From the course: Blender 3.3 Essential Training

First steps, navigating the interface - Blender Tutorial

From the course: Blender 3.3 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

First steps, navigating the interface

“

- [Instructor] Welcome to the Blender 3.3 Essential Training Course. In this first chapter, we're going to cover the basics of Blender and get a feel for how the program functions, and what some of the major tools are. Now, if you have no experience in 3D animation, drawing, or any art program, don't worry, we're going to start from the very basic. However, if you do have some 3D animation experience, say, by using 3D Studio Max or Autodesk Maya, that I still recommend you follow along as you may learn how Blender does things differently than other programs. Okay, now let's start with the most basic of basic things, the interface. There's a few major parts to this interface, and the most important is going to be the Viewport, which is this 3D view right here. The Viewport can be navigated by holding down your Middle Mouse Button. You can zoom in or truck forward by Middle Mouse scrolling in and out, and you can hold down Shift and hold down your Middle Mouse button to move around the view or shift it around. Now, if you don't have a middle mouse button, don't worry. Up here on the top right you can see a little gizmo, which you can Left Click and hold and drag it around, or click on one of these predetermined views, like the top or the side known as ZYX. You can also zoom by Left Clicking and holding on this magnifying glass, and shift the view around or move it just by clicking on the hand, Left Click and hold, and here you go, you can move it all around. While we're here, you can also click on the camera button to toggle what your camera will see. This will be important once we get into 3D rendering. And down here is a perspective shift where you can go into orthographic or no perspective mode. This is quite useful for 3D modeling as it gives you an exact orthographic view of everything. On a far left, you're going to see your tools area. There's a lot of great tools inside of Blender and if you ever get confused as to what they mean you can either hover over them or you can put your mouse right about here and you can see how my cursor turns into this horizontal cursor. Left Click and drag and pull it out, and there you go, you can see some of the names of these tools. There are three basic tools that we use in Blender, moving, rotating, and scaling. Now, all I'm doing is clicking on any one of these tools and then clicking on any one of the arrows with my Left Click and just dragging. In the case of rotate and scale, you have this big white circle, which you can click on, which allows you to manipulate it quite easily. Move also has a little white square, but it's a lot smaller, so sometimes it's easy to miss. Those are the three major tools that you'll use inside of Blender to manipulate all of your objects, vertices, faces, et cetera. Speaking of vertices and faces, all 3D objects inside of Blender are made up of points called vertices. Those points come together to form a face or an edge. You can access all of these different things by clicking up here in your object mode and going to edit mode, and here you can see have vertices, edges and faces. We'll dive into this a little bit deeper, but for now, just know that you can switch different modes inside of Blender and it will give you different tools to use. Let's come back up to object mode. At the top left, you're going to see your typical buttons, for file, editing, undos, render, et cetera. Undo is going to be really handy inside of 3D software, so just keep an eye on that one. On the far right over here, you're going to see something really interesting if you've never used 3D software before, it's called an outliner. And this outliner allows you to visually see a hierarchy of everything inside your 3D scene. In this case, we have our cube selected, so it's highlighted and it has a bright orange name. Bright orange is an indication inside of Blender that that is the most currently selected object. If I were to select the camera, you can see it turns bright orange and it turns bright orange up here too. All right, two more parts of Blender that are really important. The properties panel is right below the outliner and has every single kind of property that this object needs. For example, it's location, rotation, et cetera. And finally, below is the playback area, which you can use to either click on play to have animation or to scrub by Left Clicking on this little blue number and moving the timeline left and right. We'll dive into all of these tools a lot deeper throughout the course, but for now, just know that you have tools on the left, a Viewport in the middle to see everything, and an outliner on the right along with properties that lets you manipulate all of those objects.

Contents