Blender Beginner Tutorial - Part 1

get a if you are new to blender then welcome you're in the right place this is a complete beginners tutorial series designed to show you how to use all the main features of blender whilst learning how to create a delicious doughnut and some coffee now I know you are excited you want to start clicking on things and learning things but since this is part 1 of a series I want to take just 60 seconds to explain what you will learn and what you won't learn so right now this is you you are a little red dot and you are entering into the wide world of 3d and if you've done any research you probably know there is a lot to learn and it can be a little overwhelming and you can feel like I'm never gonna learn at all so why bother well the good news is you don't need to know everything if you're familiar with the 8020 rule there is really only 20% of the features inside 3d software that you use 80% of the time and that is what this course is all about it's teaching you those core concepts that you're going to use all the time so that you can then by the end of it feel confident creating your own projects in the future so this is all going up for free on YouTube and I've just separated it by level just like in terms of chapters so you know what to expect in terms of difficulty but if you follow it from start to finish rest assured you can create a doughnut and coffee that final image there you can get there because there are half a million people who completed the last version of this tutorial that I made three years ago there's even a blended donut subreddit where you can see the results of people that finish the last course so it might look advanced at this stage like oh I don't know 3d how am I gonna you know you can get there right if you just follow it through to the end now this is part one of level one so this is going to be the basics of the basics and we are going to start with the user interface and just to keep it interesting I promise you if you finish the end of this video you will learn how to set a monkey head on fire random but you'll see so open wonder for the first and this is what you should see now this big area here this big patch of space is called the 3d viewport and it's where you'll spend probably 90% of your time if you are modeling something if you're like laying out a scene and you're moving things around it's all gonna happen right here so let's talk about moving stuff so we have the cube here the default cube selected and let's say we want to move it so if you go to the tool bar you've got a move function right and when you do that you'll see that you get these arrows that appear over your cube now if I just click and drag on any of these arrows you can see that I'm moving it along that direction that AXI so there's three axes because there are three dimensions in the world the z axis the x axis and the y axis so along those I can sort of move it anywhere within this space here okay so that's moving and the next one underneath that you've got rotate I can rotate something along a specific axis well by the way if you just like don't click on any of these like highlighted colors just click anywhere in there it's gonna like track board which is like just free rotate if you release by the way it's gonna like oops sorry release the mouse it's going to like drop it wherever you set it to but if while rotating it you just right click it's gonna like cancel the action or you hit escape right but anyways then you've got scale so they click the scale option now I've got these that function there or this axes all that axes etc um or click anywhere within there and now you're scaling just the size of the thing okay so move rotate scale and then by the way that one down there is like all three of them mashed in together for I don't know people who are running out of time and they need to click them all at the same time for some reason but anyways that that's how you can do things but actually the faster way to work is to memorize the hotkeys because you're gonna use this a lot and every time you want to like wrote a toast if you have to go up here then click on this then click on this it's a lot of work it doesn't sound like it but when you're doing it like repeatedly hundreds of times an hour it it's a lot of work so what I would suggest you memorize is the hotkeys so to move something it's G G for grab ok G and when you do that it's attached to your cursor so you just tap the key once and you don't have to like click or hold or anything like that it's now attached to my cursor if I right-click I'm canceling the movement but if while it's moving like that if I just left-click it's now confirmed the movement now it's it's free movement right now so if I was to push the letter of any of those axes like Zed I'm now moving it along the z axis or X or Y ok so again that that's while it's moving if I hit any of those keys I can snap it to that axis or instead of having to like do a separate key so while it's moving if instead of hitting those axes buttons if I hold down the middle mouse button which is did I talk about the middle mouse but I didn't talk about I've recorded this tutorial five times if you click in on the the scroll wheel that's the middle mouse button and if you hold that in you'll see that it's like snapping it to a specific axes so that's actually a really fast way to work so if I hit G I can move it down so G quickly tap middle mouse to get it to the right axes then click then G quickly tap middle mouse get it to the right axis I can do this and I can move this cube anywhere and it's a really fast way of working it's great and those hotkeys work the exact same way so sorry for for rotating scale so if while rotating free rotate XYZ or middle Mouse and I'm gonna rotate it along the x axis scaling again I don't have to be in scale mode I can just hit ss4 scale and that's going to scale it like that or I can s scale along the y axis by tapping Y X Z or s middle mouse button and snap it to a specific axes that I have in mind okay so those hotkeys G R and s tip of the iceberg my friends a lot of hotkeys to come there's a lot of hot keys in blender and so I created a shortcut PDF with like all the keyboard shortcuts so if you join my email newsletter I'll send you that it's a PDF that you can print out and stick on your wall or a Google Doc that you can like save and reference on a separate monitor or whatever but the link for that is in the description if you are interested because we're going to learn more hotkeys okay so the next hotkey is moving around like navigating within this space here because we're just looking at it from this view but let's say this cube was all the way off-screen where's it gone how are we gonna see it now so if you use the middle mouse button which is again the scroll wheel if you push that in if you hold bad down that is called orbiting or rotating the view but orbiting right and that enables you to rotate around the view now you'll see that it we can't really get close to that cube there because we're just looking at the center of our scene right now so if we want to pan to a separate area if we hold down shift middle mouse button and drag across then we are looking at a new area so those two functions middle mouse button to orbit and then shift middle mouse button to drag to a new section of very common so I can go anywhere in my space just with those those two functions shift middle mouse button to pan middle mouse button to whole bit so just familiarize yourself with that just try to move around to different areas of the canvas a 3d view like so now if perchance you do not have a mouse with a scroll wheel or you're on a laptop with a trackpad good luck with that by the way tough road ahead but there is another way which is to use this gizmo in the top right hand corner if you just click and drag anywhere within that that is orbit and then if you click this hand tool and just hold that will move it so this this whole gizmo section here was designed it's it's a new feature of blender but it's basically designed because you know we know that tablet devices and everything on the rise and at some point people are going to start using them on surface tablets or something and they've only got a stylus so you don't need a mouse you know with all the functions to to move around blender anymore you've got this if you needed it or by the way let's say you know you just don't have that the scroll wheel thing but you you don't want to have to keep using the gizmo if you go to your user preferences you'll see something there in input called emulate 3-button Mouse which will just enable you to use alt and then left-click as the middle mouse alternative essentially so yeah the other one I clearly mentioned because I think I've been doing it without realizing a scroll wheel that's zoom or you can click that little hold down the little magnifying glass thing and you'll zoom in and out now the cube is over there and we could get to it by panning over there but when you've got a lot of stuff in the scene like let's say we duplicate this cube which you could do by going to object and then click on duplicate objects but you can see the hotkey there you can memorize that hotkey shift D we can move that cube over there right so we're like we're looking at the cube over here but now we're gonna get all the way over there a lot of work so if you just click on an object and you want to focus on that like just zoom over there if you hit the number pad period key which is yeah that little dot in the bottom corner of your number pad it will focus on that object ok so that's a very fast way of like changing your focus so you don't have to like fart around with like oh I'm gonna move over there extra slow nice and easy now easy does it don't get lost right and by the way going back to people with a laptop most laptops don't have number pads so the other hotkey that you should memorize is the tilde key which is that key underneath the Escape key there's one there that says view selected this so it'll bring up a pie menu and one of the options in the pie menu view selected and release and there we go does the exact same thing as as numberpad peered game alright let's delete this little extra cube let's find my original cube and I'm gonna move this over back to the center with G middle mouse to drag it along the y-axis and then I'll hit number pad period again and focus on that cube now look at that we're back at the start now there's more to blender than just cubes so let's make it a little bit more interesting so I'm gonna delete the cube here by just tapping delete or X if you're don't want your arm to move as far let's replace it so I have to leave the cube now I'm gonna go to the top X section up here you'll see one that says add and you'll get a whole bunch of options that will appear here and you can replace it with something but it's a long way to go for your mouse when you're adding stuff frequently in blender so shift a is a very common hotkey that you should memorize shift a memorize it as add I'm adding something shift a and you got a whole bunch of stuff here now oh by the way this will this will be applicable like if you're in the node view of you're in other views within blindness so shift days are good one to memorize now there's a whole bunch of stuff here um some things that I've never used before like speaker don't know what that does it's just useful to someone but not to me the main ones you'll use are underneath mesh you've got a whole bunch of what are called primitives like plain you can add in a plan it's the ground plane you've got a whole bunch of other really like boring sounding ones and then you go one right at the bottom there what's cool monkey so obviously we're gonna click it and this brings us into the final part of this video that I promised you we're gonna set this monkey head on fire which is cruel thing to do but it's not real so no need to email me so with the monkey head selected we're gonna use a little Easter egg feature of blender but it's like basically if you push f3 this allows you to bring up the search bar which is actually very common this isn't Easter egg puppet f3 is like you can search for anything like if you forget the shortcut for something you can just like type it in and there it is and you can you can do it but if we type into the search bar smoke you'll see there's one there called quick smoke and what this does is it has applied a smoke simulation to my selected object which basically just saves you from like setting up a box and then sending a smoke sim and blah blah blah blah blah it's just done that for you and then if I hit that play button right at the bottom there you can see it's samokhin now I promised you fire though so if you select the monkey and then click the simulator panel button which you know it's getting a bit advanced but just in here where it says smoke if you change that to fire and smoke and there you go you have set the monkey head on fire pretty random but hey it's cool right and so that's the end of this video go ahead click here to watch the next video where I promise you we will start building that donut because this was just user interface fooling around showing you the basics and if you haven't already go ahead and get my PDF keyboard shortcut PDF link is in the description because that'll come in handy for the rest of the series so I will see you in the next video

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 10,367,174

Rating: 4.9505987 out of 5

Keywords: blender, tutorial, beginner, 3d, donut, doughnut, blender donut, blender tutorial

Id: TPrnSACiTJ4

Length: 14min 33sec (873 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 04 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Gredran]

There are other basic tutorials out there, and you should also damn well follow them, BUT THIS was the tutorial that got me to STICK with this complex software and wanna keep moving forward! He’s awesome and so is this tutorial!

[u/Draknar95]

I really hope he makes lots of tutorials for blender 2.8 I feel like he gives you loads of tips and advice for future projects, his videos aren’t just a set of instructions for you to mindlessly copy. He also does a much better job explaining what he’s doing and why compared to other tutorials.

[u/MunkRubilla]

Andrew is essentially sharing his donut recipe with us.

What a god.

[u/A1pH4W01v]

Rename the title to "Blender 2.8 tutorial" since its been updated. Just so people dont get confused

[u/Magnus-Artifex]

Ah shit, here we go again

[u/King_Kr]

I'm going to try it, might learn something new, been blending for 4 years

[u/Xaviarsly]

Hmmmmmmmm donuts. 😏

[u/Leestons]

So we're going to get even more donuts posted here.

[u/csquaredisrippn]

Another excellent job with tutorials! Thanks for updating the tutorial Andrew! What a bro move!