Understanding how Blender works - Blender Tutorial

- [Instructor] Welcome to the first chapter in Learning Blender 4.0. In this chapter, we're going to cover the very basics of Blender, so we have an idea of how the program works, and a feel for how all the different tools interact together. The very first thing you'll notice is you have a big 3D view port. You can navigate around by holding down the middle mouse button. Shortcuts are going to be a really popular thing inside of Blender, so knowing how to use your middle mouse button is going to be key. But like most things in Blender, there are other ways of doing this. Up here at the top right, for example, you can left click drag and hold, and move around your view. Below you'll see a few other buttons, like Zoom, so go ahead and left click and drag that back, and forth. Pan. And two other buttons that may not make sense at first. This is your camera toggle, which you can see is right here, if I left click and select it. And orthographic to perspective mode. See that? It's a pretty noticeable shift. Now if you're in the 3D viewport, you can hold down Shift and middle mouse to pan around, or control and middle mouse to zoom in and out. And of course, just hold down your middle mouse to rotate around. At the bottom left of your view, you'll actually see these buttons highlighted. Left click to select, middle mouse to rotate, and on the right, if I right click over here, you'll see Object Menu, which gives you a lot of different options that appear, right up here. Since we're up here, let's take a look at how this all works. First, we have an Object Mode, and if you left click on it, you'll see there are multiple modes available to you. Go ahead and leave it on Object Mode for right now, and the one thing I want you to know is this is how we're going to shift between multiple modes inside of Blender. Each mode has its own little sub menu that comes up with different options. Depending on what mode you're in, you'll also have a quick selection of tools. Many of these you can find up here in this menu, but these quick select tools are really easy, and you can just drag this out, to get an idea of what they all are. On the far right there is a tiny little carrot. I like to hit the N button. And that'll open up this sub-menu. Which gives you an idea of exactly where your object is, the scale, et cetera. You also have some extra options that we'll explore throughout this whole course. Alright, let's hit N to hide that and T to hide our tools on the left. A few more things. Now at the top left here, you'll see the typical File menu. Editing, for some preferences, which you may want to adjust. Rendering, which becomes a little bit more relevant later on in this chapter. Windowing, if you want to come in and out of full screen, or just make a brand new window. And of course Help, with an excellent manual, which I referenced quite a bit as I'm working inside of Blender. Up here at the top are different workspaces, and you can go ahead and left click them, and see how Blender changes the view and the tools that are available to you. These are just handy shortcuts, so you can quickly jump from, say, Layout to Modeling, or to texture painting. On the far right, you'll see something called an outliner. If I left click and drag this to give us a little bit more real estate, you'll see that the outliner is made up of a few things. Collection. Collection. And then objects inside of that collection. Generally speaking, everything in Blender is an object, and it's going to be orange. Green things are the kind of data type. So in this case, the cube has this little triangle, which means that it's a mesh type. An object is the overall container of the thing, where it is in 3D space, and this little green thing kind of indicates what its guts are made of. In this case, vertices, triangles, polygons, et cetera. At the bottom right here is the Properties panel, and you're going to spend a lot of time sifting through these different menus, so get familiar with clicking through them, and if you hover over them, you'll actually see what all of these little icons mean. All the options that you want to select live inside of this Properties panel. Finally, at the bottom is the Playback. If I lift this up, I can left click and drag and move my playhead. Playback is how you control time inside of Blender. At first, when you're using Blender, it may look like a space shuttle, but don't worry. Over time, we're going to get used to this whole interface, and by the end of this course, you're going to be a pro.