[Intro]
Welcome everyone to "Blender for beginners". The tutorial series for people who do not know blender at all and want to learn from the beginning.
I'm not gonna be assuming they know any of the hotkeys terminology or anything like that.
This is a true from the beginning style tutorial.
And when you look at blender, it can be pretty confusing.
I mean there are buttons here and here and you don't know what any of them do yet.
So to simplify everything, we're just going to ignore these and look at what's called the "3d viewport" and pretty much everything
we're gonna be covering in this tutorial will be contained inside this window.
So what is it that we're actually going to cover in this video?
The first objective of this tutorial is to teach you basic navigation.
So that's orbiting, panning and zooming around our scene.
And these are important fundamentals that let us move around the 3d environment.
And our second objective is going to be learning the basic transforms.
So that's moving an object, rotating it and also scaling it.
And knowing all these things will already let us do a lot in blender. And to prove it
we're gonna try to achieve some kind of goal in this tutorial. In this case
our goal is going to be to create a tower of Hanoi model. And you can see that this is composed entirely of
primitive objects. And this just means it's made out of fundamental objects like cubes and cylinders.
And the reason we're going to be making this model specifically is that it really tests our ability to work with basic transforms.
So let's actually get started.
So when you open up blender for the first time
you're going to get this default scene. And you can see that we already have three Objects:
A light, a cube and a camera. To select any of these objects,
we can just "left-click" with our mouse and we can see which object is selected because it's highlighted in orange.
Instead, if we want to deselect something we can just left click anywhere in the background.
If we now want to select multiple things we can just click and drag over our desired objects.
Another way to do this is to just click an object and then hold down "shift" and click anything we want to add to the selection.
So now we know the basics of selecting things but how do we actually move around our scene?
So again, one of the main ways we navigate around our space is by orbiting. And this just means
revolving around our scene. And to do this just hold down your middle mouse button and move around.
Another type of motion we can do is panning, which just means sliding around our view. And to do this
we basically just orbit but this time hold down "shift" before using the middle mouse button.
So already we have two types of navigation that used the middle mouse button. And as you might have expected
zooming in and out is just scrolling the mouse wheel up and down.
And this will take some time to get used to
but the main lesson here is that navigation is done with the middle mouse button.
But there's actually another way to navigate the 3d viewport that can be done with just a trackpad.
So on the top right you see we have a gizmo and a couple extra buttons
and if we drag around this gizmo you see that we're orbiting around our Scene.
So this is the equivalent of an orbit. And immediately to the left
we have this magnifying glass, which we can click and drag to zoom in and out.
So obviously this is the equivalent of a zoom.
And lastly we have this hand icon which we can click and drag to pan around
So this is our equivalent of panning. And notice that our gizmo is actually updating as we orbit around manually using the middle mouse button.
So this will always match the orientation we have in our viewport.
And this actually leads me to the reason that you even use a gizmo if you have a mouse.
So suppose we want to look at our scene, coming from this direction, which is to say coming from the right side of our green Y-axis
Well to do this all we have to do is click the green right handle in our gizmo and this gives us a side view of our scene.
If instead we want it to look at the top of our scene
we can just click the top blue handle in the gizmo and this gives us a bird's-eye view on the scene.
So this method can be used to go to the front, back, left, right, top and bottom views very easily
And I want to mention one more thing about navigation before we move on.
So let's say that for some reason we want to orbit around our camera object.
Well notice that no matter how much we try to orbit were fixed on the center of the scene. And this doesn't really feel that natural
Instinctively we want to orbit around wherever our mouse is hovering and there's actually setting that forces blender to do this
So to find the setting go to the Edit drop-down and then open up our Preferences window.
Now since this is a navigation based issue we're going to go to the navigation tab
And then you want to enable auto depth. And now you see that our orbiting is acting in a way that makes more sense
So now we actually have all the tools we need to navigate around our 3d viewport
So our first objective is now complete and we want to switch our attention over to moving, rotating and scaling our objects
So back in the default scene, we only want our cube, which means we need to delete the other objects
so again, click an object to select it and then "shift-click" the other to add it to the selection
And there are many ways to delete your selection, like hitting "Delete" on the keyboard,
right clicking and then selecting "delete" or using the blender hotkey for deleting, which is just "X"
and now that we've isolated the cube
I want to look over at the toolbar which we can enable and disable using "T"
And right now by default we have our selection tool chosen, but let's switch over to the move tool
and when we do this we get the move gizmo placed over our selection
and we can drag any of our arrows to move our cube across the X, Y or Z axis
You can also drag these little squares to move around two axes at once
and if we drag outside our gizmo we're gonna end up moving perpendicularly to our view
Some other tricks are holding down shift while using the gizmo to slow down the movement
and this can be very useful whenever we want to make small precise movements
And another trick is holding down control to move incrementally.
So as you might expect these ideas extend over to rotation and to scaling
So now let's select our rotation tool and we can rotate by choosing an axis and making a Circular motion with our mouse
and just like last time you can hold down shift to slow things down or ctrl to rotate Incrementally
And we can do this on any of the axes or we can just select other parts of our gizmo to get a free Rotation
And now switching over to the scale tool we can scale on one axis at a time or two at a time by clicking the small squares
when we select outside our gizmo we get a uniform scaling on all three axes
And again, we can hold down shift to scale slowly or hold down control to do it incrementally
now one way to combine all of these together
is by choosing the transform tool which basically has all three gizmos packed into one
So this lets us use all the basic transformations in one convenient place
Now when we're using blender we want to do things as quickly as possible.
And while the tool bar is very useful It's not really the fastest way to work
Instead we use hotkeys for pretty much everything
So now I'm going to show you how to move, rotate and scale Objects the fast and efficient way.
To move an object the hotkey is "G" for grab and automatically we're moving our object perpendicularly to the view
if we want to constrain this movement to one axis
we can hit "X" for the x-axis, "Y" for the y-axis, or "Z" for the z-axis
And notice that as we're moving the cube blender tells us how much we're displacing it by
And we can actually type in values for this movement
And it will automatically be moved by exactly that distance.
You can put in positive numbers, negative numbers or even Decimals.
And just like before we can hold down shift after clicking "G" and we'll get slow precise Movement
or we can hold down "ctrl" to get incremental movement.
So this is already much faster than using the movement gizmo and we also have hotkey shortcuts for
Rotation and for scaling. So hit "R" to rotate your selection and we can hit
"X", "Y" or "Z" to choose our axis of rotation
Again, we can hold down "shift" to slow this down or "ctrl" to do it Incrementally
for scaling the hotkey is "S" and we can choose an axis in the same way. And if we don't choose an axis
the scaling will be uniform and we can hold down shift to slow things down or control to do it Incrementally
Now scaling has one more trick we can use which is scaling on two axes at once
So for example, we can hit "S" for scale and then "Shift-Z" to scale on everything except the z axis.
We can also do the same type of thing with "shift-X" and "shift-Y"
So now that we can navigate and quickly do basic transforms
Let's try making the Tower of Hanoi model, which was the goal for this tutorial
So let's start off by selecting our light and Camera
By shift-clicking and we can delete these with "X". And I want to turn this cube into the base of the tower
So we need to reshape it, so it looks like a thin board
so "S" and then "Y" to scale it and on the y-axis
And let's also widen it a bit on the x-axis.
Now we want this to be a lot thinner than it is right now and we can do that by "S" and then "Z" to scale down
on the z-axis. And I'm making sure to say a lot of these hotkeys out loud
So it really gets ingrained because they're really important
So now I'm going to change over to the side view using our gizmo and I want to make this base look a bit more complex
And we can do that by just adding another layer to the base using another cube
But since we already have this one here, it'd be nice to duplicate it and one very intuitive way to do this
is just with "ctrl-C" for copy and "ctrl-V" for paste
And right now we can't see the cube that we added because it's perfectly overlapping with our original
So let's just move this down z-axis with "G" and then "Z" until they're barely overlapping
And I want the second layer to be a bit bigger, but also slightly thinner.
So if we scale and then hit "shift-Z" we are scaling on the x- and y-axis
And then we can make it thinner by scaling down on the z-axis and we should bring this back up
So they're overlapping. So we have the base and now we need to add three pegs
which are just cylinders. And to add a cylinder we just go to the add drop down and under mesh
we just select cylinder. And the faster way to do this is with the hotkey "Shift-A" to add and then again choose cylinder
So now on the side view, let's bring up our pegs
so it's hovering over the board. And I want our cylinder to have a smaller radius so we can just scale with "shift-Z"
so it preserves its height. And then just make this a bit taller
so it looks more like the peg that you'd find in the Tower of annoy
So now we need one more peg on either side.
So "ctrl-C" and "ctrl-V" to
Duplicate our cylinder and then move it over to the left
And if we want another way to do this
We can hit "shift-D" to duplicate and this duplicates our cylinder and puts it in a free transform
So just hit "Y" to constrain it to the y-axis and then bring that over. You see that very quickly
we've made the base and the three pegs and now we just need the pieces they move around
So let's add another cylinder and then in the side view, let's rescale this and bring it up
so it's in position. And for the rest of these pieces
we just need to make each smaller than the last.
So duplicate our piece was "shift-D" and bring it up on the z-axis. And I'm going to decrease the radius with "shift-Z"
so the piece preserves its thickness. And let's just repeat this process one more time to get the next piece. And we can just keep
repeating this process over and over again, or we can try something a bit smarter.
So I'm gonna select all our pieces by shift-clicking and we can repeat the same process
But this time it will work on all the pieces at once
So this trick just lets us work a lot faster
and we can make this look a bit more interesting by bringing some of our pieces to the other pegs. And in this one
you see that we're getting some overlap we don't want, so I'm just going to cheat and bring down the radius a bit more
So just keep using these methods to add more pieces,
until you feel like it looks complete. And at this point I'm pretty happy with what we've got and I want to rotate the entire thing
so we can see it as a whole
So the hotkey for selecting everything is "A" or you can just click and drag to select everything
and with our rotate tool we can use this gizmo to view our entire model
So we used only primitive objects, the cube and the cylinder, and basic transforms like
moving, rotating and scaling to create something with more complexity
And again, we were able to make this using only the core fundamentals.
And you should try making some other objects using these techniques like a snowman a bookshelf or anything like that
but this has been the first part of "Blender for beginners" and I hope you guys join me on the next one
And if you want to fund more high-quality tutorials like these consider donating on the Seiji matter patreon
It really helps me make these tutorials
and you can get some perks like behind the scenes content and the full scripts I write for these videos
But anyways, thank you guys for watching and I'll see you on the next one [Subtitles by Herr Kürbis]