Blender 2.8 Basics Tutorial pt. 1 I Interface & Navigation for Beginners

hey there blender beginners welcome to the blender basics course here on CG cookie comm if you've ever wanted to get into 3d modeling animation game asset creation visual effects or literally anything 3d you're in the right place my name is grant Wilk and I'm a CG cookie instructor today I get to guide you through the blender basics this course will serve as your launchpad into blender 2.8 and even if you've never touched a 3d software like blender before you'll still be able to walk away from this course with a firm and confident understanding of the basics now I'm super excited to get started here so let's go ahead and hop into the next lesson where we're going to make sure that we have everything set up properly and ready to go for the rest of this course when it comes to setting things up there's really only one thing that we need to take care of and that is installing blender 2.8 you can get the most recent stable version of blender 2.8 from blender.org it's available on Windows Mac and Linux so no matter what operating system you're using you shouldn't have too much to worry about and as an added bonus because blender is an open source software it's available for free once you've downloaded and installed the software go ahead and open it up just to make sure that it runs properly when it opens it should look something like this and just like that everything is set up but Before we jump into our course and actually start learning I'd like to give you guys a piece of advice that is going to be very helpful if you have the hardware available to you blender as a software is built around the three button Mouse a three button Mouse has a left click a right click and then a clickable scroll wheel in the center it uses these buttons for navigation which means we use them a lot if you're working on a trackpad a laptop trackpad or you're using a 2 button Mouse you don't have this clickable scroll wheel in the center and thus blender doesn't work quite as well there are certain software implementations that make it possible to use these however they're not optimal so I'd strongly recommend if you have the hardware available to you make sure you're using a three-button mouse with blender however if you don't have the hardware available don't worry we'll still be covering it in this course and it'll still work with blender it's just gonna be a little bit trickier to use so with that let's go ahead and jump right into blender when we open up blender for the first time there are a few little things that we have to take care of before we can get into 3d modeling texturing animating or doing whatever you want in blender the first of those things is setting up some very basic user preferences to dictate how we want to use blender and how we want to interact with blender in the future additionally we should also take a look at blenders user interface to understand where we are in the interface that way we don't get lost throughout the duration of this course so let's go ahead and get started with that whenever we start up blender were presented with this little splash screen and your first instinct is probably to click out of this like you do in most software's but for this case we're actually gonna stay in here really quick because we have this option to do a quick setup to set up the way that we want to interact with blender down here now before we get started with this I do want to mention if for any reason your feature image is different than this don't worry too much blender likes to change their feature image quite often whenever they release new versions of blender but as long as you're using version 2.8 something you're in the right boat so anyway let's get started with this quick setup here our first option here is to change our shortcuts now we get a few different options here we get the option to use blender blender 2.7 X this is going to be if you're coming from an older version of blender this is a more familiar hotkey set for you or we could also choose an industry compatible key set which is for people that might be coming from Maya or a similar software now I'm going to be working with the blender hotkey set throughout the entirety of this course so I recommend you follow this unless you are familiar with a different set of hotkeys in which case you might be able to choose one of these but again better to just use the blender ones additionally we can choose the mouse button that we want to use to select objects in our 3d viewport which we'll talk about shortly here now by default it is a left click select area so if you want to select a cue for example you just left-click on it but some people do prefer right-click select in fact this used to be the old default is to use right-click which may seem unintuitive if you've never used blender before but it wasn't too bad to get used to but again I'll be using the default left click select and additionally we can choose what our spacebar does we get the options use it to play animations we have the option to use or to open up our tool panel here our tool bar or we can also use it to search for different operations within blender again I'm going to keep mine on the default play because that's what I prefer and finally we also have the option to choose a theme if you'd like to do this you can but you don't have to anyway once we're done with this we'll click Save new settings and just like that we get a new screen here and this is going to be the splash screen that you see most the time when you open blender so I'm going to go ahead and now click out of the splash screen and we can start talking about our interface so at first glance blenders user interface might look a little bit intimidating over here on the right we have a lot of different toggles with a lot of different units and strange names we have all sorts of weird things over here and icons that we don't know what they mean all sorts of tabs but if we break this down into sections it's actually pretty easy to follow you see blenders user interface is built up of smaller sections called editors and we can actually configure the user interface to be whatever we'd like we'll talk about this in a bonus lesson later but for now let's go ahead and talk about the default setup that we're seeing here and we'll start with the biggest and most prominent thing on our screen which is our three viewport the 3d viewport is the place where we do all of our 3d work so whether we're creating a 3d model texturing something animating something or even simulating something we do our work over here in the 3d viewport down below our 3d viewport we have our timeline and our timeline is crucial for animation and all sorts of things that happen over time up in the upper right here we have our outliner and our outliner will list every single object in our scene and sort them into folders called collections we'll talk more about the outliner later as well and then down here on the right we have our properties panel the properties panel I like to call it the Mission Control Center of blender when we have certain objects selected we'll be able to tweak certain properties of those objects and we'll also be able to tweak different settings about our entire scene in general so this is the Mission Control if you will additionally up top here we have our standard top bar and we also have a bunch of different precomposed layouts and interfaces that we can work with for example we could switch to the modeling interface which is not too similar from the not too different from the default a sculpting interface a UV editing texture painting shading which will take a second to load animation rendering compositing and scripting interface all of these interfaces are great but for now we are just going to be sticking with the default because really this is all we need so now that we have the basics of our interface down let's go ahead and start talking a little bit more about our 3d viewport in the introduction to this course I mentioned that there are a few topics we'll be covering that differ depending on whether you using a three button Mouse or a laptop trackpad two button mouse or even a one button Mouse and navigating the 3d viewport is one of the biggest differences because of the different hotkeys that we have to use so we decided to split this topic up into two separate videos the first video which is the one you're watching right now is for a three button Mouse so if you're using a three button Mouse go ahead and keep watching this video however if you're using any of those secondary hardware as I mentioned go ahead and mark this video as watched by clicking the little eyeball icon down below the video player here then you can go ahead and move on to the next video where we'll be talking about how to navigate the 3d viewport using your respective hardware so for those of you with a three button Mouse let's go ahead and get started when navigating the 3d viewport with a three button Mouse we have three different options for manipulating our perspective or changing the direction that we're looking at our scene from we have an orbit a pan and a zoom now these are a little bit inaccurately named if you're familiar with any sort of cinematography work anything that requires precise camera movements these would be better called in orbit a truck and a dolly but for some reason in the blender community we prefer the terms orbit pan and zoom so we will be using those for the duration of this course now an orbit is the first of our three options for changing our perspective in order to perform an orbit all we need to do is click down on our middle mouse button or our scroll wheel until it clicks and then we just drag our mouse so I'm gonna go ahead and do so now and you'll notice that when we orbit around our object here I'm just moving my mouse left and right we can perform this kind of circular perspective change around our cube in fact it's actually spherical because we can look at our cube from all sorts of different directions if you haven't already paused the video and given this a shot yourself go ahead and pause and try to orbit around your scene here simply open up blender and just use the middle mouse button click and drag to change your perspective in an orbital fashion now that you've got the orbit down let's go ahead and try panning around our scene now when we pan in blender we're moving our perspective either left right up or down in a planar fashion not in a spherical fashion like we did with the orbit so to perform a pan it's actually pretty similar to how we did the orbit in that we're going to be pressing down our middle mouse button but instead we're going to be holding down the shift key in addition to that so I'm going to go ahead and press and hold the shift key and then I'm going to click down on my middle mouse and drag and you'll notice we're able to shift our camera left right up and down with ease next we have our zoom and we actually have a few different options for how we can zoom with a three-button Mouse the first one which is pretty similar to the last two is just by holding down the control key and then clicking and dragging with the middle mouse button so let's do that first I'm holding the control key right now and if I click and drag on my middle mouse button you'll notice we can move our camera back and forth just like this now there is another way and it's actually the way I use more often is simply just scrolling on the scroll wheel by doing this we can zoom in and out with ease without having to hold an extra key down so personally I prefer that so go ahead and practice your zoom now and now that we've got all three of these under our belt I am going to challenge you to just move around in your scene and try and look at different objects different features of your scene for example maybe I'll try and zoom in on this back corner and get it just like that or maybe instead I want to look at my 3d camera over here so I'll rotate sideways shift my camera over and then zoom in on my camera just like this just practice moving around in the 3d viewport a little bit because the more you can move around in this space the better off you'll be when we get into the later portions of this course and when you're done you can go ahead and move on to the next video welcome to Part B of this lesson where we're going to be talking about navigating the 3d viewport using a laptop trackpad two-button mouse or a one-button mouse if you just came from the last video and you're using a three button Mouse go ahead and just mark this video as watched by clicking the little eyeball icon down below the video player here and then you can go ahead and move on to the next lesson but for those of you who are using those secondary hardware's let's go ahead and get started before we actually get started with navigating the 3d viewport we first have to enable a setting in blenders user preferences in order to access these preferences we just need to come up here in the upper left and click Edit and then select Preferences now in here there are quite a few different settings the category we're looking for though is the input settings over here so we'll click this and then we'll check this box that says emulate 3-button Mouse so I'm gonna go ahead and check this box and I'm gonna go ahead and just exit out of blenders user preferences alright so now we're ready to get started when it comes to navigating within blenders 3d viewport we have three different options for changing our perspective we have the option to perform an orbit a pan and a zoom now if you're familiar at all with the film industry cinematography and anything that requires sighs camera movements you'll notice that these are slightly inaccurately named they'd probably be better off being called an orbit a truck and a dolly but for whatever reason the blender community prefers calling them an orbit a pan and a zoom so we will be calling them that for the duration of this course so let's kick things off by talking about how we can perform in orbit so orbits are when we move our camera in a circular or spherical fashion around a certain point within our 3d viewport in this case that point is the origin here so in order to perform a orbit all we need to do is hold the Alt key and then left-click and drag our mouse and by doing so we can change our perspective in an orbital fashion around our cube and we can see it from all different sides just like that so again that's alt and then left-click and drag your mouse around so go ahead and give this a shot yourself try orbiting around and then come back to this video when you're done all right now that we've got the orbit in the books we can go ahead and try panning now panning is similar to the orbit in which case it uses the alt left-click functionality but we add an extra modifier key on top of it and that's the shift key so we're going to press shift and then alt left-click just like we did with in orbit to perform a pan so I'm going to do that right now I'll hold shift alt and then left-click and you'll notice that a pan allows us to move our camera in a planar fashion either left right up or down so we can move anywhere in a planar fashion not in an orbital fashion though like our orbit so go ahead and give the pan a try yourself now it's just going to be shift plus your usual alt left click to pan all right now we've got two of the three of these down so let's go ahead and talk about our zoom now our zoom functions similarly to our pan in which case we just hold a modifier key and then alt left-click in this case our modifier key is control so in order to zoom we're just going to press ctrl alt and then left-click and drag our mouse up and down to zoom in and out of our perspective here just like that so now that we know all three go ahead and practice these a little bit remember it's Alt + left click to orbit shift alt left click to pan and then ctrl alt left click to zoom go ahead and try and move around your scene maybe find a specific point such as the back corner of this cube here and the idea here is just to move around and get familiar with the 3d navigation system with blender because the more familiar you are with it now the better off you'll be for the rest of this course so go ahead and play around and once you're done you can go ahead and move on to the next lesson

Channel: CG Cookie

Views: 48,114

Keywords: blender 2.8 beginner tutorial, blender 2.8 tutorial, blender 2.8 beginner, blender beginner tutorial, blender 2.8 ui, blender basics, cg cookie, cgcookie, blender interface, blender navigation, blender 2.8, blender 3d

Id: -O52Js1c5D4

Length: 16min 11sec (971 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 23 2019