Complete Beginners Guide to Blender 2.8 | Free course | Part 1 | The Interface

hello and welcome to Cabot Media I'm grant Abbott and in this course we're going to be making this fun scene here this is a complete beginners guide so if you're completely new to blender then this course will get you used to the interface and you'll learn how to text your models adapt shapes add new shapes and create scenes with lighting and render your scenes into a picture or movie file you can find lots of courses like this on gabot Cote UK where all the courses are free and you can go from beginner right through to advanced levels this first episode looks at the basic interface you may want to skip this one if you already know how to move objects around add objects and add materials to objects don't panic too much if it's a lot to take in I will be repeating lots of these commands and lots of these procedures in the subsequent videos so there's plenty of time to learn all the interface so let's begin this is what you'll see when you first start up blender 2.8 yours might be very slightly different because it might be a later version I've got the 2.8 release candidate but all the locations of the menus and things like that should be precisely in the same place this splash screen here will tell you which version you're using just there you can start a new file in general 2d animation sculpting visual effects or video editing general is the best one to start and if you click off the screen you're in the general layout so the first thing you'll want to do is move around your scene middle mouse button will rotate around the center point of your viewport camera the wheel will move in and out and hold down shift and middle mouse button and you can move around you've also got those options up here use the hand here to move around by left clicking and holding then you've got what are called Cartesian coordinates at the top here and you can go from the top view which is the z-axis looking down so we can see the Y and the X there and you can move around your view by clicking these as you wish and then middle mouse button if you want to go back into perspective mode and I'm upside down at moment so it takes a bit of getting used to make sure you've got the Zed going up and the Y and X going across and you know you're the right way up don't panic if you're finding moving around tricky because that's something that you get used to and you can start seeing in 3d after just a short time of use the next thing you'll want to do is add objects at the top here we've got a menu and we've got ad and we've got lots of different things we can add and you'll want to start with the meshes and later on you'll want to use the lights but I would lead the rest until you're a bit more advanced so we'll add a mesh and Wattpad a UV sphere you can see that it adds it right in the middle and it's got a yellow outline it's underneath our other one though so we'll want to get used to the movement tools now you have tools over here you got move rotate and scale I much prefer to use the keyboard shortcuts and I strongly suggest you do the same and my keyboard shortcuts are going to be displayed down the bottom left here G is to grab and you can move it around with G to grab if I left click that will set my movement I'll undo that with control Z or if I start moving around by pressing G again and right click it will go back and cancel that movement as long as I haven't left clicked if you find it easier you can use the gizmo up here by clicking on the gizmo and then clicking on the arrows to move things around beginners often find that easier but it is a lot slower left click to select different objects and then you can move them around now let's try rotating the cube so let's grab the rotation gizmo this done and we can grab an axes and spin it round so that's the set axis this is the x axis so the x axis goes along here and I can spin it around the x axis or there's the y axis like this I can undo that movement with a few clicks of control Zed lastly the scale if you click these different icons it will scale them in that axis let's move around a touch and if I click on the white ring I can scale the whole thing up okay so let's undo all those scales with controls it doesn't matter too much at this stage but it's a quick challenge add several of these objects and place them in a long line so hopefully you manage that now two things that would have made that slightly easier is going to front view with your gizmo up here and then you can line them up nice and easily I'm just pressing grab to move mine around and the other thing that makes it slightly easier instead of going to the add menu here is pressing shift a that's the shortcut to get the add menu up it's good to learn the shortcuts that you will become much faster if you do so okay so it'd be a nice to have a floor for these things to sit on select shift a and add a plane now notice that all these things are being added where my 3d cursor is which is this red and white dashed circle here and we can move that 3d cursor around by pressing shift right click or we can go to the cursor gizmo at the top here and move that around with that I prefer to leave mine on the selection box and press shift right click and whenever I add with shift a an object it will appear where that 3d cursor is I'm going to undo that and then select my plane again and scale it up you can use the gizmo here or you can press s to scale now you'll notice my objects aren't sitting on the floor so to get them sitting on the floor I can press g4 grab and then said in the z-axis and that will only move in the z-axis now so G then Zed of course you can use the movement gizmo if you prefer so it's hard to see whether the objects are sitting on the plane what I can do though is go to front view and now I can see much more easily whether these objects are sitting on this plane or not so your challenge now is to move these objects so they're sitting on the plane but you'll notice that as soon as I click off the plane I can't see it anymore so it makes far more sense to have the plane on the access line than in the middle of nowhere which it is at the moment so with the plane selected let's go to the front view and move that down G then Zed G to grab Zed to keep it on the z axis which is the up and down axis remember you can see those up here in the corner and then let's grab all our objects you can shift left click or you can box select by clicking and dragging as long as you have this select box I can enabled I've selected the camera as well so let's try again click and drag and then G then said we'll grab them all in the z-axis so let's move them close to that line and then we'll have to do a bit of manual adjusting so I'm selecting the objects pressing G to grab and then moving them onto the line so pause the video and have a go at that now I have all my objects lined up well though they're not lined up this way so if I go to top view with seven on my numpad or click the Z icon up there I can now line them up so G to grab and lining them up that's good better now one thing you will notice that when you go into something like front view you get the grid in the background this option up here is switch current view from perspective to orthographic projection we're currently in orthographic so it takes away any perspective see what happens when I press this button you can see that it adds this perspective but it takes away the grid it's harder to place objects when there's this perspective display it's much easier when it's in orthographic but it looks a bit weird when you move around in orthographic mode when you're not in front view side view or top view but if I click this in perspective mode it all makes sense now but I can go to one on my numpad 3 or 7 which of these different views up here and I can use that grid and place things in orthographic mode which is much easier when placing objects now the next bit you'll want to do is probably color in your objects so we can click on an object and we can go to the material tab down here but before we do that let's introduce you to the workspaces up the top we got layout modeling sculpting and so on and there's a shading option here I'm going to click on the shading and suddenly we get this layout we've still got our scene at the top here so we can move around in the same way but we've got what's called the node editor underneath it where we can add shaders we've also got our file manager and image editor to the side here I'm not going to go into those at the moment that's for a later series but for now let's concentrate on these two viewports here so in the shading layout with my object selected we'll start with this cone I can press new for new material and this is the shader editor so new and suddenly we get something that looks rather scary it's called the principal B SDF shader but it's actually fairly simple when you used to it we've also got these options over on the right-hand side here under material menu and you can see all the principal shader just there as well so don't worry too much about the node view just know that it goes from left to right so here's our principal shader and this is the material output so the surface which is the surface of the object we want to color that in with a different color so we can get to the base color here click on the white and change it to red by dragging this white dot down into the red you can change the tone of the color over on the right hand side and the hue of the color in this circle here there are other options that are really nice but we'll go into those at another time so I'll do that one more time on the ICO sphere so click the ICO sphere press new and we'll change this one to green under the base color drag the white dot over to the green and let's go for a mid-tone green so I want you to color in the different objects so pause the video and have a go at that okay now you'll notice that there are no shadows in our scene at the moment that's because we've got different rendered modes up here we've got four different options we've got wireframe which will show us a wireframe which can be quite handy at times if you want to see through objects solid mode which gives us just the grayish outline with some shading so we can see then this is called look dev so this is the colors and a bit of shading but no real lighting influence and then we have what's called rendered mode now we can see the influence of our light if I press it G to grab this light you can see the shadows moving so it's taking into account where the light is and projecting the shadows the reason why we have different modes is that it takes more computational power the further you go along these icons so this one is the least then we got a solid mode look Devers a little bit harder for the computer and then rendered mode is much harder since 2.8 it does very well in rendered mode because we've got a new render engine called evey but if your scene gets very complicated your computer may possibly struggle but also it may get very complicated trying to work on these different objects whilst all the shadows and lighting is enabled so you may want to use look dev so you can see the materials but still edit your objects or solid mode so you get a rough outline of where they are and it's much easier to edit your objects so those are the different rendering options let's go to rendered mode for now so we can see what it would look like in our finished result there is one other thing I want to talk about before making our final image and that's about sharing materials so if I click on the floor and I want this to share the same material as our cone here I can actually find materials that I've already created with this drop-down arrow here so there's the material for the cone I should really label all these materials but for now we're just practicing so let's click that and it shares the same material so one last challenge before we make our final image is to have a play with the principal shader so I'm going to click on the green I go sphere I move the light source in front of our objects so over here so we can see a bit more of our objects and maybe I'll put another light in now instead of adding a light I'm going to copy this one shift D to duplicate the shift D will duplicate an object and now we have two lights in our scene and it's a bit brighter you'll notice when I click on the lights we've got this lighting option here so the material option which would have if we had an object like this the material option changes when we click on the light and we get a lighting option instead and we can actually change the color and the power and other things about the light so I'd like you to have a go at experimenting with the principal shader so I'll need to click on one of my objects and there's the material for that object and just have a play around with the different options but just one thing to note before you do that it's important to understand the different rendering methods so up here we got the rendering tab and we've got two important rendering engines Eevee and cycles don't worry about workbench Eevee is what's called our real-time renderer but in order to be real-time it needs to fake a lot of things cycles however let's press on that is our realistic render and that takes into account how the light bounces how the shadows will fade off because of all the lights bouncing around in the scene the problem with cycles is it's very taxing on the computer if you have a GPU you can set up your GPU to render and that will do it faster but every time I move around my scene can you see how there's a number over the side here and that's the time it's taking to render that scene and you can up the quality of this by upping the samples their path tracing samples so at the moment we're on 32 and when I move it works its way up to 32 so it's not real time like Eevee but you'll notice when I go to Eevee it just doesn't look quite as good there's things we can do to Eevee to make it look better the main one being screen space reflections I click that suddenly we got a bit of reflections happening and there's other things that are really useful like ambient occlusion which is the crevices and you can turn this distance up and it ups the crevices and the shadows and the crevices and we're getting a bit closer to what cycles looks like like if I switch across the cycles and switch back to Eevee it's a bit better now with a bit more distance in our ambient occlusion and screen-space reflections on but reflections are something that's really hard for real-time render engines like Eevee to handle the good thing is that both render engines Eevee and cycles will have the same material setup for the most part until you get to really advanced work so you can flick between Eevee and cycles have a play around in both and see some real time results in Eevee or some very realistic results in cycles whilst you're playing around it might be an idea to stick to cycles so you can see the real benefits of all the changes down here but if you've got a slow computer then it's stick to Eevee so pause the video and have a go with that so hopefully you've managed to have a bit of a play around one other thing that's worth mentioning if you right-click on objects you get an object context menu so you can shade smooth for example and get this nice smooth look now in cycles if I bring the roughness down at this object we suddenly get some reflectivity we can also make this metallic usually objects are either nonmetallic or metallic so this is either 1 or 0 and we've got this nice metallic sphere and if I change the color of it perhaps to a Goldy color we can recreate some gold so the last thing is how do we make an image out of this at the moment we just got the viewport and it's a little bit grainy in places well we've got this object here and that's called our camera we can look through the camera by pressing 0 on a numpad or clicking this icon up here so that's camera view and this is what the camera sees if I am middle-click to move it around I come out of my camera view so let's press 0 on the numpad or the icon at the top here to get back to it in order to move around and move my camera in the same way as I move my scene so using the middle mouse button and so on press n on your keyboard and you'll come up with this menu down the side here now there's an option here called view you might not be able to see it very well so I'll expand my window down so it's a bit easier to see you can expand these windows by by hovering in between them and waiting for the arrow to appear and then clicking left mouse button and dragging so there's my view and down the view there is lock camera to view under view lock if I tick that now when I middle mouse button I'm moving my camera and I can move this into a nice position to make it look good now once we've got the camera in position we can render our image and that means take what's ever in the camera view and turn it into an image which we can send off to our friends and show off on Instagram in order to do that we got to render and render image now depending on the speed of your computer this may take some time and this is using cycles if you want to a quicker render then use Eevee and it will take just a few seconds but it won't look as realistic so i speeded mine up so i'll be quicker if you want to save this image now we go to the top left where it says image and we can then save our image here you can zoom in and out of your image with the wheel or middle mouse button in the same way but you'll notice that we've opened up a new render window so if I bring this down like this blender is in the background there and we can close down this window at any time to get back to blender so those I would say are the most important parts of the interface and you'll be able to get creating with basic objects and rendering your scene so in the next few episodes we'll actually be creating our character and starting to look more at rendering lighting and you'll be able to create some fun scenes in for your own in no time thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Grant Abbitt

Views: 907,554

Keywords: understand, texture, paint, how, to, learn, blender, tutorials, 3d, art, graphics, game, material, guide, easy, sculpting, sculptor, sculpt, painting, novie, starting, beginner, learning, blender2.8, new, course, fullcourse, full, lowpoly, scene, rendering, interface, basics

Id: 7MRonzqYJgw

Length: 18min 25sec (1105 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 18 2019