How to Use Blender | The Interface | Blender Basics Bootcamp Part 1

welcome to the blender basics boot camp my goal with this series is to get you up to speed with blender 3d as quickly as possible so you can start making your own cool stuff each video in the series will build on the last covering a new topic ranging from navigating the interface all the way to lighting animating and rendering a final project this course is aimed at the absolute beginner someone who has never even touched blender before but there's still plenty of great information here for the intermediate user as well by the end of this series you'll have made your very own number one blender trophy that looks something like this and in this video specifically i'm going to explain the blender interface show you how to navigate in 3d and show you how to add and manipulate some basic 3d objects that being said let's hop in my name is chris folia i'm your stream scholar welcome to stream school all right when you first open blender you'll get this splash screen it has some beautiful artwork created in blender it'll show you what version of blender you're working with i'm in 2.92 at the moment it'll show you some recent files you've been working on which will probably be blank for you and down here on the left we have five different workspace templates depending on what sort of task you want to complete now 99.9 of the time i just go with the default general file type and then adjust my workspace as i go depending on whatever i'm doing so you can just click off of the splash screen and here we are welcome to blender now i realize for the absolute beginner someone who has never touched the software before this probably looks pretty confusing you got all these buttons and numbers and sliders and the windows divided up in all these complicated looking panels and it can just be extremely overwhelming so today i want to keep it simple and just focus on the main central attraction which is the 3d viewport i want you to picture this as sort of a window into a completely different 3d world that you get to create and to navigate this 3d world you're going to need two different pieces of hardware the first is a three button mouse and what i mean by that is a mouse that has a scroll wheel that you can click in that is your middle mouse button the second thing you're going to want to have is a full size keyboard and what i mean by that is a keyboard that has a numpad i realize a lot of laptops these days ship with keyboards that don't have numpads and yes you can navigate the interface without a numpad but it's going to make your life a whole lot more tedious so i'd honestly really recommend just running out to walmart dropping ten dollars and getting a super cheap keyboard that has a numpad on it i promise it will make your life so much easier in blender in the long run that little public service announcement aside let's dive in so to navigate 3d space we have a few different controls the first one is to rotate around 3d space and to do that all you have to do is click in your middle mouse button move your mouse and now we're rotating around in 3d space we can look at our object from all different angles but let's say you have an object over here you want to look at well to pan over there which is our second command all you have to do is hold shift on your keyboard press the middle mouse button and drag over you can drag back you can pan down you can pan up you can pan all around have a whole lot of control here and finally most 3d scenes are probably going to have objects that are different sizes so to zoom in and out our third command all you have to do is scroll up on your middle mouse wheel to zoom in and down on your middle mouse wheel to zoom out between these three commands you already have a whole lot of control to move and navigate around 3d space but let's say you want to focus and work on a specific object in your 3d scene like let's say i want to look at this camera over here if i'm panning and moving and rotating and zooming it can take a long time to get a perfect view on this object that i want so blender has a hotkey for focusing on a specific object and to do that all you have to do is select that object and then click period on your numpad and it will automatically zoom over to whatever object you have selected and perfectly center your view so i can do it again i can click on this cube i can click period on my numpad and now i'm looking at that and this one hotkey will save you so much time if you don't have a numpad i understand some of you are stubborn you can just click on the object go to view and then go to frame selected it's slower than the hotkey but it still works so the next thing i want to talk about are the default orthographic views in blender and before i get into that i feel like i need to talk about the difference between perspective and orthographic views by default blender opens up in a 3d perspective view what i mean by that is as objects get closer to you they appear bigger and as they get further away they appear smaller just like in real life and you can tell you're in a 3d perspective view because up here in the upper left hand corner it says user perspective now blender also has the option to view your viewport in an orthographic view what that means is flat it's just a big fancy word for a flat view it means your objects don't get smaller as they move further away from you and they don't get bigger as they move closer to you they are projected on screen as their actual shape and their actual silhouette and from flat on fuse this can be extremely useful to see the true shape of your object without perspective distortion so to switch to an orthographic view all you have to do is hit five on your keyboard and it'll switch to user orthographic as you can see in the upper left hand corner you can also tell because this square is just as big as this square even though this one is further away to switch back all you have to do is hit five on your numpad again and you can toggle between the two indefinitely now if you don't have a numpad again there is a interface shortcut for that you can just come over to this button right here and you can click it as many times as you want to toggle between the two now to get to specific flat orthographic views blender has some specific hotkeys because trying to align like a front and a top view yourself that can be pretty tedious so for instance to go to a top flat bird's eye view all you have to do is hit seven on your keyboard and it'll take you to a nice flat view then all the other commands for panning and zooming and such are exactly the same to go to a front view you can hit 1 on your numpad and to go to a right view you can hit 3 on your numpad and you're probably thinking man these hotkeys are pretty biased you only have a top front and right view what about the bottom back and left view well to get to the bottom view instead of hitting 7 on your numpad you can hit control 7 on your numpad instead of hitting 1 on your numpad to go to the back you can hit ctrl 1. instead of 3 for right you can hit ctrl 3 on your numpad to go to the left view and if you don't have a numpad you can go up here to the right where you have this little axis crosshair and you can click in the circle to rotate around or you can just click on the individual axes to look at it from those views some people might find that easier but i personally am used to the numpad hotkeys so all of that being said between all of these different commands you now have ultimate power to navigate in 3d space i honestly highly recommend just taking some time to get really familiar with these commands until they basically become second nature it'll make your life so much easier in the long run if you just take the time to really familiarize yourself but just navigating around the 3d view isn't going to give you a super interesting 3d scene you also need to be able to manipulate your 3d objects so for that blender has a whole bunch of different widgets and commands so on the left here you'll notice we have a movement widget where you can click and drag to move your object or a rotation widget you can rotate it or a scale widget you can scale it and i realize a lot of people are mad at me because i'm moving so fast right here but i'm doing that for a reason the reason i'm moving so fast is honestly i want you to completely forget that these widgets exist just completely ignore them blender was designed from the ground up to be used with one hand on the keyboard one hand on the mouse using all of the hotkeys so i want to really drill these hotkeys into your brain because i promise they're so much faster than clicking on the individual widgets and dragging your object around so to move your object instead of using the widget or grab it using your mouse you can hit g to grab and that'll stick the object to your mouse you can move it around you can left click to set it in place or if you hit g to grab it and you decide no wait i didn't want to move i want to shut that down you can just right click and the object will go straight back to where it started um and i know a lot of you are probably thinking yeah but the widget had the different arrows so you can move it on specific axes you can lock it to the x-axis or the y-axis or the z-axis and you can do that with the hotkeys too so if you hit g to grab it you're going to move it around to your view but if you want to lock it to a specific axis all you have to do is literally type that axis on your keyboard so if i hit g to move it then i hit x now it's locked to the x-axis if i hit y now it's locked to the y-axis or if i hit z now it's locked to the z-axis and a fancy way to do this is to hold your middle mouse wheel in or middle mouse button in then you can drag this whip around to highlight whatever axis you want it to be locked to then you can release your middle mouse wheel and now it's locked to that axis one further level of control when moving it on a specific axis is you can move it a specific amount using the hotkeys so let's say we're moving the cube along the y-axis by hitting g y and let's say i want to move it three units to the right now i can literally just type in three on my keyboard and it will move three units to the right or i can backspace and i can say negative four point point five not forty 45 and it'll go negative 4.5 units to the left and you can do this for the x and the z axes as well now one more thing i want to cover here is what if you want to move your object along a specific plane like let's say we want this object to be stuck to the floor because we want to move it over here but have it on the floor so to do that all you have to do is exclude a specific axes so for instance i mean obviously the sidebar here you could just hit g y and then gx to move it over there and that's pretty easy but for my personal taste that's too many hotkeys so to exclude a specific axis you can hit g to move it and then shift plus whatever axis you want to exclude so i don't want to move this on the up and down axis so i'm going to hit shift z and now it's locked to the x and y axis or shift y now it's locked to the x and z axis or shift x now it's locked to the z and y axis which can be super useful for keeping it on a specific plane and those are the movement commands now to rotate your object can you guess what letter that's gonna be if you guessed r for rotate you'd be correct so if you hit r on your keyboard now your object is rotating and the default axis that this is rotating on is to your view so picture you took like a giant stick or pole and you shoved it into your screen and skewered your object that is the axis this object is rotating around but if i right click to undo that we also have trackball rotation so let's say i want to make this side of the cube face us i'd want to do a trackball rotation for that so i can hit r then i can hit r again and now i'm rotating this more like a trackball mouse like so and in addition to that we also have all of the other commands that we could do for location so we could hit r and then x to rotate it on the x-axis y to rotate it on the y-axis z for z and then you can also type in specific amounts if you want to like 54 degrees or negative 75 degrees you just have all the same control that you have for the movement controls the next widget is the scale widget and if you guessed s for scale you would also be correct so if you hit s on your keyboard and move your mouse around now we're scaling our cube and the same hotkeys apply here as well so we can hit x for the x-axis y for the y-axis and z for the z-axis and just like the location widget we can also exclude axes for scale so we can do shift z to exclude z to make a nice flat rectangular pancake we could do shift y or we could do shift shift x i messed it up a little bit there by pressing the wrong thing so i'm going to right click to undo that and one more thing i want to cover here are global versus local coordinate systems so by default if i move this cube on the x axis that is the world's x-axis moving on the y-axis that is the world's y-axis the same x and y-axis that you're going to move every other object on but let's say our cube is rotated funny let's say it's on like a diagonal floor like this and i want to move it across the diagonal floor local to my object well to do that all i have to do is hit g x now it's moving on the x-axis but then if i hit x again now it's moving on the object's local x-axis i could do y-y for local y or z-z for local z you can also do this for rotation and scale so r x x y y is easy and same with scale as well so s x x z z y y like so now manipulating one object is pretty interesting you're already going to have an infinitely more interesting scene than just panning and looking around at a regular cube but let's say you want to add multiple objects to the scene that's pretty easy to do too so i'm going to go ahead and hit alt r to reset the rotation alt g to reset the location although it's already in place and alt s to reset the scale although it's already at the default so to add objects to the scene all you have to do is go up here to the left and click on the add button and then you can add whatever you want but that's pretty slow i don't wanna i don't wanna go through the painstaking process of moving my mouse all the way up to the left taking like three quarters of a second to get there clicking and adding the object i'd much rather use the hotkey so the hotkey for adding objects or bringing up the add menu is shift a and that'll bring up the add menu wherever your mouse is and it'll save you those seconds which will turn into minutes and maybe even hours throughout your entire life span in blender so anyway if you hit shift a that brings up the add menu and here i'm going to add a monkey and you'll notice that that came in at the very center of the scene so now i can hit g shift z now i'm moving them along the floor i can hit r i can rotate them on a trackball like i've already learned and we can have him facing us oh but like i said the object came in at the center of the scene but that's not actually correct the object comes in wherever the 3d cursor is the 3d cursor is this weird looking crosshair thing that makes it look like you're kind of in a first person shooter in blender and you can move that wherever you want you can just hold shift and right click anywhere in the scene and now that's where 3d objects are going to come in and if you want to move that to a very specific location all you have to do is hit n on your keyboard to bring up your transform controls you can go down to the view tab and where it says 3d cursor you can change this to whatever you want so let's say i want this to be over three over three up zero now objects will come in at that grid space so if i hit shift a i can add a plane now i have a floor plane i can scale that up to make a nice little ground plane or i can hit alt g like we already learned to move it back to the center alert using everything that we learned once you get really comfortable with those different commands you can do things extremely quickly so i just added this plane now i'm going to re i'm going to reset the 3d cursor location which by the way if you click and drag it'll edit all of these at the exact same time uh click hold and drag but for 3d cursor to the center now i'm going to hit shift a i'm going to add a cylinder i'm going to hit s z to make it bigger s shift z to scale it down on the x and y to make a nice pull i'm going to move it up i'm going to take this q i'm going to scale it on the y axis i'm going to move it up i'm going to move it over now we have a flag just like that this is basically the next pixar movie at this point beautiful so if you just learn these basic commands we went over in this video just take some time make them second nature navigating around blender is going to be extremely quick and easy for you so in the next video we're going to talk about how to actually go into edit mode and model some of your own 3d objects so you're not stuck with the boring primitives but until then just take some time really familiarize yourself with these different commands and make all these different navigation commands basically second nature to you so i will see you all in the next video at this point you should have a pretty good idea of how to navigate the blender interface i'd also like to encourage you to just mess around have fun click some buttons and explore what's the worst that could happen if you found this video useful and want to stay tuned for part two make sure you hit that like and subscribe button and ring the bell i'll be releasing the basics videos on a daily basis for the duration of the course and if you want to come hang out with me live i'm live at least every friday over at youtube.com oraclefish also if you want to support what i do on the channel here make sure you check out my brand new patreon link in the description until next time my name is chris folia i'm your stream scholar and class is out you

Channel: Stream Scholar

Views: 1,505

Keywords: stream scholar, oraclefish, stream school, blender 3d, blender tutorial, how to use blender, blender for beginners, how to use blender 2.9, blender 2.9 tutorial, blender 2.8 tutorial, blender tutorial series, blender tutorial beginner

Id: IWLDpisABuM

Length: 18min 36sec (1116 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 20 2021