How to use Blender : Beginner Tutorial

hey guys this is Steve from CG geek and today we're going to be taking a look at how to use blender for the absolute beginner so maybe you've heard about blender and you've seen some of the amazing short films created in blender and some of the amazing art works and you've heard about just how powerful it is so you've downloaded it and now you don't know where to start you've opened it up and all you see is these confusing buttons you don't know what you're doing if you lost well this video is geared at getting you started and it's going to kind of get you comfortable with the user interface where your buttons are how to kind of operate in 3d and hopefully get you started and give you the confidence you need to continue and have some fun in blender so if you've downloaded blender you're going to first see the splash screen here when you open it up and this is just shows your recent files and some links you can just left click this and it will be gone so here we have the 3d view this is the most used window I'd say in blender this is where most of your work is going to be done into creating anything in 3d and let's kind of get comfortable manipulating around and seeing what we can do here so first off I recommend using a full-size keyboard and a three button Mouse but if you're working off a laptop like I was when I started and you might easily be there's some settings that will make it easier for you it's using that so first we're going to go to user preferences and see what might help if you're using a laptop so first off you don't want to go to input and here you can see we have the option to emulate the number pad so this is going to make you one through nine keys work as the number pad keys word in 3d so you want to click that if you're on a laptop and then the emulate 3-button Mouse this will let you use alt and then when you left-click it's going to work like the middle mouse button so again if you don't have a three button Mouse and you're working off a laptop click that and it will work like the middle mouse button does okay so now that those settings have changed if you're running a laptop you'll be ready to go as well and we're just going to start moving around in 3d so to do this we're going to click with our middle mouse wheel and we can zoom around how our 3d cube here so here we have a cube a camera and a lamp and these are the three items that come added already in your blender scene these default objects and we're just gonna kind of get comfortable moving around and selecting different objects so with middle mouse button you can pan around a cube and with right-click you can select different objects now most people find this confusing because they're used to left clicking to select something but in blender 3d the left-click will move your 3d cursor and that is the crosshair as you see in the middle of your cube here so let's clicking will move your 3d cursor and the 3d cursor is used to be basically a placement in 3d space to add things and manipulate things with so basically if I was to add another object to our scene here it would be added where the 3d cursor is placed now if you want to reset your 3d cursor to be in the center of your scene it's just shift s on your keyboard and then cursor to Center so that is handy if you accidentally move the cursor and then you want to move it back because you messed up just shift s and it resets it ok so get comfortable just panning around your cube and selecting different things with right click once you're comfortable with that we'll start moving around holding shift and this is just going to pan left and right so this is going to pan side to side on our 3d view so this is good for kind of getting a different angle on your object or moving around to a different spot and if you ever get kind of lost in 3d like you you know pan too far over and you can't see your object anymore just hit the period on your number pad keys and it will reset you to the object you have selected there and then you can just use the scroll wheel on your mouse to zoom out again if you are a laptop though it is the plus and minus keys to zoom in and out alright so now that we know how to kind of move around in 3d space and select things let's uh let's delete something all right so let's delete this default cube I'm just going to right click it and then it's X on your keyboard to delete you little pop-up window here and when you left click the delete and it is gone but what if you wanted that back well then it is shift a on your keyboard to bring up your add menu and then you can see right here mesh cube and a cube is back so that's pretty cool and yeah so you can also add objects over in your toolbar now your toolbar is going to chain is depending on what window you are in but this is where all of your different settings for that view is going to be be laid out so here you can see we can rotate and scale and translate our mesh and this is done also with shortcut keys and that is our to rotate so as soon as you hit R you'll be able to rotate your Q by moving your mouse if you don't want to rotate it then you can just hit escape and it will clear it and then S will scale your mouse whenever you move your cursor if you hit s and you can escape again to cancel that and G will grab your object and it will follow the mouse cursor where if you move it so that is the same as clicking one of these settings here and using the toolbar so I highly recommend getting comfortable with the shortcut keys and blender because then you can be working with both hands and moving very fast and efficiently in that blender okay so let's try it a different mode now this is object mode and this is where we have our solid meshes but what if you wanted to kind of manipulate this mesh and change it to not be a cube but something else well you would do that in edit mode so edit mode you can get to it by coming down here and clicking edit mode or by hitting tab on your keyboard and this is where you can deform your mesh basically you can grab any of the vertices and change the way it looks so say we want to make this a triangle we would select this vertice here hold down shift and right click this vertice and then we can grab the transformation handles here this is going to move it down along the z axis and we could turn it right into a triangle just by doing that and then if you hit tab you can see we have a triangular mesh so that is what object mode is meant for is meant for deforming your objects so you can cancel this then with control Z and you're back to having your your mesh so that is how you use edit mode and object mode now there's plenty of different modes here we have sculpt mode vertex weight paint and these are all for texturing and doing other things like that that we don't really need to worry about right now but then it's also different windows so these are the different modes within this window but you can change the window here in the bottom corner from 3d view to your movie club editor to video sequence editor - you know deterred so this is where you can get to all the different settings and blenders so you want to edit videos you'd want to go to your video sequence editor now these are the different windows and up here we have our different presets so here we have a default but if you want to go to video editing you might click down here and you have your timeline and your video previews here for video editing or if you want to do something like motion tracking you have it right here and so forth so I'm just going to go back to default view and let's kind of work with our windows now so if you've noticed every single window in blender has this little grab icon in the bottom corner and this is meant to be able to manipulate your windows and customize it however you want so say I want to add a material to this cube here I might do that with the node editor or the material editor so what I would do is I would grab this corner here drag it over and now I have two windows now this is where some people can get stuck because they have these windows and they don't know how to get rid of them then and stuff but it's really not that confusing you can always grab the center bar there and slide the window back and forth and if you want to ever get rid of that window you grab this window and drag it over and then it just removes that window so it gets confusing though when you have multiple windows so you pull this one out and then you pull this one up and you have three windows but now you can't cancel that out anymore you can't move that and you might be like why can't I get rid of those windows well that's because you first need to combine these two by dragging this one down and then you can grab this one and drag it over so I highly recommend you guys just kind of getting comfortable moving windows around dragging new windows into your scene and then getting rid of them and being able to kind of move around blender that way so it's going to be really important to get comfortable with that but once you're ready to move on we'll we'll get into some of the other features so most tutorials now you'll find on YouTube including myself is going to be using the Cycles render engine so that is going to be changed up here from blender render to cycles render and this is just because cycles so much more powerful right now that you're going to be having the most realism and the best looking results using cycles so you're going to want to be switching to cycles rendered most often if you're going to be working with materials and stuff in blender so now that you've noted that you've done that we can kind of drag our window little larger here by grabbing that corner and then we kind of look at some of these settings over on the right hand side so here this is our render settings this is where we going to choose like our output for our files our different render settings here are different samplings this is for changing all anything that involves rendering really if you want to render with more detail and samples and you go here and change your render samples and this is where you can change all of your render settings so because we're on recycles we have all of our cycles render settings right here so then moving on we have our render layers this is a similar to if you view Photoshop or something you have different layers where you can render different objects on a different layer moving on then we have our scene info we have our world info we have our object info and these are all settings that you don't really need to use right off the bat there's just handy to know where they are in case you ever get lost we have our constraints or modifiers our object data our materials this is where you might spend a lot of time our textures our particle systems and our physics so these are all the different modes for doing different cool things in blender so we don't want to overwhelm you by showing you all the different settings all at once so we're just going to kind of work around and use some basic settings that we need to do something cool so I'm just going to click back to our 3d view here and what if you want to add another object to your scene well you'd want to make sure that your cursor is in the center because we're going to be adding say a floor to our scene here and then you'd go shift a and you'd go add a mesh plane you can see we have different options for a cone or a circle or UV sphere but we'll be adding a plane now and this is just a flat surface area so you can see it's added right there but it's inside cube so I'm just going to hit F on my keyboard to scale that plane up now when you're scaling you can also use your number keys to type in a number to scale to an exact amount so if I scale eight if I hit eight in my number pad right now it's going to scale it eight times it's just going to fill my my floor grid here so that's great that's all I want to do right now and cool now I'm just going to right click that cube and what if I want to move this to be sitting on that floor plan I'm going to grab the Z controller handle here and just pull it up along the z axis and let go you could also do this by using G and then hitting Z on your keyboard to move it just up and down along the z axis this works the same for x and y if you want to move it left or right you go G and X this is going to move it along the x axis or you hit Y and this is going to move it along the y axis all right so now what if we wanted to give our cube a different color for example I want a red cube so then we'd go over to our materials tab here we click new material and then we change the color here to be red now you don't see anything change here and that's because in the viewport is can remain the solid object color but if you go down here where you can change the viewport shading options you could change it to material and then you'd see you have your red material you can also change it to rendered view and this is going to be rendering with the Cycles render engine and you can go back to solid view and change the viewport color and the Settings tab here to also be red so just going to click that I'm using left click grab that dropper and choose the red color so now we have a red cube cool what are we going to do with this cube though well good question why don't we why don't we drop it from the sky onto this plane that sounds like fun so what I'm going to do is in the grab the top z-axis handle here and pull it upwards along the Z and now I'm going to use some physics and blender to do something cool so this is going to be done in your physics tab I'm going to move to the end physics tab here and with that cube selected we're going to click rigidbody a rigidbody is the physics options in built into blender and so if you click that it's going to add in the rigid body physics to that cube and now we have some more settings here now don't worry about all the settings that look confusing because we don't even have to use any of them we can just leave it just like that and if we hit play in our timeline down here this is the timeline you can see it's set up to be 250 frames and this is the frame that we're on store on frame 1 and this is our play forward backwards buttons just like you'd see in any video player so if we click play you can see that our Cube drops realistically out of 3d space so that's cool but we want it to interact with our floor now this is just going to continue looping in our timeline here and they're going to continue until we stop it so we're just going to go ahead and click pause and then I'm gonna click the jump back to frame 1 option and that let's add some physics to our floor so I'm going to again right click to select that plane click rigidbody and then I'm going to change it to not be dynamic I'm sorry not that I'm going to change it from active to passive I want to leave that well unlikely be changed just change the type to passive now if you this is just going to be basically a solid object that does it move or anything that will interact with other objects so if you click play now you can see that the cube lands and bounces off of our floor awesome that's exactly what we wanted it to do so you can see now that we have that we have two objects interacting with each other realistically with the material on it so that's cool we've already done something pretty cool and blender well let's do something even cooler let's take this cube and let's duplicate it multiple times and have multiple cubes falling from the sky because that's awesome so what we're going to do is I'm going to zoom out with my middle mouse wheel I'm going to hold shift in my middle mouse button to kind of move my view up a little higher here and then I'm going to hover over my cube I'm going to hit shift and D and this is going to duplicate my mesh just like clicking duplicate wood over here and our toolbar so I'm going to hit shift D and we'll move that cube and it's going to follow our our mouse cursor until we left click so I'll just left click right there and now we have two cubes and if I hit play and our timeline you'll see both the keeps falling and bouncing off the ground realistically so that's pretty cool let's say let's add some more so I'm going to jump back to frame 1 shift D again move that cube over here shift D again move that cube over here now I might want to move around and 3 to see what it's looking like from a different angle so I could use my number peg keys to jump from front view with number pad 1 side view with number pad 3 or top view with number pad 7 or you could use 4 to 6 and 8 to kind of move around like you would in a video game just kind of zooming around so I'm going to kind of pan around to the to the well I'm just going to go to the right view by hitting 3 and my number pad then I'm going to hit shift D and add a few more from this view very cool now if you hit 5 on your keyboard and go into orthographic view and this basically makes it look 2d it basically takes the perspective out of your view and it's useful for a lot of different situations but in this case we don't really need it it's just there in case you do so hitting 5 is going to go from perspective to orthographic ok so now we have multiple cubes sitting in our 3d space just moving around with our middle mouse wheel I'm going to add one more over here and let's give them some different materials so I'm going to click on this one I'm going to click on our material tab and I'm going to click this button next to the material to make it a separate material so clicking that will make a new material you can see it's not material - I'm just going to change this color to be blue so clicking on our color wheel there with our left-click we have a blue color you might see that it doesn't change but that's just because the view fourth color is still red so we're just going to grab that click that color dropper and make it blue so now we have a blue cube let's just go ahead and do that same thing on all of these make this one green click that color left-click the dropper make that one green and you can see that they all change and that's because I didn't click that button like I told you to earlier so you want to click that button and now it's its own material so we can click this one click this drop-down box and you can see we have our different materials here and I'm just going to grab the third one here and then I'm going to change this one to be red change there and change it there and now we have our red color back so that's pretty cool and let's just add one more blue cube by selecting this one and then going to our material drop down and selecting the blue material ok so now we have a handful different colors here and it's looking as looking pretty colorful so now if we hit play well it's going to be awesome because when I have what eight cubes all dropping to the ground realistically bouncing off each other so that's pretty cool let's do a little bit more let's change the scale and rotation of these cubes so as I showed you before we're going to right click a cube I'm going to hit s to scale it down we might scale this one up a little bit so I'm going to hit s and scale this one up might rotate this one so I'm going to right click it and hit R and rotate it and I'll do the same with this one I'll hit R and rotate it I'll scale this one down a little bit smaller I'll scale this one already scale that one right click this one and I'll rotate it I'll right-click this one and I'll Richie a little bit as well maybe I'll move it with G over here a little bit more and maybe I'll move this one by hitting Chi and moving a bit too and then I kind of pan around and it's looking pretty cool so let's let's see what this looks like so if I hit play they'll all fall to the ground and bounce off each other realistically pretty cool so the last thing we can do is we can kind of change the physics for each of these cubes depending on their size so this is getting a little bit more advanced it's going to be cool because it's going to be a little bit more realistic so to do this we first have to apply the different transformations that we did these so because we scaled some of them we have to tell blender that that is now the default size value for that cube so do that I'm just going to hit B on my keyboard and this will bring up a box select option so you can select multiple things by clicking with your left click and dragging so I'm going to grab all of those cubes and now over in my physics tab here so in my toolbar I'm going to drop down to my physics tab you can click that and you'll see you have some rigidbody tools here I'm going to go well before I do anything here I first have to apply the scale so to do that you go to control a and apply the scale and I'm also going to apply the rotation so those rotation and scale left-click and there you have it now you can click calculate mass and before I do that I want to show you what it changes so in our physics tab here you can see that all of our cubes have a mass of 1 well if I click calculate mass depending on the size of that cube it's going to change basically the weight of the cube so the bigger tube will drop faster and a smaller cube might drop slower so it'll be a little bit more realistic so go ahead and click calculate mass now and you have all these different options I'm just going to choose well let's just do brick comment it's going to be the weight of a common brick depending on the size of them ok so now when we play we'll have a little bit more variation in how quickly they drop and how they react with each other so that's pretty cool we've just created our first looping animation in blender so it goes out a little longer than we want so let's make the end frame to be 100 instead of 250 so I'm just going to click there and then type in 100 and now I'm going to click this to jump back to our beginning settings here and I'll click play and we'll watch our cubes drop to the ground now you can use a middle mouse wheel to kind of get a different angle on that see from every view and yeah that's pretty cool we have the simulation in blender now what's really cool is as this is going you can select something like our bottom plane here and move it around in real-time to kind of bounce those cubes around though just kind of having fun and seeing how the physics work with the different weights and everything it's pretty cool so that is the introduction to blender guys we have we have created a little animation here we've kind of gotten into how to add materials how to kind of manipulate your mesh and how to change the shape of it now the last thing I want to do is I want to go to edit mode and I want to make one of these a triangle instead of a square so to do that I'm going to grab this cube here with left click the tabata edit mode and grab those two vertices again and drag them down along with Zed to make a triangle with left click I did that and then I'm just going to hit tab out of edit mode and yeah now if we play this we have a triangular shape bouncing around like a triangle might now you have the different shapes over here this is going to be depending on the collisions you might want to change that depending on your mesh but because these are all just basic shapes we can leave it at context hull and uh there you have it so maybe I'll duplicate this triangle one more time with shift D I'll hit R to rotate just we have some more variation in our simulation so that's going to kind of wrap up our beginner introduction into how to use blender we kind of covered a lot of the different settings and the placements of things and we kind of created something pretty cool so uh yeah if you like this video definitely check it out some of the other videos I have on my channel here and create something else that's pretty cool and I like to give a huge shout out to all of my patreon followers for supporting me all this time and if you'd like to be a patreon and gain access to all the finished files on this channel then you can sign up over here and really appreciate the support but that's one do it for me guys and I'll see you later bye

Channel: CG Geek

Views: 870,612

Rating: 4.9207625 out of 5

Keywords: Blender, Beginner, How to, Tutorial, Learn, 3D, Easy, Fun, Model

Id: JUhWdGcOHPw

Length: 24min 13sec (1453 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 16 2017