Blender 2.9 for Absolute Beginners - Complete Starter Tutorial | Part 1/4

hey guys and welcome back to my channel for the first of hopefully many videos in my new blender 2.9 tutorial series now we're once again in blender and no don't go don't go oh my god don't press that button don't turn off please no no [Music] i'm so sorry i just really had to get that awful pun out of the way what now seems like an eternity ago i created a complete beginner tutorial series for blender the full series is still available here youtube as well as on my academy academy.surfacestudio.com where i offer free training courses for blender premiere pro after effects and more i also offer some premium courses on my academy if you do crave for some more in-depth training and or you would like to support me at the content i create but of course you can also watch that original series right here on youtube i'm going to drop you the links to everything relevant down below so you can go and check that out now back when i created that original series blender was at version 2.78 and we're now up to 2.92 a lot has changed since then in particular a major change in uplift in the ui with the release of version blender 2.8 and that can make it a little bit challenging if you're not trying to follow along with some of the older tutorial videos that you can find online therefore and as many of you have been asking me i want to update my original series and in this very first part of the refresh i want to give you an absolute beginner guide for how to use blender 2.9 blender in case you don't know is a really powerful and absolutely free 3d program that is gaining more and more attractions and followers all over the world it's a really fun tool that allows you to create animate and render pretty much anything in 3d or 2d that you can imagine you can use it to make your own film projects from scratch or add 3d objects to your videos to create cool visual effects run physics simulations for rigid bodies liquids fire smoke explosions cloth and much much more in this very first part of my tutorial series for blender 2.9 i want to show you how you can get blender absolutely free of course and then show you how to use it at a basic level to set up create modify and render your very first project now there's a lot to cover in this first tutorial and i'm going to drop you timestamps to everything down below so you can jump to any part that you might find useful also please let me know if you think i missed something or if you would like a dedicated tutorial for anything that i touched on in this video but now i feel like i've waffled on forever let's finally jump into the tutorial [Music] now first off let's talk about how you can download blender for that simply pop open your favorite browser and then navigate to blender.org this is the official website for blender and on here you can find tons of articles training resources looks behind the scenes and all sorts of information on what's currently going on absolutely worth checking out now as of the time of me recording this video as you can tell blender is at version 2.92 and this version might be slightly different if you're watching this video at a later date but as long as you're 2.92 or above you should be able to follow along without a problem now you can download blender simply by clicking on this big blue download blender button you can also come into the main menu and up here let's click on download and here you can then download the installer for blender now by default this will give you a big blue button to download the installer that is appropriate for your operating system but you can also come to this little drop down here pop that open and then download either the installer or the portable for windows with mac os version linux and yes you can also get blender on steam if you so wish also if you're super hardcore you can also download the source code for blender because blender is open source software you can modify do whatever you want to it compile it and then run it but maybe that's a topic for another video altogether now i'm going to be pretty lazy not going to download the windows installer though i prefer going with the portable zip files which is just an archive of files that you can extract anywhere on your computer and just run blender straight out of that so let's hit that that'll kick off the download so let's download this to our computer obviously if you are using a different operating system make sure you download the installer that is appropriate for your particular operating system the other thing you may want to check let's come back to download and in the sub menu here there'll be a tab for requirements so let's click on that and down here do make sure that your computer meets the minimum hardware requirements for blender now blender is pretty undemanding the download is also just usually around 100 to 200 megabytes in size so it's really nice and compact but you do need at least a graphics card that supports opengl 3.3 you should have a decent cpu and at least 4 gigabytes of ram obviously if you want to do some really heavy stuff in blender it's always recommended to go for more like a really powerful graphics card lots of ram and a strong cpu is recommended but you can run blender on pretty little but anyways now that we've downloaded the installer let's navigate to the folder where we downloaded blender and you can actually just unzip that right in here so let's extract this zip file in here that'll give you a folder for blender and if you pop this open in here you'll find a blender.exe if you're on windows obviously this will be a packaged file if you're on mac and just install that in your apps folder but if you're on windows they'll just be a blender xe you can simply double click that to launch blender if this is your first time launching blender you'll be greeted by the splash screen for blender in the top right hand corner it shows you which version you are running we're running version 2.92 again this might differ depending on when you download blender now for the quick setup language i'm going to leave on english shortcuts i'm going to leave on the blender defaults you can also select to use blender 2.7 shortcuts if you're more used to some of the older versions there's also an option to select industry compatible if you more use the 3ds max cinema 4d or some of the other industry standard tools now select with is set to left by default is an option to select with right because before blender 2.8 right click select was actually the standard in blender but it was confusing which is why it was changed in version 2.8 to begin with i'm going to leave it on left spacebar settings i'm going to leave on play by default again we're just going to do the basics and you can change the theme of blender if you want a different color scheme right here i'm going to leave all of that and then let's hit save new settings and then you're going to see the standard startup screen for blender so we can now create a new project for a general 3d project we can create 2d animations a sculpting project something that focuses on visual effects or video editing you'll also see a list of recently worked on files right here for now i'm just going to select general you can also click anywhere outside of the splash screen it'll just go to the default file but let's just select general and we're finally within our project in blender now very quickly let's come up into the main menu bar at the top click on edit and come into the preferences let me just drag this window into the screen and let's navigate into the input tab on the left side here and one thing if you're using a mouse that doesn't have a middle mouse button which blender uses quite heavily actually you can select an option here to emulate three button mouse which means alt and left click or option and left click if you're on a mac will simulate pressing the middle mouse button so that can be super useful if you're on a magic mouse or a mouse that doesn't have a middle mouse button i do so i'm going to leave this unchecked the other thing i recommend you do as well come into the system and up here you've actually got options for your cycles render devices and we'll get to render engines and all of that stuff in just a little bit right now this is set to none meaning that all of the rendering and blender will be done on your cpu alone however if you have a graphics card like an nvidia graphics card i recommend go with cuda cuda uses your graphics card to speed up rendering so rendering will be faster if you have an rtx card go with optics because again that will speed up the rendering a little bit more than what you would get with cuda if you don't have an nvidia card you've got an ati card or something else that doesn't support cuda or optics you should have an option to select opencl which again leverages your graphics card for rendering it'll just all go a little bit faster now i have a nvidia graphics card so i'm going to select cuda here that's going to use my gtx 1080 graphics cards to help with rendering it'll just make everything a bit faster now there's tons of other options in here go through them have a play i'm not going to go through everything in detail this is really the more important ones as well as dealing with the mouse that doesn't have a middle mouse button so let's close the preferences and let's have a general look at how you work with the user interface within blender now the blender user interface is broken up into a number of different panels at the top like in most programs you have the main menu bar so file edit render window help over on the right hand side you have a number of different tabs which are different workspaces within blender that you can customize and set up for now we're just going to remain on the default layout right here in the middle very obviously you have your 3d view and we'll talk about how to navigate and work with this in just a moment over in the top right hand side you will find the outliner which is essentially a list a tree view of all of the objects and items in your scene right now you can tell we have a camera you have a cube and you have a light in your scene and as i click through these you can see them being selected in the 3d view over on the left hand side down below that you will find the properties panel which is where you can control all of the settings for your scene your rendering your objects your materials your physics your particles your lighting and much much much more again very detailed we'll get into that in just a little bit underneath the 3d view you will find your timeline where you can create keyframes and playback your animations and underneath that you'll just find a footer bar this is actually really useful if you have a look here there's little icons indicating in the current mode what would happen if i pressed the left mouse button or the middle mouse button or the right mouse button as i'm navigating around you can see this change this little context menu down here super useful if you're just getting started just keep an eye out down here below it's super useful very helpful getting used to the shortcut keys and what the different controls do within blender now besides the main menu at the very top and the footer down at the bottom every single panel is structurally actually the same at the top left hand corner of every panel in this properties window the outliner the 3d view and even in the timeline the top left hand side here let's go back to the 3d view you'll find this little drop down and if you pop this open you can change this particular panel which right now is the 3d view if you pop this open again again top left hand side in your 3d view panel let's pop this open you can change the view of what you're seeing in this panel so for example let's say i want to change this to my video sequencer this panel has now changed to be my video sequencer let's come over to the top right hand side into the outliner let's pop this open and right now this is set to be the outliner but we can change this over to select the 3d view so now our 3d view is in this panel let's come to the bottom where we've got our properties panel again let's pop this open let's change this to be our image editor now again i'm not going to go through all of the panels but we will talk about all of the important ones i just want to show you that you can change what's inside all of these panels in any way that you like you can also click these stick bars between the panels and your cursor will change to this little sideway errors either left and right or up and down and you can click and drag down or click and drag left to kind of rearrange your interface if you want some panels to be bigger and smaller the other cool thing you can do you can actually right click on any of these lines between two panels let's click this and you can then determine to add a vertical or horizontal split to that panel let's select to do a horizontal split and now i can place a split in this panel on the left hand side let's click that's going to split this panel into two and now i can change one of them to be something totally different so let's leave the top one to being the sequencer but let's pop open the top left hand side drop down on this bottom panel that we've just created let's change this over to let's say the shader editor again don't worry about what this panel does right now i'm just showing you how to essentially deal with the interface and work with the different panels let's right click onto this top bar on top of our shader editor and select to do a vertical split and that's just you know you can place it at the top panel on the bottom panel or you can all go over to the right inside to split any of these other panels in half let's split our shader editor in half again let's change the right one over to maybe the graph editor and once you've got yourself in a pickle and you've got too many panels and you're like oh i don't know what to do anymore this has gotten all really messy you can also right click on any of these lines and select to join the areas and then hover your cursor over the panel on either side of the line that you clicked that's going to display this arrow here this is going to collapse the panel on the left hand side and make the one on the right side the only one that sits within the space so let's click that that has collapsed our shader editor and now the graph editor is taking up this panel let's right click this line at the top here select to join errors by the way you can also swap if you just want to swap the two panels let's like join areas drag up and let's collapse this upwards so now all of this is taken up by the graph editor now once you've messed everything up in your workspace and you want to reset it to the default you can come up into the main menu bar and on these tabs here for all of the different workspaces right now we're on the layout tab you can right click but in here there isn't yet an option to reset it's being looked at that being added pretty soon maybe it'll be available in blender 2.93 right now there is no option right here the easiest thing you can do is come over to the right hand side of all these tabs with the workspaces click plus select general and let's just create a new workspace a new layout workspace let's select that that's going to add a new tab called layout001 because we already have a layout and this is essentially the layout workspace that we started with so we're now reset to default if it bothers you that you have a layout workspace here and the layout 01 we can right click this one select to reorder to the front that's going to push this workspace panel to the left hand side you can right click the old layout if you click into that you'll see this is the one we messed up right click that just go delete that and let's just double click onto this workspace name here let's just rename this to layout and we're back to where we started now if you just want to reset everything including any work that you may already have done you can simply close down blender and start it up again or you come up into the main menu select file and under file you will find a default option and then just select to load factory settings that'll reset the blender interface it'll also lose you any unsaved changes it'll simply reload this basic startup file and it resets all of your workspaces and the interface to the default but now that i've talked way too much about panels let's finally talk about the main panel in the default interface for blender and that is the 3d view arguably one of the most useful panels when you're getting started with blender is the 3d view which well shows you a 3d view of your scene right now we have a cube here over on the left hand side we have a camera by the way left click to select because that's what we said to be a default so now we've selected the camera it's highlighted in yellow let's left click on the cube to select it up here over on the top right hand side is a light if you left click that to select it it'll turn orange and again you'll notice in the outliner over on the top right hand side in our scene collection which is a collection of everything that is in our scene you have a basic collection it's just a default collection and it contains a camera a cube and a light and as you select these ones you can see them being highlighted within the 3d view now in order to rotate around in your 3d view simply hold down the middle mouse button or alt and left click if you're emulating a three button mouse and then just drag to rotate around your scene you can scroll up and down on your mouse wheel to zoom in and out of the scene and you can hold down shift then press and hold down the middle mouse button and drag to kind of pan up and down so it's really nice and easy to navigate around the 3d view if you don't have a three button mouse or you just don't like using the middle mouse button or in the top right hand side in the 3d view you'll find this little axis gizmo and you can click on any of these and kind of rotate around there's also a plus icon you can click and hold and then move your mouse forward or backwards to zoom in and out there's also a hand tool again just click and drag to pan around your scene but personally i prefer just using the middle mouse button and the mouse wheel to do that so this is essentially the 3d view of everything we have in our scene right now the next most important thing within your 3d view are the shading modes and you will find all of them in the top right hand corner of your 3d view these four little spheres over on the right hand side the leftmost one is wireframe shading and if you click on that all of your objects are going to be displayed in wireframes so it's just going to show the outline and the geometric structure often without showing the faces so you can just see right through the second one is solid view which won't use any lighting but you'll be able to see the actual surfaces of your 3d objects in the scene one over to the right hand side is material preview again it won't use any lighting but it'll actually show you materials that are applied to any of your objects and again we'll get to those a little bit later in this tutorial and the one over on the very right is rendered shading view if we click that that will essentially give you a rendered preview of your scene so you can see this light is now being applied to that cube and what this rendered preview will look like depends a little bit on the render engine that you have selected and we'll get to that in just a second let's return to the solid view and by the way blender is filled like filled with shortcuts for everything and i highly recommend that you start using some wherever you encounter them they're super useful then make your workflow so much quicker for example you can switch between the shading modes by pressing z while your cursor is over the 3d view this is going to bring up a radial menu and then you can select rendered wireframe material preview or solid view so you can really quickly switch to render view you can also just press that and then press the number that is displayed so for example 6 will get us back into solid view again it just makes life so much easier now in order to select objects in your 3d view simply click on them you can also click and drag to box select a whole bunch of them so let's select the camera as well as the cube so you can select multiple objects as one you can also press a to select everything in your scene or a a in quick succession to unselect everything and the last thing i want to talk about is this little circle here this little red and white circle now this is the 3d cursor in blender and it's really important because this is essentially the point at which any new objects you create in your scene will be created you can move this cursor around by holding down shift and right clicking anywhere within your 3d view and that is going to move the 3d cursor to that position if we were to create a new object right now it would get created in this position here where the 3d cursor is again hold on shift and right click to navigate and move this cursor around to anywhere that you want you can also press shift and c to reset the 3d cursor right to the origin of your world but we'll deal with the 3d cursor a little bit more when we start to create some objects now over on the left hand side within your 3d view you have a number of different controls right now we're on the selection mode you can also go into cursor mode and then whenever you click left you're just going to move that cursor without having to hold down shift you also have options to move rotate and scale your objects there's also a general transform object and we'll get to that you can annotate measure and add different objects to your scene while these controls we'll get to some of these a little bit later now with the cursor over the 3d view let's press shift and c again to reset that 3d cursor to the origin of our world and before we move on to talking about the outliner let's very quickly talk on render engines and the different render engines that are available within blender now the render engine and blender will determine how the final rendered image or animation will look and blender sr version 2.92 has three internal render engine that you can choose between for that over on the right hand side within the property panel you'll find a number of different vertical tabs and there's one with this little camera icon here which is your render properties for your project let's click into that and over on the right hand side at the very top you should see a drop down for your render engine right now this is set to eevee eevee is blender's high performance viewport rendering engine and it's mainly used to render within blender within the 3d view but you can also use it for your final renders they come out looking really nice however in order to understand the difference between these three engines we actually need to change our shading mode because right now our shading mode is set to solid neither wireframe solid nor material preview will use the actual render engine the render engine is only used for rendered shading mode or for rendering out the actual image or animation that you've created in blender so let's click onto the rendered shading mode this is going to take a second and now our viewport is going to get rendered out using eevee you can easily move around because eevee renders in real time into the 3d view within blender using your graphics card now this is what ev looks like let's come back into the properties panel into this render engine drop down and let's change this over to cycles now that was really quick but you may have noticed that as we're moving around everything looks a little bit blocky for a moment and then it becomes sharp and that is because the scene is now being rendered with cycles and the difference with cycles is that cycles is an actual ray tracing engine it will actually simulate the light bouncing around your scene it will render a lot slower than ev especially if you have a complex scene but the final result will look much more realistic especially because it can deal much better with reflections and refraction like transparent materials like glass and other things just to give you that really realistic look i recommend go with cycles but it will render a fair bit slower than eevee obviously there's tons and tons of different settings for every single render engine and we might get into some of them a little bit later in this tutorial for now let's switch from cycles over to the third render engine within blender which is called the workbench engine now this engine is simpler than ev it doesn't have some of the fancy features and it doesn't give you a realistic result it's mainly used for modeling or while you're setting up your scene or animations to get a good feel for what that scene will look like in the end and then i recommend switch over either to evie if you want to render it really nice and fast other cycles if you really need that absolute precision and that more realistic look in the end for now i'm going to switch back to ev because ev is nice and fast we can use it while we work and run through the rest of this tutorial but now that i bought you enough with the different rendering engines let's get back to the panels and let's talk about the outliner which you will find by default in the top right hand corner of blender let's just click on this little vertical bar on the left side of this panel drag that over to the left just to make this a little bit bigger and the outliner essentially shows you all of the objects that you have within your 3d scene there's the light you can just click on them to select them in here and that selects them in the 3d view as well there's the cube and there's the camera by the way you can double click on any of these objects in the outliners let's double click on this light and rename them to anything that makes sense to you and this can be very useful especially if you create a bazillion cubes for different walls or elements of a building or arms and body parts of your characters it makes much more sense to give them useful names by default they'll just be called cube or sphere or triangle or monkey head so very useful to name these ones right next to the name you'll get a little icon indicating what type of object this is in your scene for example our bright light is a light object camera is a camera our cube is a mesh or a three-dimensional object made up of vertices points edges which are the lines connecting those points and faces which then give you that solid outer exterior of your object but back in the outliner the other thing blender now has are collections collections are simply groups for your objects so in the default scene you will have a collection which contains your bright light the camera and the cube all of these have little triangles that you can collapse and expand and if you expand the bright light you'll actually just find that light object under there if you expand the camera you'll find the camera under there and underneath the cube you'll actually just find the mesh for the cube you can dig further into that and you'll find the material in here and we'll get to materials in just a little bit let's just collapse these ones again and collections you can rename as well so let's double click the name collection i'm just going to call this one my stuff and you may notice that this collection sits in another collection called the scene collection you can actually drag and drop all of the objects around in this hierarchy on this tree within your outlines for example i could grab the camera and drag it out of the my stuff collection and drop it onto the scene collection and now it's just part of the scene collection it's no longer in this my stuff can do the same with the bright light right here and then collapse them so now i have the my stuff collection which only contains the cube bright light and camera sit outside in the scene collection and i highly recommend stay as organized as you can within blender it just makes your life a whole lot easier now if you have too many objects in your scene and you don't actually want to see them at any point in time in the outliner or on the right hand side you have this little eye icon you can click on any of these to hide the objects within your 3d view you can also click one of them and drag down to enable all of them or click to untick and then drag up to untick all of them let's just show all of them again now this visibility switch if you hover over it saying hide in viewport doesn't actually impact whether this object is going to get rendered into the final image when you do render it just hides it temporarily in the viewport however blender in the outliner actually has tons of additional switches and options for all of the objects and all of the elements in your scene but by default they're all hidden because they were getting a bit confusing in some of the earlier versions of blender in order to add them back in simply come up to this little filter icon here pop that open and at the very top you actually have a whole bunch of toggles the blue ones are enabled the gray ones are disabled so you can enable the selectability toggle as well as the disable in viewports option as well as the disable and renders and there's a few other ones so by default this is how you should start out i would recommend enable the selectable one because it's really useful as well as the disabled viewports and disable in renders flag and if we now collapse this filter again you can see all of these new switches options available on every single element within your scene in the outliner so right now if i clicked on my cube in my 3d view i would select it let's click anywhere else to unselect it in the outliner let's disable the selectable switch here simply click on it it's going to get grayed out and now i can no longer select my cube and this is great if you've done working on parts of your scene just make them all unselectable put them in a collection and make the entire collection unselectable so that you can't accidentally select those objects anymore i can obviously still hide and show my cube i can also hide it in all viewports or short on all viewports and this actually is a global option it does it for all viewports because you may have multiple 3d views and other things so this can be really useful as well and the much more interesting one is this little disable and render switch here if i tick this you can see the cube is still visible in my 3d view but now if i rendered this scene this cube would not show up in my final renders and this is really useful if you want to temporarily disable individual elements or entire collections from being rendered into that final image that comes out of blender but for now i'm just going to leave all of them enabled other great things in the outliner at the very top you have a search and you can simply search for any object by name and the outliner will filter all of those down so you can find exactly what you're looking for assuming you've named them properly let's clear that search and over on the right hand side you'll find this little plus icon here this is to add a new collection into your scene so right now we have a scene collection which is the base of everything within this project inside that we have this my stuff collection but let's say i wanted to add a new one i have new stuff so on the top right hand side in the outline let's click the little plus to add a new collection we now have a new collection in our scene double click the name let's call this one my new stuff and let's select the bright light hold down shift click on the camera to select both of those objects drag and drop them into the my new stuff collection and now we've got them organized just a little bit better there's a ton of stuff you can do in the outliner i haven't touched on everything yet especially under the filter there's lots of different options here there's also a drop down here where you can see different parts of this blender project not gonna worry about that too much for now when you're starting out the outliner just the basic switches and naming and organizing your stuff is probably the main thing you need to know about the outliner but now let's move on to the next panel and you will likely spend a lot of time in here and that is the properties panel in blender this is where you can control all the settings for your scene your output your materials your objects your physics your lighting your textures and much much more now you may have noticed that this panel actually changed as i selected the different objects in my scene let's click on the cube and we're now seeing some vertex groups and shape keys and other in-depth 3d ish stuff don't have to worry about that if you select the camera in your 3d view you're now seeing the camera settings if you select the light you now see the light settings and each time a different tab in this properties panel here has been highlighted you can also click through these and the difference between the gray icons at the top and the colored ones at the bottom is that the ones at the bottom may change depending on what object you have selected in your scene they're context specific the ones that are gray are if you hover over them the scene properties which impact the entire 3d belt above that you've got your view layers and this is a bit too technical for this tutorial you can set up different render passes and you know render out different colors or different objects into different images at the same time gets pretty fancy here the things you probably want to know about are the output properties where you define the resolution like the width and height of your final render image the aspect ratio frames if you're doing animations as well as the output files like whether it's a png or it's a movie file or other things just above that we were here just a minute before are the render properties where you define your render engine and then depending on which engine you have selected you've got a ton of different options for those render engines that you can control in here again we might touch on some of these throughout this tutorial but don't worry about them too much for now just leave everything on default just above that you have your active tool settings and these ones do change but not based on which object you have selected but which tool you have selected as you're working so we don't need to worry about that too much for now let's just select the cube and you may notice that some of these tabs have changed again and we will get to them in just a little bit for now let's just talk about the last panel that you will have on your interface by default and that is the timeline that you have at the bottom of the 3d view let me just click on this horizontal bar at the top of it just drag it up a little bit so you can see this is essentially your timeline if you're playing back and making animations you can click on this little timeline indicator and drag to scrub through there's also playback controls just above you can play and pause also by default space will start or stop the playback right now obviously we have no animations and animations will probably cover in a separate tutorial because it's going again a bit more in-depth for now let's just collapse that again a little bit so it's not so in the way and let's finally talk about how you can actually add new 3d objects into your scene move them around and actually set up something that's a little bit more interesting than the blender default cube now right now all we have in our scene is a simple cube a light and a camera but let's add a few more things in here to make it look a little bit more interesting now remember this little white red circle here is our 3d cursor and any new object we create will get created at that 3d cursor we can move this cursor by holding down shift you can see the little context menu at the bottom of the screen change and right clicking now will move that 3d cursor so let's move it over to the side right there and let's add a new object right here for that you can either come to the top of the 3d view and in here you'll find an option to add and if you pop that open there's tons of different options to add different meshes like 3d objects curves surfaces meta bolts which are kind of like liquid shapes that melt together text you can add volume for like smoke and fog grease pencil which is all for 2d animations armature for animations empty objects which are helpers images lights cameras speakers for sound force fields when you're dealing with particles and a whole bunch of other stuff again blend is full of shortcuts so the shortcut for that menu is actually shift and a that's going to pop that up wherever your mouse cursor is let's just add something pretty simple let's come into mesh and let's select to add a uv sphere this has now added a sphere into our 3d scene that's also appeared in the outliner here's our new sphere and again you could double click it and rename it or move it to a different collection maybe this is part of my stuff right there and if you did that you may have missed an option that you actually have in blender let's delete this object again by selecting it pressing x on your keyboard and then confirming yes delete please let's press shift and a again come into mesh let's add a uv sphere again and as you add objects into your scene in blender at the bottom of the 3d view you actually have this little pop-up here that shows you your last operation but also gives you some options for that let's pop that up and in here you now actually have options for what you want that uv sphere to look like there's segments so in order to change this value you can either use the arrows on the left and right side you can see there's more or less segments being added to the sphere you cannot just click and drag right or left to maybe let's not go too crazy let's add a few more maybe 60 or so you can also change the number of rings on it you can change the radius you can modify the object right here you can move it around and yep if you accidentally click somewhere else or if you move some stuff around that option disappears so you only have that available directly after you performed a certain action such as creating an object so there we now have a sphere let's move the 3d cursor down here to the right hand side so shift and right click somewhere at the bottom of this light yep maybe there this time let's come into the top of the 3d view under add let's select mesh and maybe let's add a monkey hat or suzanne monkey head into our scene and there it is and again it has popped up this option here because we had it expanded already you can collapse that or expand it again we can make this head just a little bit bigger and maybe i'll move it back a little bit so it gets hit by the light and i'll move it up just a little bit as well and again just you know set this up in any way you want you don't need to follow along exactly i'm more just showing you the basics of how it all hangs together so now we have a little scene set up and we've added a sphere in the monkey into our scene however after you created your object and you start working with the rest of blender those pop-up options for where that object is positioned how it looks the scale the rotation will disappear and chances are that you will want to keep modifying the position scale rotation of your objects and there's quite a number of different ways to do that in blender now the most obvious one is the toolbar on the left side of your 3d view below the selection tool and the cursor tool which when selected allows you to simply click to move your 3d cursor around you will find an option for move rotate scale and transform with the monkey head selected and by the way you can't select objects while you're on the cursor tool return to the selection tool make sure the monkey is selected if it isn't already and now with the monkey head selected let's come over to the left hand side of the 3d view and change to the move tool this will now display a move gizmo on our monkey hat and you can click and drag on any of these errors to move the monkey up left forward backwards let's move it down a little bit and if you zoom in just a little bit more on this monkey head you can see there's these little planes here as well so this allows you to freely move the monkey in two axes at the same time so you can shuffle it around with the movement restricted to a certain plane within your 3d space with the monkey still selected let's come over to the left hand side select the rotate tool that will show the rotate gizmo so you can now rotate the monkey in place let's go over to the scale tool and again simply click and drag to scale the monkey out in any one direction so you can really distort them in any way that you want let's just control command and z that to undo all of that by the way you can actually select this white ring here click and drag if you want to scale the entire monkey head so you're not squishing it you're just scaling it uniformly across all of these axes or if you don't want to use either of those individual tools you can come over to the left hand side and simply select the transform tool which shows all of those gizmos at the same time so you can now move the monkey you can rotate and you can scale them in anywhere that you want again let's undo all of that let's return to the selection tool and let's talk about another way you can modify all of those properties for your objects in the properties panel which by default will be on the bottom right hand side of the blender interface come to this tab with this bracketed rectangle here which is the object properties select that and in here under the transform by the way you can collapse and expand all of these within the transform panel you will have a location rotation and a scale and you can literally just click into these type in any number so at two meters two meters by two meters so let's position our monkey at two meters by two meters by two meters away from the origin point in your 3d world let's just undo that a little bit maybe i'll select the monkey head come to the move tool let's just move the monkey a little bit more where we can see him again oh again you can just move the camera around if you wanted to by the way by default the camera will rotate from the point that it's sitting in your 3d world if instead you want it to rotate around your currently selected objects like let's say we wanted this camera to rotate around the monkey head you can select the monkey head and hit the delete key on your numpad that is going to focus the camera on the monkey and now if i rotate in my 3d view my movements will be around that monkey head that's super useful if you just want to focus in on an object no matter where it's in your 3d scene but anyways back into the properties panel into the object properties you have a location and just like with any sliders in blender you can simply click on this value and drag it right and left or again click into it and give it a number you can now rotate your monkey head in here or you can scale it up let's just set the scale to one by one by one to make sure our monkey head is not distorted in any way let's come back into the 3d view scroll down on your mouse wheel to zoom out a little bit let's talk about the easiest way and the way i would recommend you get used to modifying things in blender and that is using your shortcut keys it just makes life so much easier you don't have to deal with the tools on the left side you don't have to dig into the object properties you can do all of that straight in your 3d view simply select your object let me just return to the selection tool so select the monkey head and press g to grab it and now you can simply drag it around in your 3d view click to place it anywhere that you want you can rotate around say well that's not where i wanted it again press g just grab it and drag it kind of into position the problem is that this move will move the monkey from the perspective of the camera if you want to move it specifically in the x y or z axis press g to grab the monkey head and then press x to constrain the movement to the x-axis press z for the z-axis or y for the y-axis now if you want to constrain the movement of this monkey head to a plane like let's say just the x-y plane you can press shift and z so this means move the monkey in anything but the z direction so not up and down but i can now move it within the x y plane if i go shift in x i can move it into the z and y direction but i can't move it on the x-axis so this kind of gives you a really nice way to control exactly how and where you want to place your objects i like to do one axis at a time so let's bring the monkey forward on the x-axis a bit press g and then z to constrain the movement to the z axis or the vertical axis let's bring it up a little bit press g and then y just bring the monkey head forward a little bit dark so let's just rotate around maybe g and x again move it a bit closer to that light maybe just somewhere there and while the camera is now rotating around the point where the monkey head used to be so with the monkey still selected press delete on the numpad and the camera will zoom right back in on that so g is for grab super easy with the monkey selected press r for rotate and now you can rotate the monkey yet again you're doing this in relation to the view of the camera so if you rotate around the monkey press r again now you're rotating the head in a different axis and again similar to the grabbing you can now press x to lock the rotation around the x axis no matter where your camera is position so let's face them from the front plus r x and now if you move you can only rotate them around the x axis y for the y axis z for the z axis you can also use shift and x or shift z and shift and y to rotate within a plane but i find those ones less useful so i don't generally use that now left click will always confirm if you want to cancel simply right click with your mouse or hit escape on your keyboard and it's back to where it was finally let's talk about scaling and you may have guessed it with your object or objects selected press s to scale and then you can simply drag out or in to scale your object now i recommend try to avoid having your mouse directly on the center object object because if i now press s it's actually really hard to control because the distance or the multiplier that is used to figure out how much the scale is based on how far my mouse was from the center of the object to begin with so i recommend have your mouse a little bit further away then press s you can see that line there to scale in and out and same thing again x for the x axis y for y z for the z axis or shift x y and z to constrain the scaling to two planes so i can squish my monkey in or blow them up on just you know parts of the axis so now we know how to create and modify objects within blender and by the way let's just reset the camera back to the center of the world as well as the 3d cursor by pressing shift and c to kind of move the 3d cursor back to the origin cameras focus back on the origin so we got an overview over our entire scene and now let's talk about how to add materials to your objects to actually give them some color and make them look different because right now everything we have in the scene is the same boring dull gray now in blender you can easily create any sort of material that you can think of from plain plasticy color objects to really intricate color textures bump mapping distortion glass refraction and then you can also create volumetric materials for smoke and fire all of that is pretty advanced and i'd like to get to that later in this course let's just start with something really simple let's just say i want these three objects to have different colors so let's select the monkey head in the properties panel let's come all the way down to this little soccer ball looking thing right here that's the material properties let's click on that and we're now in the material properties panel it's pretty empty right now because the monkey itself does not yet have a material assigned to it in order to create a new material to assign to our boring grey monkey simply press new that is going to create a new material called material001 by default by the way you can simply click into this and i highly recommend naming your materials so let's call this one monkey underscore matte for material hit enter to confirm don't worry too much about the fact that it's replicated up at the top single objects can have multiple materials assigned to them because you can assign them to parts of the objects like the ears the eyes and the rest of that might have different materials for now there's just the one material called monkey matte that's selected right here as well don't worry too much about the used nodes and all of the other fancy stuff there's tons of settings in here play around with them have fun and just see what happens for now let's simply come down a little bit you can just use your mouse wheel you can also click and hold the middle mouse button and drag down up to scroll through the contents of these panels and that's super useful i use that all the time let's simply come to the base color click on this that's going to bring up a color picker let's change this to maybe a bluish color and you will notice that in the viewport the monkey is now blue now do note that this blue this material will only show if you're in rendered or material preview mode so both of those will show the actual material if you go into solid shading mode or wireframe that will not show any material so make sure you either in material preview or in rendered shading mode otherwise these materials will not show let's just select the sphere but keep an eye on what happens in this material properties panel right here if i select the sphere well this object has no materials and again it's all blank if you reselect the monkey head you can see your monkey and your monkey material back in here let's select the sphere and you can either now click on new to create a new material for the sphere or over on the left hand side you actually have this drop down here if you pop this open you will see there's a monkey mat our monkey material that we created there's also a blank material which is the default material that blender creates and assigns to the cube and you'll see that in just a second so in here you could now select to assign the monkey material to this sphere now do note that this material is now shared between the sphere and the monkey head and that's indicated in blender with this little box here saying there's now two objects referencing this material that means that if you were to change this base color or any of the other properties in this material let's change this to green you will change both the sphere and the monkey head because they're both using the same material let's just change this back to a sky blue sphere and monkey are now blue again with this here selected come into the materials properties let's click this little x to unassign that material from our sphere so now it has no material it's blank and gray again let's hit new to create a new material again let's rename this one to sphere matte and let's change the base color of this to maybe a red with the sphere selected press delete on your numpad to zoom in on it you can see that's what this material looks like let's just come down and change a few other properties for example let's jack up this metallic property right here and you can see how that's affecting the look and feel of this material it now feels well more metallic because we brought up the metallic value of that material you can also increase or decrease the specular highlight you can see that getting a little bit brighter right there and you can bring down the roughness so right now the light that hits this material is kind of getting diffused just a little bit which is making that look a little bit soft but you can bring down the roughness to essentially make the material closer to something like glass that is very reflective so let's bring down the roughness you can see how that's suddenly getting much much shinier i may also right click the sphere and select to shade this one smooth you can see this really nice highlight there if you bring up the roughness again you're diffusing that and making it a much softer material and again there's tons of properties in here i'm not going to go through all of them just have a play around there's so many cool things you can do so now we have a sphere material and one for our monkey head if i click middle mouse button or just scroll up in here this is now the monkey material selected again sphere has the sphere material which is red let's select the cube and this one already has a material sign called material because by default in the default scene that blender created for us you already had this cube and you already had a default material on it now you can either delete this and create a new one or i'm just going to rename it to cube map come down let's change the base color maybe this one i'll make bright yellow again with the cube selector to delete on the numpad to zoom in on that so you can check out what that looks like come down a little bit i want it to be a little bit more specular a little bit less rough so it just gets a little bit more shiny and you'll see the effect of all of these changes as well when we start dealing with lights a little bit better now i actually want my scene to kind of have a plane underneath that reflects these objects a bit nicer just to make the scene look a little bit more interesting for that with the 3d cursor at the origin of the world and again if it is not because you've moved it with holding down shift and clicking right or because you were on the cursor tool and you were clicking that 3d cursor around press shift and c to reset the 3d cursor to the center of the origin now let's press shift and a to add an object i'm going to add a mesh i'm going to add a plane that now added a plane and you can either scale it up in here so maybe let's make this 12 meters in size let's make sure you're on the selection tool let's click anywhere that pop-up box will disappear so let's select the plane press s for scale let's just drag this out to scale this plane up quite a bit more you can see these really nice shadows here now as well being cast by this light and we'll get to more lights in just a second let me just grab this cube press g to grab it move it up and you can see how the shadows update in real time that's ev working evie is an amazing tool since that's been introduced in blender 2.8 it makes working with blender so much more fun just because you can see all of these updates live in your viewport let me grab the monkey hat press g to move it i'm just going to move it over to the right hand side there the sphere move that over a little bit i want to push it back so i'm going to press y to lock the movement to the y axis drag that down g and x move that over there maybe move this forward just a little bit so i've got the three objects kind of lined up right there and what i might do as well select the plane press g and y and just push the plane back and maybe g and x and again just do whatever you want in here i'm just kind of just going with a very simple setup but obviously feel free to just tweak this in any way that you want i might also rotate my monkey around the z-axis just it kind of faces the camera a little bit better and i'm just going to move the camera in this is kind of where i want to be grab the plane x move that over to the right hand side so just so we've got a little bit of a nicer setup right here with the plane selected let's also give this a material so in the material properties tab press new to add a new material let's call this one plain underscore matte let's come down a little bit and i actually want to make this very non-rough so it actually i want this to be reflective and bring up the specular and the metallic base color oh white maybe not maybe i'll make this a bit darker it's almost like a black reflective surface maybe just a dark gray will do and that looks all right but there's no actual reflections and that's because we're using evie right now if you return to the render properties and change your render engine from ev over to cycles you can see you now have reflections because cycles is a ray tracing engine it deals really well with reflections and refractions you have a bit of noise don't worry about that too much for now you can fix that just with sampling and denoising now in the render settings if you are using cycles do make sure that your device is set on gpu compute so you're actually utilizing your graphics card and that might take a moment just to switch those drivers over but then rendering should be a whole lot faster however let's switch this back from cycles over to evie because you can actually well fake reflections in eevee by using something called screen space reflections with the eevee render engine selected you can come a bit further down there's actually a whole bunch of different options of things that are turned off by default but they make your scene look a whole lot nicer they're just a little bit slower to compute there's ambient occlusion which will add a little bit of shadow into the dark corners of your 3d objects there's bloom which will make bright parts of your image bloom and if you overdo that can look a little bit cheap but if you just come into the settings and tweak this a little bit maybe let's make this a little bit less intense and just a little bit smaller so it just doesn't look quite so gaudy it's just a bit more subtle that actually looks quite nice you can also control things like depth of field subsurface scattering a whole bunch of other things that again topics for other tutorials the one thing i want to enable is screen space reflections let's take this on and you now have reflections in eevee now these ones are kind of faked they're not real light bouncing around the scene and they have some limitations but they actually work really well to previewing and rendering a lot of scenes and just making them look nice so let's just go with that for now also because it makes rendering really nice and fast in the viewport now the one big thing to note is that ev is a little bit more limited than cycles in terms of what it can render and how well it can do that especially if you come to transparent and translucent materials like glass or water liquids cycles does a much better job evie doesn't properly support that just yet but they might come in a future release of blender so maybe by the time you're watching it you may as well use ev but if you want a fully realistic render do go with cycles you just get a much more realistic result especially once you jack up the render quality settings but again it's just going to take a little bit longer so let's stay on ev and let's talk about how to add more and more interesting lights into your scene right now we have a single light in our scene let's click on it to select it that's going to select that light in our outliner as well and like any other object you can grab it with g and then move it around your scene and you can now see the light moving you can position that anywhere that you want us just kind of move it over to the right hand side of that monkey head but using a single light to light your scene especially if it's just a point light can look a little bit boring so let's add a few more lights into our scene let's make sure you know where your 3d curse is or place it with shift and right clicking into your scene press shift and a to add a new object let's come down and there's so many objects in here that you can create but let's come into the light category and you can create a point light a sunlight a spotlight or an area light again i'm not going to go through every single one in detail let's just add an area light which is essentially a light source with a large surface like a light panel or something now right now nothing really happened let's press delete on the numpad with the light selected to zoom in and yeah it's kind of squished right there on the floor let's press g and pull it up and you can see the light source right there it's a bit weak so let's just drop that here press s to scale it just like any other object in blender let's pull that out to make that light source nice and big and while i still can't really see a whole lot of light and that's because the light itself is still quite weak by default however with this light selected by the way let's come into the outliner it's called area right now let's call this area light let's also come into the top right hand corner of the outliner click on the new collection icon to create a new collection let's rename this one by double clicking onto the name let's rename this one two lights click on the area light hold down control or command to select the bright light drag and drop both of them into the lights collection just so we're keeping things neat because then i can collapse my new stuff collection and the my stuff collection and i've just got my two lights here in this nice collection so i can turn them on and off all together but let's come back to this area light make sure it's selected and in the properties panel with a light selected further towards the bottom you've got this light bulb icon here and that is your light settings click into that and in here you can now change the slide from an area light to a spotlight a sunlight or a point light in any way you want but let's remain on area you can change the color but also the power right now it's 10 watts and if you've ever installed a 10 watts light bulb that is not very bright so let's click and drag this over to the right hand side and you can see now it's brightening up a little bit let's drag this to maybe almost a thousand or so and again you can also just click into it maybe give it a thousand two hundred like a really nice and bright light let's just rotate around a little bit and with the light selected press r to rotate it and you can now rotate this light around a much nicer way though for lights especially area lights is that they have this little target icon here you can simply click on this yellow dot that is attached to the end of this light and drag it to where you want the point that light so let's point it forward a little bit but you can see the light only starts right here so let's grab this light with g just drag it back a little bit and i might also just move it up by pressing g and then z to move it up like that and it's kind of really rotated so let's press r and y and just rotate this light a little bit because it's just kind of oddly positioned i kind of want it floating behind those objects but not penetrating through the ground plane so you can see it right there and you can now again select this little target icon here and drag that out to kind of point it maybe to the center of the screen so the light is kind of positioned there facing forward let's come back into the light properties and change the color from being fully white to maybe something just a little bit pink reddish or something i'm finding the powers a little bit too weak so maybe let's jack this up to three thousand yeah it's a bit nicer it's just a little bit more intense and let's add another area light on this side with a different color and for that you can either create a new one by hitting shift and a coming into light adding the arrow light or you could actually just duplicate this light and you can do this with any object in blender simply select the object press shift and d for duplicate and now we can drag this duplicated light around so i'm going to drag this over to the right hand side rotate around a little bit grab this target and pull that towards the center as well so you now have these two big lights positioned there and it's kind of penetrating down there let's press r and y let's just rotate that around just a little bit but i'm also going to change the color of this second light here from pink to maybe something a little bit blue or green maybe i'll scale this down a little bit and move it down just so it's just a little bit different so they don't look like they're exactly the same thing but i might actually jack the brightness up just a little bit more as well so maybe i'll make this 5000 watts select the other light as well check that up to 5000 as well but again just play around with this in any way that you want if we zoom in now we now have some really nice lighting reflections we've got shadows we've got a whole lot going on in the scene but before we can render this out we need to now set up our camera so that blender knows how and from what position and at what focal length to actually render out our final image so let's pretend we're happy with our scene setup and we now want to render out this image the most natural thing to do would be to simply come up into the main menu there's a big render tab in here click on render and then simply select to render image or just hit f12 so let's do that now that popped up outside of the screen let me just drag that in and well let's zoom out by scrolling down on the mouse wheel well it looks like it's part of our scene but it's certainly not what we're seeing in the 3d view let's close this render window again and the reason for that is that anytime you render a scene within blender blender will use the camera that is set up in your scene now if i rotate around and zoom out a little bit there's a camera in our scene already and if you look at where it's pointing at it's kind of just pointing down here at the floor it's not actually pointing at our objects and you can easily jump into the view of this camera by hitting zero on your numpad that is going to transition you into the camera's view and this is what we're seeing and if you hit f12 again or again come to render render image but again i'm a fan of shortcuts so f12 to render this out again it's off screen let me just shrink this window down just a little bit and zoom out so we can see the whole thing yes this is exactly what we're looking at through the camera within our scene so in order to get the view that we want in the 3d view we need to make sure this camera view matches what we want let's close this out and right now we're in the camera's view by the way if you had zero on the numpad again it should jump right back out of the camera and for anyone who's saying oh i don't have a numpad i'm using a laptop or some other keyboard that doesn't have a numpad you can always come up into preferences so under edit go into preferences again let me bring that into the screen go into input and at the top here you have an option to emulate numpad if you enable that then your normal number keys on the keyboard act as if they were the numpad so 0 on your keyboard will then jump you in and out of camera view let's just leave that disabled for a second let's close this out and by the way remember how when you selected an object and you pressed delete on the numpad it kind of frames on that object if again you don't have a numpad you can select the object so let's select the camera for example come up into view and in here there's a menu option to frame your selected objects it's currently assigned to delete or full stop on my numpad you can reassign all these keyboard shortcuts as well so if you select that that's essentially the same thing so you can work around if you don't have a numpad so let's hit zero on the numpad again to re-enter camera view and let's say i want to adjust the position the most natural thing would be to let's just move around i kind of just left that camera view right there i didn't change the camera i broke out of the camera view so let's hit 0 again but this time before we start moving around let's lock the position of the camera to this 3d view and you can do that via the view tab now that was a little bit hidden on the right hand side in the 3d view there's this little arrow pointing left you can either click on that to pop out this menu or you can press n on your keyboard with the cursor over the 3d view to collapse or expand that in here you'll find a number of different tabs and we want to navigate to the view tab because in here you have an option to lock camera to view make sure this is enabled and by the way in i think blender 2.93 and some of the newer releases there's an option for that up here just because it's used so much with the camera locked to your view i can now move around my 3d view and you may notice i'm no longer breaking out of that camera let's just press n to hide that panel for now i can now move around my 3d view zoom in and out just as i normally would and this actually changes the position of the camera so let's just navigate forward a little bit kind of position that camera as best as we can zoom out just a little bit let's press n to bring up the view tab again in here let's disable lock camera to view let's press n again to hide the panel and if you now move around again so now i've broken out of that camera view but you can see i've repositioned the camera up here if i now hit f12 let me just drag that in and mouse wheel down to zoom out in just a little bit and this now rendered out much more of what i was expecting let's close this again and this is now the view of the camera of our scene now this is a great way to position your camera but there's actually one option that i prefer let's again enter camera view by pressing 0 on the numpad and this time rather than locking the 3d view to the camera let's just use navigation mode like you can literally pretend to be walking the camera around your scene in order to do that while in camera perspective you can hold down shift and press the tilde key the little squiggly line on the left side of your numbers at the top of your keyboard and that is going to enable walk navigation so now i can use my mouse to look around and wasd just like a first person shooter to essentially move and navigate my camera around q moves me down e moves me up and i can now kind of slide the camera right into position to kind of frame up my objects right the way i want them to maybe just like that left click to confirm again let's move around and you can see the camera has now been repositioned press f12 to render that out and again let me drag that in and that is looking pretty nice let's close this out again hit zero again to enter that camera view and by the way if you have accidentally deleted your camera or you don't have a camera in the scene you can simply add one by pressing shift and a or coming into the object menu and in here you'll find camera so you can simply add another camera into your scene let me just drag that up a little bit and now i have two cameras so blender wouldn't know which one to use however you can simply select any camera in your scene and then come up into view cameras and then tell blender to use this active object this actively selected camera as the actual camera for rendering now i'm not going to change any of that here i'm just going to select that other camera press x and confirm to delete that because i already have a camera in my scene but i've found some people who accidentally deleted their camera and then blender will say well i can't render this because i don't know which camera to use now let's go back into the camera view by pressing 0 on the numpad and rather than pressing shift and tilde again if that's a bit too difficult you can also come up into the header in the 3d view and under view you'll find a sub menu for navigation and in here you can then enable fly navigation which is more steering an airplane or walk navigation which we had on just before so you can kind of frame up your objects i'm actually quite happy with the framing what i might do is i might grab this monkey press g then x just to move it a bit closer to the cube select that sphere g grab it move it around a little bit maybe i'll grab it and press x just to move it a bit closer to that cube as well maybe let's move it down a little bit move the monkey down a little bit as well press shift and tilde because i'm still in camera perspective to enable walk navigation just go in a little bit closer right then what i might do as well i might select the ground press g and y and just push the ground back a little bit so there's a bit more background behind this object maybe also press s to scale that up so now i've got my camera set up nicely plenty of space behind my objects and if i now hit f12 to render this out let's bring this in and this is a nicely set up scene so now finally we just need to talk about rendering and well we've kind of been doing a lot of that already because we've been rendering our scene via the render menu and by the way the easiest way to save these images is simply in this render window that you'll get when you render your scene come into image select save as that is going to bring up a blender file browser and then you can simply give your file a name let's call this my first render hit save image and then if you navigate to where we saved that image here it is my first render and that is the file that we've just saved out now just very quickly before we conclude this tutorial let's close down the render window and let's just move this out of the screen again and let's just quickly talk on a few of the render and output settings that may be relevant as you're getting set up to render your first project so in the properties panel bottom right hand side by default in your blender workspace come into the output properties and in here you can define the resolution like the width and height of your final output image by the way up here if you click on that you get a bunch of presets very easy to select so hdtv 1080p or you can render in 4k you can select any of these that will apply them and you can tweak them this percentage here is super useful by the way if you're rendering a really complex scene that takes long to render especially if using the cycles render engine let's just switch over to cycles just to give you a taste of that as you can see that renders just a little bit slower and if you hit f12 and bring up the render window you can see my machine crunching through rendering this out this is taking a whole lot longer than it does with ev but the result is just so much nicer it's so much more realistic because it's a physically based rendering engine that essentially simulates light bouncing around these objects and interacting with everything in your scene so this generally can look a whole lot nicer especially again as i've mentioned if you're dealing with transparent or translucent objects or some of the more advanced features that aren't yet supported by ev but because that took a little while to render maybe i just want to render a preview initially so let's close this out let's come back into the output settings and in here i can adjust the percentage of resolution so if i render this out at 50 resolution that will render it at 960 by 540 half the resolution so if i now hit f12 bring that in that's only half the resolution for this image and it renders much quicker so you can get a nice quick preview and then once you're ready to render out the final image you can just jack that right back up so let's come back in here jack this back up to 100 a little bit further down you also find options for the output directory and you can just click on this little folder icon here that will bring up a browse dialogue and you can select a folder somewhere on your hard drive or create a new one where you want to save your files now do note that when you hit f12 to render your files this does not automatically save them to this output location if you're rendering out single images in order to save those images again the easiest is simply to come up into the image menu hit save as and then just save that anywhere on your hard drive that you would want now this output folder is useful for rendering out animations because they have many images that need to be saved or if you're rendering your project out by the command line it knows where to save this file now there's also tons of options in here you can change the file output format and deal with image sequences movies and all the other advanced stuff if you're getting to rendering out animations but for now with our resolution set at 1920x1080 at 100 let's simply click into our 3d view hit f12 to render that out and hopefully this is enough to get you started and excited about all of the cool stuff that you can do with blender there's so many awesome features and we've really just scratched the absolute surface of what is possible with this awesome tool but i really hope that you like this introduction as always if you do have any comments questions feedbacks just leave all of that down below let me know what you'd like to see next there's so much cool stuff that you can do with blender there's always new features coming out things do change over time so do let me know what you would like to see next i'm absolutely keen to make more videos for blender let's talk about all of the cool stuff that you can do with this amazing free tool and that is all there is to it please like and subscribe if you enjoyed this video and you would like to see more all and any useful links you will find down in the video description and please leave any comments questions or suggestions below thank you very much for watching and until next time i will see you later

Channel: Surfaced Studio

Views: 64,975

Rating: 4.9780736 out of 5

Keywords: Blender, Tutorial, Blender 2.9, Beginner, Getting Started, Basics, Free, 3D, Introduction, Interface, how to use Blender, create cameras, create lights, adding materials, moving objects, scale, rotate, 3D cursor, entry level, modeling, instructions, guide, rendering, cycles, EEVEE, workbench, shading modes, splitting panels, Surfaced Studio, exporting, saving images, shadows, monkey head, noob, free 3d program, best 3d program, free training, complete course, complete beginner

Id: bB3qtedwbSI

Length: 69min 30sec (4170 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 30 2021