This is the opening view of blender.

Transcription

1 This is the opening view of blender. Note that interacting with Blender is a little different from other programs that you may be used to. For example, left clicking won t select objects on the scene, or left click-dragging won t select multiple objects inside a rectangle. You ll use the right click to select things in the scene. It s a little confusing at first By default, blender gives you a cube in your opening scene. We don t want it. Press X to delete the cube and then choose Erase Selected Object(s) from the popup menu. After you delete the cube, there should be three things left in your scene. If you can t see them, you can use the mouse scroll wheel to zoom out until you can. 1) The scene s light (or lamp in some tutorials) 2) The cursor 3) The scene s camera Objects get added at the cursor position. If your cursor isn t at the origin (intersection of green and red lines), click on the origin to move it there.

2 We re going to build our mushroom from a circular base. From the Add menu, select Mesh, and then Circle. A popup window will appear that allows you to set the number of vertices and the radius of the circle. 32 and 1 are fine values to start with. So, press OK. In the center of your scene, you should now see a circle. You can use the arrows to move it around. Then either move it back to the origin or use CTRL Z to undo your moves.

3 Blender initially shows a view of the scene from the top. In order to build a mushroom, we want to view the scene from the front. Below the scene, click on the View menu and choose Front. Your circle should now look like this. We want to start editing the actual geometry. To switch to edit mode, click on the Object Mode combo box below the scene and choose Edit Mode

4 Now, your circle should look like this. The yellow dots represent vertices in the geometry. We re going to build a mushroom out of two basic operations: extrude and scale. To extrude, you need to have your circle selected (the dots should be yellow). If the circle isn t selected, press a to select it. With the circle selected, press e and choose Only Edges from the popup menu. Move the mouse up to extrude the circle into a cylinder.

5 When the cylinder looks right, click to accept the extrusion. At this point, the added circle will be selected. Sometimes it s useful to resize. To resize the current selection, press s and move your mouse. When the selection is the right size, click the mouse to accept it. Using just extrude and resize (scale), my mushroom looks like this. One potential problem is that the mushroom has a hole in its top. And, we can t see it.

6 To change the camera view, hold down the middle mouse button (or scroll wheel) and drag. Rotate the camera to get a view of the hole in the mushroom top. Note: if you hold down shift and the middle mouse button you can pan the current camera view. You can also press 5 on the numpad (or use the view menu below) to switch between the default orthographic view and the perspective view. The perspective view feels more 3D, but orthographic view can be easier to deal with. To fill in the hole, select the Mesh menu below the scene, choose Faces and then Fill

7 When filled, the hole should look something like this. To see what the model might look like, we can render it. From the top menu, select Render and then Render Current Frame A new window will appear with a rendering of the model. In this one, we don t have a particularly good view of the mushroom.

8 To fix this, rotate the camera in the scene editor to a view you like. Now, we ll move the render camera to this view. From the View menu below the scene, select Align View and Align Active Camera to View The view now shows what the camera will see if you render it again. And, now our rendered version has lighting problems. To fix this, we need to move the light so that it s near the camera.

9 Go back to object mode by clicking on the Edit Mode combo box and selecting Object Mode Switch to the top view and scroll until you can see the light icon and the camera icon.

10 Now we need to move the light so it s near the camera so the light will be coming from a good direction. Right click on the camera to select it. When selected, the light should look like this. Now, click and drag on the arrows to move the light over to near the camera.

11 It should look something like this when you re done. And, the rendering will now look a little better.