BLENDER BASICS 4: Transforming Objects and Adjusting Transformations

now that we can select our objects let's work on transforming them and unfortunately i don't mean this in the decepticon or autobot sense of the word i just mean our basic movement we can find our transform properties for any object in the properties editor and it's the one that's opened by default but just to make sure it's the orange square here with the four corners around it those are our object properties the first panel is the transform panel and here we have location rotation and scale if we just click and drag on any one of the location axes we can move it along the x-axis move it along the y-axis or move it along the z-axis or if you want to type in any specific number then you can just type it in here so i can just set it to one one and one and that's where it's going to exist in the world now a couple handy tricks when it comes to dealing with these number fields in blender first of all a lot of them are going to be a little bit touchy in this case this ends up working pretty well i can just left click and drag my mouse around in order to maneuver this how i want but let's say i'm zoomed in really really close and that's just moving it way too much well what i can do is just hold down shift and then left click and drag and that's going to move it a lot more slowly so this is helpful all over blender another thing that's helpful here is let's say i just drag it you know way too off to the side here and i want to reset it all to zero zero zero or 1 1 1 whatever it is i can left click on the top one and drag down through the other ones and let's just set them all to let's say 2 then they're all going to be set to 2 2 2. so you can change multiple values in a row like this and it's really fast you can also reset any input back to its default by hovering over with your mouse and hitting backspace another cool little fun fact is that you can do any math that you want inside of these so let's just say you wanted to do two plus five and for whatever reason you didn't want to pull out a calculator let's just say two plus five then you can just type that out inside of the number field and hit enter and it'll do the math for you and tell you that that's seven now it's kind of a simple example but if you wanted to you know divide this by you know 263 or whatever for whatever particular reason then you can just do any of that math in here and it'll come up with the right answer for you but i'll go ahead and set this back to 0 0 0 here and let's look at rotation just in the same way i can rotate it along the x-axis the y-axis or the z-axis now we haven't really talked about axis a whole lot yet as it's kind of just assumed that in 3d space we have an x y and a z axis and we can see that in the 3d viewport y is always represented by green x is always represented by red and z is represented by blue you can also see that here in the axis gizmo here at the top that we looked at when it comes to navigation remember that in blender the z axis is up and down and the 2d plane the x and the y plane is when you're looking at things from the top view the dimension of depth is going up and down next let's look at scale i'm going to skip the rotation mode because that's a lot more complicated of an issue which we'll talk about in later courses so i'll set the rotation back to 0 0 0 here and you can see we can also scale along the x-axis the y-axis or the z-axis now it would be pretty tedious to have to go to the properties editor every time that we want to move or rotate or scale something so we can also do that via the toolbar over here on the left side of the 3d view we have a bunch of tools that we can use so far we've just looked at the selection tools at the top but now let's look at this second section which is the transform tools i'll select the first one and use our move tool that's going to give us this gizmo with the x y and z axes so i can very easily click and drag on any of these arrows to move it along that axis so the red one is the x-axis the green one is the y-axis and the blue one is the z-axis if i click and drag on the white circle that's in the middle here i can move it along any axis but according to the view these little squares are really helpful as well because if you click and drag on those you'll move them along two axes at the same time this one between the x-axis and the y-axis is blue and that indicates that it'll move in any direction except on the z-axis so i can click and drag and move it around that z-plane i can also move it around the x-plane or if the y-plane next let's select the rotation tool in a very similar manner i can rotate this along the x-axis the y-axis or the z-axis if i click and drag on the white circle that surrounds these then i can rotate according to the view one hotkey that might be helpful here for you is holding down the control key while you do this will help it to snap to even increments so if i start rotating this and then hold down control you'll see there are a bunch of ticks that go around the circle and so i can easily snap it to rotating let's say 90 degrees or 45 degrees or whatever i need to now after i move or rotate anything i'm going to get this little pop-up here in the bottom left and by default it's collapsed but if i go ahead and expand that then i can see exactly how much i rotated this by and in this case it's 95 degrees if you wanted to rotate this by some exact increment then you could just type it in here but this is really hard to see here with this angled in kind of an odd direction so i'll set the rotation back to zero zero zero in the properties editor now let's say i wanted to rotate this by exactly 45 degrees in the x direction well i could either just click and drag on the x axis in the rotation tool hold ctrl and try to snap exactly but let's say i get it a little bit off then i can always just type in 45 degrees here in the redo panel and then click enter so this little pop-up is called the redo panel or the adjust last operation panel that's going to allow you to change the values of whatever you just did in the viewport i'll go ahead and set the x rotation back to zero now and let's look at scale if we grab our scale tool here then we can scale along the x-axis the y-axis or the z-axis or along all the axes if i click and drag the white circle now if you're particularly observant you might have noticed that there's a little tiny corner indicating that there's more tools next to the scale tool just like how this one has a little tiny corner in the bottom right where we can click and hold and access more tools that are similar same thing here we can switch from the scale tool to the scale cage tool so again click and hold on the tool and go down to scale cage now you can click on any one of these points and manipulate it in a little bit more of a familiar way if you're more used to tools like photoshop but in three dimensions try clicking and dragging on one of the dots in the middle of the faces or on one of the corners lastly we have the all-in-one transform tool here at the bottom with this one we can click and drag the arrows to move click and drag the circles to rotate or click and drag the little boxes in order to scale and if at any point you do something by accident or you want to reverse it then you can hit ctrl z like in most programs to undo so hit ctrl z a couple times and get us back to our basic cube we only have a limited number of undo steps though so it won't get us back all the way so if you want to completely reset things you could either set them manually in the transform panel in the properties editor let's say here i want to take the scale and set it back to 1 1 1. instead of doing that from the properties editor i can also go to object clear and scale that will do the exact same thing as setting 1 1 1 as the scale in the properties editor i don't really like looking at this gizmo here so i'm actually going to go back to my select tool and i want to show you that i can do that exact same thing but for rotation and location so i'm just going to change my location a little bit here change my rotation and then go to object clear and location and then object clear and rotation now we're back to the default cube so using our tools over here on the left was a lot faster than using the properties editor but there's an even faster way to do it and that's with hotkeys that's what most people are going to be doing most of the time if you're watching a tutorial so it's definitely well worth getting into your muscle memory now if you can i'll zoom in on this box here and to grab something and move it around we just hit the g key so hit g that'll jump you right into the transformation and then you can move your mouse around to confirm left click this works a little bit differently from other programs because as soon as you hit g it jumps you right into the action it takes a little bit of time to get used to if you're coming from another 3d app but in my opinion it's a lot faster to work with because there are just fewer clicks if you want to constrain your movement to just one axis like we were doing before then you can type that access in after you hit g while it's still in that move mode so let's say i want to move this only on the x-axis well i can just hit g to move and then while i'm still in the mode of moving it around before i hit anything else i can just hit x now i can move my mouse around and it'll move it just on the x-axis then i can left click again to confirm to move it on the y axis i just hit g y and then move my mouse left click to confirm and of course for z we can hit g to move z for the z axis and left-click to confirm one handy thing to know about moving with the hotkeys is that you can also type in numbers so let's say that i want to move this two units along the y-axis well instead of hitting g and then y and then left clicking to confirm and then going down to the redo panel and typing in 2 manually i could just hit g y type in 2 and then hit enter that'll move it exactly 2 units it's also helpful to know that our shift hotkey works here as well so if we're moving this around and we find that we're moving it a little bit too fast we can move it just ever so slightly by holding down the shift key that's going to slow everything down for us and help us be really precise just like we have the g hotkey for grabbing an object we have the r hotkey for rotating the object so just hit r and then you can rotate it according to the screen and just like before you can use the x to rotate around the x the y key to rotate around the y or the z key to rotate it around the z axis let's also do that with scale the hotkey for that is just s so hit s move your mouse around to scale things up or down let's say we want to scale this and make it exactly twice as big then i can just hit 2 on my number pad and then hit enter if i want to make something half as big then i can use the value of 0.5 so i'll hit s 0.5 and click enter of course we can also scale along the three axes as well so we s and then x to scale along the x axis s and then y to scale along the y axis and then s and z to scale along the z-axis and use left-click to confirm one thing that's not particularly obvious here is that when you're using rotation and scale the amount that you move the object by is determined by the distance between the object and your cursor so if you hit r to rotate and you rotate your mouse around the object it's going to move pretty fast if your mouse is really close to the center of that object which is that little orange dot however if you pull your mouse farther out and give yourself a bigger radius to work with you can be a little bit more exact so closer in with bigger movements farther out with more subtle movements your mouse will also wrap around the screen if it goes off to the side then left click to confirm another helpful hotkey to know if we don't want to go to object and clear to clear our rotation you can see that we have the hotkeys listed on the right of the menu which is alt g alt r and alt s so that's just undoing any grabbing rotation or scaling so to bring this back to the center i'll just hit alt g to unrotate it i'll hit alt r and to unscale it i'll hit alt s so even though we've just talked about how to move rotate and scale our objects in this video that's still a lot of information now if you're just starting out i would recommend first using the tools on the toolbar and getting used to those it's pretty visual and intuitive so just by getting used to these three i'll switch back to the scale tool by clicking and holding on the scale one but just by using these three you'll be able to do any operation now as soon as you're comfortable with that and you're ready to use hotkeys then i would recommend learning those as soon as possible because they're a lot faster to use but if you find it a little bit overwhelming at first to have to remember all these hotkeys then just don't worry about it it doesn't really matter which method you use as long as it works for you i would recommend at least trying out all the different things in this video though before moving on to the next lesson [Music] you

Channel: CG Cookie

Views: 2,289

Keywords: Blender tutorial, learn blender, CG Cookie, blender beginner

Id: lLJilYum_lQ

Length: 13min 48sec (828 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 17 2021