This Blender tutorial provides a crash course for absolute beginners. It covers basic navigation (orbit, pan, zoom), object selection and deletion, adding primitives (cube, cylinder, Suzanne), camera manipulation, lighting (point, sun, spot, area), and rendering. The instructor emphasizes keyboard shortcuts and customizes preferences for improved workflow. Future lessons on more advanced topics will be available on Patreon. to customize for my own work with my navigation. So for the first time we're going to get into just some preferences to get to your preferences just like lots of other software. you're going to go up to edit and preferences. Okay once we're here you're going to see a lot of different things some different tabs over here What i'm concerned about because it's what we're talking about is navigation. so just go ahead and click navigation here and I'm going to change two settings now the nice thing about Blender is it has really great uh Explanations for all the different settings that you can use across the whole software. All you have to do is hover over it and it will tell you exactly what that uh slider or the button or whatever it is you're looking at. it'll tell you exactly what it does. so this says use the depth under the mouse to improve view pan rotate zoom functionality. that's what it does. Uh, I'm going to show you the difference on on practically what that looks like so for now, I'm going to turn that on and the second one is zoom to mouse position. It's kind of self--evident what that does but let's just read it zoom in towards the mouse pointer's position in the 3d view rather than the 2d Windows center so by default, what blender will do when you zoom in is it will just zoom into the center of your 3d viewport. What you could do here is zoom to mouse positions You could point somewhere off of the distance and zoom in and it will zoom in with your mouse as the focus personally, I like this Now after you make some changes, there's going to be a little asteris next to your save preferences. That's just letting you know uh, hey, you made some changes and they're not saved If I were to exit out of this without saving it's not going to get rid of my changes. Um all that's saying is if I exited Blender without saving then those aren't going to be be save so I saved my preferences and we can exit our preferences show you how to install it if you don't know how to install software uh this isn't the tutorial for you just go to blender.org and when you open up blender for the first time depending on the version that you're on you'll see something like this i'm in version 4.3 which at the time of making this is the current released version uh there are also experimental builds and because it's open source because they're developing it openly for the world to see you can go download their latest versions that they're working on right now but 4.3 is is what we're working on and you can tell it's 4.3 just by looking at the top left or when you open it up for the first time you'll get this little splash screen and it'll show you the version right there so this is version 4.3 you're greeted with what we call the 3d viewport if you're if you've never done 3d software before it's just this big window right here and this is basically like an infinite world where we interact with every object that we're working on um there's in this world there's what we call a world origin which is kind of the center of the whole world so 3d stands for three dimensions and those three dimensions are represented by three letters x y and z depending on the 3d software you're using those letters will represent different directions but in blender um x and y are our horizontal directions and z is the vertical so when we're things so to select an object in Blender you can just left click we have a few objects here and we'll go over what each of these are in just a minute Um but you can left click to select anything if you just click out in empty space that will deselect uh whatever you had selected we're also going to go over some keyboard shortcuts as we go Blender is very uh very heavy on the keyboard shortcuts so i'm going to try to show you how to access things in the menus as well as how to access things with shortcuts Some things are just shortcuts so you're going to have to get used to uh pressing the specific keys that you need a lot of people have a problem with that with blender a lot of people say it's there's too many short cuts um but that is actually kind of a remnant of what blender has been in the past personally i've used blender for 15 16 years now and it's come a long way it's put a lot of things in the menu that used to be just shortcuts but uh some of that lives on and some of that lives on within me as i teach people i'm used to using shortcuts because i think it's it's fast because i know where the shortcuts are so i tend to teach people shortcuts anyway uh one of the shortcuts we're going to look at right now as we're talking about selecting is a on the keyboard and that usually with a shortcut i remember a word that's associated with it so a is for all that's just select all you can also hit alt a and that will deselect all uh you can also just click on an empty space. Sometimes when you're working, you don't have an empty space. If I was like working inside of this cube, for example, um, I don't have an empty space to click in. So alt A is how to deselect everything. There also a few other ways we could do that, which we should look at right right enough talking let's actually try and render something now let's exit out of our preferences there and let's bring back that cube now if you deleted the cube if you didn't have the option to contrl z and bring it back let's actually look at how we add something to the scene so we've looked at deleting now let's try to add something to add something you've probably guessed by now you can come up here to the add menu at the top left of your 3d viewport there there is a shortcut for this um which is shift a this is definitely one you're going to want to learn uh some shortcuts are optional. This one, just learn it because you're going to be adding stuff to your scene all the time. So hit shift a, and that'll bring up that little popup there. And we get the option to add all of these different things to our scene. Let me just go over each of these and kind of tell you what they do. So this first one is mesh. Now mesh is kind of like another word for geometry. These are basically just shapes you can add to the scene. So we could add a plane, delete that. We could add a cube. Just going to go through these, a circle, uh, UV sphere and isosphere or icosphere. I'm actually not sure how you say that, which is a sphere made out of triangles. The UV sphere was made out of what we call quads, which are faces with four points The icosphere is made out of triangles. Okay, then we have a cylinder, we have a cone and we have a torus. Then we have some bonus objects here. Oops, got ahead of myself. We have a grid which is just a plane that is uh subdivided. It has more points on the inside. I'll show you how we get into that component mode where we're looking at the points in just a second. We call it edit mode and then we have a monkey. Now this monkey's name is actually Suzanne. You might have seen her around. It's kind of a blender thing. This has been a primitive shape and kind of a test object in blender since the beginning, Since as far as i'm aware of the the first version, it's certainly been around since the you know, 16 years I've been using it. But those are the the mesh objects that you can add to a scene now. I don't know if you noticed, but when I added each of those, we got a little popup that showed after I added it. So for example, let me add a cylinder and it's, it's easy to miss, but we have this temporary little popup that showed at the bottom left of our screen and if I click that, um, and expand it, we can see some options here. Now This is kind of like your onetime chance to change some settings in this mesh object before, um, the this option goes away forever now. the reason for that is these objects are called primitive shapes. These are are not intended to, um, stay as they are. So typically if I'm adding a cylinder into a scene, for example, you know, maybe my ultimate plan is to change it into the shape of a jar. To do that, I'm going to be performing some different modeling functions, um, things like extruding and scaling to create the shape of this jar. This is just one example. When I add the cylinder, I have one chance to change kind of the the foundation of this primitive shape and that option is going to go away because blender knows I'm going to be changing that I'm going to be extruding it, changing the shape and stuff. Hopefully that makes sense. Long story short, we get this popup. You only have one chance, Um, as soon as you make a change to this cylinder, let's say I scaled it for example, which is something we can get into later. Then the option to change the, uh, initial variables of that cylinder has gone away. we've lost it forever now. You could try to hit F9 to bring something back but all that's going to do is it's going to bring back the option for your last performed, um, operation your last operation. So since the last thing I did was scale this, when I press F9, it's just bringing up the options for how I scaled it and I could go back and I can change those options, but the actual options for generating the mesh have gone away. So let's delete that cylinder and let's add another one so I can show you those options. So we have that, uh, little popup once again if you just happen to click on accident and you haven't performed any other operations, then you can press F9 and that will bring up your last operation. So we have the number of vertices we can have in this cylinder. The more we add kind of the smoother that face, uh, the surface of the cylinder will be now keep in mind, Um, you don't want to go crazy with this. I mean, blender can handle millions and millions of vertices or, or triangles but you want to kind of only use as much as you need for a particular um, use case. And that's something you'll get when I shift selected all three objects and just pay attention to the colors here. with our default, uh, user interface color palette, we have something that's happening when we select an object. It's outlined in this yellow, but if I shift, select a second object, you'll notice that first one turned to a darker orange. And if again, I shift, select this third object. Now both the cube and this little, this a camera over here. Um, they're both dark orange And then this circle over here, which is a light, is that light orange. If I keep holding down, shift and go back and forth between these, you'll notice that they trade off being the yellow object and the other ones remain orange. If I deselect everything, uh, the highlight goes away, it just becomes normal black lines. What this is telling us is Blender has two different states for something being selected You can see in the outliner here too. The Tex text is either, uh, this dark orange or the light yellow. the two different states are selected and active. The difference is you can have many, many objects selected in Blender but you can only have one active object at a time. And the reason for this will become evident as we go deeper and start looking at different tools and different things you could do in Blender. Um, but just keep keep that in mind. that only one object is active and go ahead and add our monkey suzanne. Um, and we'll spit out our first rendered image. Now to take a picture of this, we're going to need a camera. We had a camera in our scene by by default. I'm going to delete everything but our monkey just cuz I want to show you how to add those and how to position them on your own. So now to add a camera again, hit shift a and we have not just mesh objects, but we have all sorts of objects here. If you come down towards the bottom four from the bottom you'll see camera. Now we've added that to the scene and you might not see it right away because it appeared at the world origin which is 0. 0. It's inside our monkeyy head, the rotation right now we can zero that out as well. Now I just did a cool thing in blender if you want to change multiple values at once. Um what this is called. it's called a vector. a vector is just a collection of three numbers. It's something that happens really, really frequently in 3d things like XYZ or RGB for colors, um but anyway if i wanted to change all three of these at once like i just did you just click and drag and then you can type in your value for all three And there you go it changed all three at once that's that's something that's really useful um i just zeroed that out so it's just pointing straight down and let's rotate it 90° on x so it's just looking um kind of in that direction it's been rotated 90° on this red xaxis okay so we have our camera now let's talk about actually moving this camera around so you have a few options one of the options is you could use what's called a gizmo so when you select your camera on the left hand side here we have some different gizmos and just our general tools now by the way if you don't see this, um, if you're confused like where is it? it's because you press the t button t stands for toolbar And if you press t that goes away. uh, you could bring it back by pressing t or there's a little arrow here. It's just a tiny arrow. It's trying to stay out of the way you can click that and that will bring back your toolbar. Now in our toolbar, we have, um, three different gizmo types. We have move which is the location of our object we have rotate which of course is the rotation. And then we have scale which is the size of things. Now I don't personally use these GizMos but this is very very common for 3d software in general and a lot of artists are going to be most comfortable with the use of gizmos. So I wanted to show you where they are. And the way this Gizmo works is now we have these three arrows that we can use to position whatever it is we're positioning. All you have to do is click and drag. And now Blender has this functionality where if you're in the middle of something and you kind of change your mind, you want to cancel out of it. Um, instead of letting go of my left click and then contrl z, what I can do at any point, if I'm not happy with what I'm doing is I can rightclick and that will just abandon whatever we're working on right now. Uh, I could also just press escape, right click and escape kind of do the same thing in this context. So we have our Gizmos. Um, we can also rotate the camera with these. Uh, if you click on a specific access or axis or if you hover over it, it'll kind of show you which one you're rotating on. Or if you click in between, you can rotate kind of freely. And that goes the same for um, location or moving. I can either hover over a specific axis or I can go in between a few and that will allow me to move on two different axis, um, axises and eliminate one. So for example, if I grab this plane right here, I'm moving on z and X but I'm not moving forward and backward on on that y ais, something similar with the scaling, um, I could just kind of grab anywhere and it'll scale up and down on all three, uh, dimensions at once Or I can choose one particular one. Now with the camera, that's not a great example, Um, but with the monkey, for example, I could I could scale just on one axis. So let's go back to the camera and let me show you another way you can move and rotate and scale things around Now, Like I said, I I don't typically use gizmos. I just keep this on box select and this is the case for a lot of, um, artists in blender. This is where we kind of go into shortcut hell if you're not familiar with shortcuts uh, it's not too bad but, um, for some people, this is a new concept. So I typically like to use G for grab s for scale and R for rotate. The cool thing about those three shortcuts GS and R is you can pair them with any axis. So for example, if I have my monkey here, I can press S to scale and then I can press X to only scale on the x axis I can even take it further and I can type in a specific value like two And what that's done is it's scaled s on x two a multiple of two So it's two times bigger on the x axis now, Um again, that was s x2 enter? It's a lot of keys But once you get used to this concept of Of what we're doing here Oops, I don't want to save. I just wanted to undo then it becomes really quick You could scale on y you could scale by a factor of four. You could even do uh, decimals so we could hit s for scale and we could do 0.5 Now it's half as big or half the scale that it was before we could do s and 50 and now it's 50 times bigger than it was before so these shortcuts again, it's g s and R. Now if I hit R once it's kind of rotating from wherever my view is I could also hit a specific axis or I can hit R and then press R again and it'll enter kind of this free rotation mode. Um, that was similar to if we grabbed just in the middle of the gizmo there. Now there's one other thing we can also exclude a specific axis. So remember with the Gizmos, how you could grab, like in between for example and you could scale on everything except for the z-axis. You could scale on x and and Y. Uh, we could do something similar with shortcuts All we have to do is hold down shift and then press the axis. So for example, s for scale and then shift Z will scale on everything except for the z axis Now, um, if you want to confirm whatever it is you're doing, you can left click or press enter and if you want to cancel the current oper operation, you can rightclick or press escape. So I'll usually just just right click and it'll jump right back. So with all that said, review that section as needed. Um, all the info in there, but now we can start to move our camera. So let's do grab on y and let's bring it back. Um and that can kind of give us a a good view on our monkey face. We could also jump into the camera view to try and position the camera and to do that, uh, we're going to look at our first pi menu. So pi menus are a really great way to quickly jump to different options. This particular p menu is the tilda key. And again, it's less to do with the fact that it's the tilda key, uh, which is right under the escape key by the way. And more to do with the location of that key. it's kind of just in that leftand column of the keyboard. And it's easy for my left hand to find, even if I'm not looking down on my keyboard, so hold down the tilda key and we get this pi menu where we get all these different options and this is a quick way to jump to different views in our scene. Now the idea of a pi menu is it's very fast. it's just supposed to take quick gest gestures. Okay, so if you hold down this pi menu, you see a lot of different options if we want to jump to the front view. For example, we can hover over that and let go, um, or, or if you're just used to this gesture based, uh, P menu, then what you could do is just very quickly kind of gesture in the direction you want to go. So if I want to look at the right hand side, I just barely press that pi menu, um, and gesture towards the right. I could do the same with top view, front view, back view, whatever it is. Now in that menu, we also have view camera, which jumps into our camera view. And while we're in this view now, this is the cool thing about not using GizMos and using the shortcuts is we could press G to grab and we could choose a particular axis. So I could press G and X to move on the X-axis. I could press R and Z to rotate on the Z axis. There's just lots you could do with that. Um, some people are not comfortable with that kind of navigation for the camera. So I'm by default is one meter, Okay, really cool thing in blender is you could, you could click on these fields and you can change things. So you could type in two, um I'm not going to press enter because that will make this whole window go away. i'm just going to left click and that will change that to two. Now the cool thing about blender is it does conversions for you. so let's say you're working with a client or maybe your mind, um works in a different system so maybe you're not in the metric system but you're thinking in terms of like feet and yards and inches. So you could actually type in for example, one, uh you could either spell it out or you could just abbreviate it. so like one ft for one foot and it will convert that. so uh, one foot is35 m or like I said, you could, uh type in like nine in. You could spell it out or you could just say 9 I in. And that will do the conversion and change that back to meters. So that's one of my favorite things about Blender is it it it handles Key settings(I tweaked): “Use Depth Under Mouse” improves pan/rotate/zoom by using the depth under the mouse. turning it on for better control. “Zoom to Mouse Position” instead of zooming into the center of the 3D view, zooms to where the mouse points. super handy for focused navigation! unsaved changes = little asterisk near “Save Preferences.” changes stay during the session, but not saved permanently unless you hit “Save."