the v key in that number pad toggles between perspective view and orthographic view perspective view is how you're seeing the scene right now and how you see the real world when things get farther away I'm just going to drag this cube back with my y-axis or green arrow when things get farther away they get smaller as you can see the cube is small because it's far in the distance I move it closer it gets bigger smaller bigger smaller bigger but if I press v it toggles over to orthographic view and as you can see I'm just going to toggle kind of back and forth when you're in an orthographic view it says ortho and things do not get smaller smaller when they get farther away and this is more like a video game like The Sims or Sim City which use a similar sort of a view there are other games like that as well especially lots of those strategy games on the iPad views that you know you're seeing a lot of things at the same time so I dragged this cube back into the distance you'll notice that you know it is going far back but it's not getting any smaller and it's actually this you that I recommend for at least beginner users because things seem less to store it this way things look more like they should or at least they give you a better sense of scale or a better sense of shape with this believe it or not you would think that maybe perspective does but actually orthographic keeps things simple when you're viewing from a front and side and top you always want to be using orthographic and I believe now it does switch to orthographic automatically as soon as you press 1/3 or 7 so that's navigating your viewport you can use your mouse to orbit around like I am right now with your middle mouse button pushed in you can zoom in and out you can pan with the shift and orbit buttons that you can use 1 3 and 7 and that's all good and great but what about moving objects and transforming objects this is number 2 in this video moving and transforming objects so when you are moving in scaling and rotating those are the three ways that you can transform an object you can translate it which means move it you can rotate it and you can scale it there's a few different ways of doing that and again blender is very keyboard shortcut oriented if I go to one of my three views one three or seven I'll go to my front view if I want to grab this object and move it around all I have to do is have it selected in which case you would right click on things and that's another weird thing about blender selecting objects is with the right mouse button which is the opposite of most programs which confuses people right away but I show you you get used to it if you have an object selected and you want to grab it and move it around you can just press g4 grab and as soon as you tap G the object that's left it gets kind of stuck to your mouse and you can move it you can click let us how when I'm looking from the front I can only move things side to side and up and down I can't move things perpendicular to my view in other words I can't move things forward and backwards towards me or away from my view so I can only move things with G that's right up and down or in this case on the X and I'll need z axes if I view from the side or the right I can then move things with a grab towards where I was just looking from and then go back to that front view if that makes sense hopefully it does ok so the G key is for grab and that's a very handy tool what if I want to rotate well if G is for grab then it makes sense that R is rotate so the R key when you tap it again from the front or side or top views you can then rotate your mouse in a circle and it'll rotate that object and again you're rotating perpendicular from your view in other words you cannot rotate in this manner towards you or away from you only side to side in both directions so moving your mouse in a circle all right so we've talked about moving by grabbing we've talked about rotating with the are key to scale things is again pretty obvious I'm going to quickly undo that rotation so everything's kind of flush again scale is the S key and the S key if you tap it once will let you scale an object bigger or smaller by dragging your mouse away in the middle of the object or closer to the middle of the object now this is where things kind of get interesting because this is reliant on where your mouse is you want to not have your mouse kind of right in the middle of the object when you press s because that makes it very difficult to make it smaller or control it because your mouse distance away from the center is how you're scaling it in proportion to the distance the most travels so what I suggest is that you have your mouse before you press s you put your mouse somewhere between the edge of this of that window and the middle of the objects all right about there and then tap s and I've got lots of control I can really fine-tune how I'm moving things and I can even you know keep moving to the right as you can see my mouse cursor is looping so I can make that object big by having my mouse go off one side of the screen and on other automatically alright so that is s let us how its scaling things proportionally it's not stretching the cube at all in fact I can switch out to kind of a user view here I can scale things and it's staying a square Q but it's getting bigger and smaller the next way to transform objects is by using what's called the gizmo and it gives more of these three arrows that are coming out of the object that you have selected notice how if I have my lamp selected it has those arrows coming out of it - same thing with the camera but we'll just keep on using the cube if I drag on any of these one arrows it'll move that object in only that one direction so this is a good tool to use if you're looking from some sort of a user perspective view or user orthographic view to move your objects around on any of the three axes now this brings me to the other thing that's in this window is your axis display down at the bottom left of your screen you'll see your axis displayed and as you orbit in your scene you'll see those axes kind of follow the global axes of your scene or your viewport and you'll notice your gizmo also always follows your axis or your three axes so if you rotate around you'll see the axes kind of follow the main our red and green ends and blue lines okay so I can give any of these things I move it don't get in have a place of dragging from the middle of that white circle if you do that you're you're moving things in a not very predictable way it's hard to tell right now but I'm not actually moving this this cube directly up and down I'm actually moving it sort of closer to me or closer yeah closer towards me as we move down and farther away from me as I move it up because I'm viewing my scene from a kind of an up diagonal view downwards so always use your arrows to move with the gizmo but that's only one kind of gizmo you can also rotate and scale with the gizmo I'm just going to quickly blank you back to where it was and maybe scale it back down again put it back down in the middle there so this is the move gizmo and to switch over to the rotate or scale gizmo you can look down here on the header bar of your 3d viewport into the 3d viewport largest program of the screen the header is actually at the bottom of it by default and this section here next the word global is your gizmo section I can turn that gizmo off and on with this gizmo button that hides it so if you ever lose it you know to go back there and click it to make it show up again your first gizmo is the Move gizmo or translate gizmo the second gizmo is your rotate gizmo and this gives you what I like to call my hula hoops so if I grab any one of these hula hoops and again I don't want to grab just the middle of it I want to grab one of the three colours that got the blue hula hoop it'll rotate it or they rotate the cube as if there's a pole going up and down on that z-axis through my cube and then I just rotate my or drag my cursor in a circle directly a circle on my screen I don't have to move it in like a perspective circle I can just move it in a round circle on my screen and let go when I'm happy with it again I can grab the red hula hoop and it'll rotate this cube as if it were there a pole rang for the cube on that red x-axis and then I just move my mouse cursor in a circle on the screen and let go when I'm happy and of course I can control Z to undo all right the scale gizmo is very similar I can switch to it just down here and I can scale or stretch my cube in any direction I can squash my my cube flat on the z axis and that's all good and great do notice here though that when I press s to scale unlike with this gizmo S transforms proportionally that's what I was looking for and so with the s key everything scales fortunately and so we're not stretching that cube at all if I use my gizmo it's for what I want to scale you know only in one direction on one axis so that's the difference there the last time third thing I'll talk about in this video is how to add and delete objects if I have an object selected I don't want anymore in this case I'm going to get rid of my cube when it's selected you need to press either the Delete key not to be confused with the backspace key the key is different or the X letter X on my keyboard and then I'll bring up the little confirmation ok yes delete window and then you just click and it'll get rid of that object and so now let's talk about adding objects before I do that though what the heck is this little crosshair thing on my screen and notice that when you left-click when you're normal click on your window this little crosshair thing gets put wherever you click and you'll notice that if you orbit around your scene that little cursor actually moves with your scene is actually in 3d space this thing is called your 3d cursor as opposed to your mouse cursor this 3d cursor is actually part of your scene it doesn't actually show up when you make a movie but what it's used for is wherever this 3d cursor is is where new objects can put in your scene and I'm just going to quickly zoom all the way out you'll notice that it does not change in scale but it does represent one coordinate in the very middle in 3d space on the x y&z axis so it's one coordinate in that space if i zoom way out and then click somewhere way off into space and then zoom back in I've lost my 3d cursor so try not to do that try not to lose it if you ever do lose it you can press and again this is where a blender is very keyboard shortcut oriented you can press shift C and shift C what's that 3d cursor right back in the middle at 0 0 0 and the coordinates in your scene and it also zooms to see everything in your scene zoom to see the the middle of the scene and the lamp and the camera so again I have the three cursor somewhere weird press shift C and it'll go back to the middle so now that that three curves in the middle of the scene I'm going to add a new object I can do that one of two ways I can go down to the add menu actually there's lots of ways to add objects the add menu and then in most cases you're adding what's called a mesh meshes include a plane which is just a flat square a cube a circle which I never use because we're almost never used because it's just like like a hula hoop with no volume at all a UV sphere which is most like a ball an eco sphere which is sort of like a soccer ball a cylinder a cone a grid which I almost never use monkey yeah look at that later and a Taurus which is like a donut you can also add things by pressing again this is blender being very keyboard shortcut oriented shift a with your mouse anywhere the 3d viewport shift a brings up the add menu so I'll be using that from now on you can also go over here to your create tab this is called your tool shelf and it's part of your through a viewport and if I go to create you can see I can click on any of the meshes or any other kinds of objects yes you can create new lamps and even you can create new cameras as well down here you can click on these I never use these though so we'll just be using shift a and I'm gonna add a cube and so it gets added to where that 3d cursor is member that when you're a beginner you should be using your one three and seven views so I'm going to go to my front view I'm going to add a cone over here so I'll click to make my three cursor go there all you shift a I'll add a new mesh I'll add a cone and again I can use my move gizmo to move things but Jiki to grab the are key to rotate the S key to scale let's go ahead and add a monkey head over here yes blender has a monkey head shift a mesh monkey monkey's name is Suzanne and that's sort of just the the pet name they have for it most 3d programs have some sort of a more complicated object usually it's a tea a teapot at least that is true in Maya and 3ds Max and they have these objects so that you can do better texture and lighting tests in a scene with more complicated objects to see how things look especially with lighting and shadows in blenders case it's a monkey just I guess for fun it's been there forever so they stuck with it so that's adding objects to your scene again you can press X to the objects and you can use all the things I've taught you in this video to navigate and add and transform objects in this video we've talked about how to change your view how to transform objects and lords how to translate move rotate and scale objects and then how to add and leave objects in your scene that's going to be it for this video thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: BornCG

Views: 211,324

Keywords: Blender, Blender (Software), b3d, Blender 2.7, Tutorial, Lesson, Tip, Dummies, Beginner, Basics, Teach, Software, Animation, Animate, 3D, CG, CGI, Cartoon, model, modelling, cycles

Id: zHdTUJBs7so

Length: 19min 57sec (1197 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 03 2014