Tutorial List

What is Blender?
Where do I get Blender?
The Interface
- Splitting and joining areas/windows
- Window types
- Setting up efficient workspaces
Moving around in 3D
- Rotating, Zooming and Panning
- Rotation point
- The Numpad
Manipulating objects
- Grab, Scale, Rotate
- Selecting Objects
- Pivot point
- Transform Properties and Clearing
Viewport Shading
Adding Objects
Shading types

[1.3a] Splitting and Joining Areas

To customize your workspace, you’re going to need to split and join areas. To do this, you need to look at the Top-Right, and Bottom-Left corners.

If you look closely at these areas, you will see that these corners have lines in.

To split an area, you click and drag one of these corners towards the middle of the current area. You will know when you are hovering over the corner because the cursor will change to a cross. So to split the 3D viewport, you click in the top right corner of it, then drag left.

After doing this, you should have two areas which both show the same thing. Now why would you want two areas that are exactly the same? Well, this is just a starting point. Now that you have the seperate area, you can change its type; pehaps you want to do some UV mapping. However, sometimes you might want two of the same area type, say if you were working on the front of a model at the same time as the side of it.

Now that you know how to create new areas, you’ll going to want to know how to get rid of old ones. You do this by merging two areas. You do this almost exactly the same way you split an area, by clicking in the corners and dragging. However, this time, you don’t want to drag into the middle, you want to drag onto another area. When you do this, an arrow will appear indicating which area is being merged onto which.

While this arrow is still showing, you can drag onto either area. To confirm the merge, you simply let go of the mouse button, and you’ll be back to only one area.

You cannot merge any two areas, they need to be next to each other, and share a dimension (same height, or same width)

So in this example, you could not merge A onto C&D, only onto B. If you wanted to merge all these areas together, you would need to merge A&B, C&D, and then merge those two resulting areas.

There is no limit to the amount of areas that you can have, you can just keep dividing and dividing.

Now that you know how to make new areas, it’s time to learn about the different area types.

Next Tutorial
The Interface – Area Types

[1.3] The Interface

Blenders User Interface can be very confusing at first, and perhaps a little scary. Even for those who have used previous versions, it’s layout and navigation is something that takes some getting used to. However, once you are used to it, you’ll be suprised at how flexible it is. With Blender, you are not forced to have your interface any one set way, it’s up to you. And even then, you can have multiple displays for different tasks.

It all sounds very complicated, but once you have the hang of it, it’s simple as a few clicks.

The Blender interface is made up of areas, each of which you can customize to behave in whatever way you want. Your areas can be any size, in any place on the screen, and you can pick and choose which ones you want or don’t. Before you can start manipulating areas though, you’re going to need to know what an area is. Lets look at the default Blender screen.

With this default view, there are 5 areas, each being a different area type. These five areas are highlighted below.

Now this layout is a good place to start, and for most of the beginner tutorials, the interface is going to look fairly similar to this. However, if you find a layout that works better for you, feel free to follow along using that instead. Now that we’ve seen the default layout, lets start messing with it, by splitting and joining areas.

 

Next Tutorial
The Interface – Splitting and Joining Areas

[1.2] Where do I get Blender?

Blender is an Open Source application which means that it is free. You can get it from http://www.blender.org/.

Blender is also cross platform, so you can use it on whatever operating system you are using, be it Windows, Mac, or Linux.

Next Tutorial
The Interface

[1.1] What is Blender?

Blender is an open source 3D modelling and animation package. It is freely available from http://www.blender.org/

Modelling a Face in Blender

Blender is a complex program, with many features allowing you to do many things, such as:

Modelling
Animation
Rendering
Rigging
Compositing
Video Sequencing
Game Making
Python Scripting

With these tutorials, I will go through each of these features so that you can become familiar with them, and use them with ease. Blender has a very steep learning curve, but once you have got the hang of it, it is simple, and even enjoyable to use.

Next Tutorial
Where can I get Blender?