Blender Notes Introduction to Digital Modelling and Animation in Design Blender Tutorial - week 1 The Blender Interface and Basic Shapes
Introduction Blender is a powerful modeling, animation and rendering software with a rapidly growing community of users worldwide. It provides amazing creative opportunities for 3D art, animation and game design. It is open-source and can be freely downloaded through the official blender website at: www.blender.org/ Versions for various operating systems including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux are available to choose from. The current version of the software is 2.71. Resources for additional training and help include: The Education section of the official website: http://www.blender.org/support/ The Blender Artists Forum: www.blenderartists.org and the Blender Cookie: http://cgcookie.com/blender/ The Blender Interface Editors and Window Types Here s the default Blender interface: The main interface is made up of individual panels featuring different editors. Blender provides a variety of editors (also called window types) enabling different functions, while every panel can be set to any type. For example, the default interface features 5 windows (see above image): the top Information editor, the 3D viewport, the bottom Timeline and on the right the Outliner and the Properties editors. 2
The button, which allows to change between editors is located on the upper or lower left corner of each window. There are a lot of different editors to choose from; the ones most commonly used are: User Preferences - which can also be selected from the File menu Outliner - displays all objects in your scene and settings Properties - where most settings and scene options occur Video Sequence Editor - compiles final movies with images, effects and sounds UV/Image Editor - setting textures for games and movies Graph Editor - displays animation data and controls Timeline - animation timeline with display and record controls 3D View - your basic 3D scene window to work in Interface Customization There are two main editors that allow access to various needed properties and are located on the 3D viewport. These are the Object Tools (or Tool Shelf) located on the left side of the 3D view, and the Transform panel on the right side, which is hidden at first. These are definitely useful panels as you will come to realize, but they take up a lot of space, so it is a good idea to minimize them when not modeling. You can minimize them by dragging on their edge with the LMB (Left Mouse Button) while your cursor looks like a double arrow. To bring them back place your cursor inside the 3D viewport and type T for the Object Tools (Tool Shelf) or N for 3
the Transform panel. This will open the panels up again (pressing either button a 2nd time will close the panel). You can also click on the small (+) symbols at the sides of the viewport to open them. When modeling in Blender it is often needed to use more than one 3D viewport to work with since you ll need to see the mesh from different angles. Therefore you need to know how to split windows to create more view angles and how to join them back together. In order to split a viewport, move your cursor over the small triangle on the upper right corner of the 3D viewport. When the cursor turns into a (+), drag with your LMB to split your screen into 2 viewports. Joining viewports together works the same way. Click on the triangle and drag over the viewport you wish to remove. There s no limit to the number of times you can split your windows. Traditionally designers work with 2 views like the example shown below. Most of the times the left view is needed to flip between principle views (top, front, side) and the right one for the camera view. 4
User Preferences The User Preferences Window can be called up by selecting it in the File pull-down menu. This is where you can customize the preferences of the software before you start working. Blender works well using the default settings, but there are several things you may want to change for your own use to stream line your work flow or react better for your computer. By looking at the tabs across the top of the window, you can select options in several areas. As we progress in the course we will be looking at different controls that can be achieved from the User Preferences Window, but for now you only need to know the basics: Editing Tab: Here is where you can increase the undo steps that the program accepts. Hover over the Undo Steps text field and type in how many steps you want to be able to go back (note that the upper limit is 64). Input Tab: The Emulate NumPad option is great for laptops without number pads. This will be quite useful for changing between views, as we will see later on, so make sure you select it if you are using a laptop. 5
Default Objects If you take a look at the first image on these notes (page 2) you will see the default objects that exist in the 3D viewport when you first open the software. These are the following: Cube: a polygon primitive (the basis for building a more complex geometry) Camera: a needed object in every scene, with properties, which specifies the angle of the render Lamp: illuminates the scene Grid: comprises of small squares. Each one represents one Blender unit*. *note: There is no defined value for the Blender Unit. As a 3D Designer you can assign it to be as large as you wish according to the needs of your project. E.g. a common measurement is 1BU = 1meter. But make sure you stay consistent in the proportions you chose throughout the whole project. (if for example you want to model a character a good way to go about it would be to assign 1BU=10cm since if you choose one meter the scale is too big and a realistic character would be around two BU big) Axes: X, Y, Z on the bottom left corner of the screen. 3D cursor: resembles a target icon and indicates where new object will be added on the screen (use the left mouse button and click on the grid to position it). IMPORTANT Select using the RMB (right mouse button) Multi- select using shift+rmb Delete via selecting a mesh and hitting X Navigation Knowing how to navigate in the 3D view window is crucial and takes some getting used to. You will move around in the 3D space via both the keyboard and the mouse. IMPORTANT Navigation in 3D space is controlled via the mouse (make sure you have a 3 button mouse, with a wheel, available) and the keyboard number pad (NOT the numbers across the top of the keyboard) 6
To change the view in the 3D window, hover your cursor over it and use the following numbers on the NumPad: 1 (Front), 3 (Right) and 7 (Top). You can also hold down ctrl and 1 (Back), 3 (Left) and 7 (Bottom) for the opposite views. ---Remember that this will only work if you have emulated the Numpad as described on the User Preferences section above! Try also typing 0, which will put you into camera view (what the camera currently sees is what will be rendered if you decide to produce a still image of your scene). By default, the margins of the camera are signified by a single line, representing the edge of what is rendered and shaded to the outside. Also notice that on the upper-left corner of the viewport a small note signifies the current view. Although the NumPad is used to change between views you will also need a mouse to navigate in the 3D view. Make sure you use a three-button mouse with a wheel, which will make your life much easier. Rotate MMB (middle mouse button) and drag the mouse Pan MMB + shift and drag the mouse Zoom in and out roll the wheel (or ctrl+mmb if there is no wheel available) Add Geometry Now that we know how to move around in 3D space, let s see how to add some basic geometry to work with. The 3D Cursor location is used to place new objects. Use the left mouse button to move the cursor in 3D space. When you have it in a convenient location, press Shift-A to bring up the insert menu. As you can see there are various elements you can insert in a scene, like Meshes, Curves, Text, Cameras, Lamps etc. We will see most of them in due course, but for now we are interested in Meshes (basic geometry to help us create more complex shapes). Select Add, then Mesh and select Cube. You should see the new mesh appear on the 7
position of the 3D Cursor. To delete a mesh, simply select it with the (RMB) and hit X. Blender will ask you whether you wish to delete, so select OK to confirm the action. Scale, Rotate and Translate Before you start changing the shape of the meshes and turning them into other shapes, you should become comfortable with creating, moving, rotating and scaling basic meshes. The three main modifying commands used in Blender are: G - move or grab objects, S - sizing or scaling them and R - rotating the object IMPORTANT To move, rotate or scale along an axis for more precise manipulations, select the mesh hit G, R or S and then the letter of the axis on the keyboard (X, Y or Z) If you would like to do any of these operations through an exact number (e.g. rotate a cube 90 degrees on the X axis) you can do it easily via the Transform panel. Move the cursor over the 3D view and type the N key to bring up the panel on the right side of your screen. There is another way to move, rotate and scale meshes and that is to use the transform widgets on the 3D view header. Rather than typing R, S or G, you can turn on the widget feature and simply grab the axis you wish to change. Save When you first start working with Blender, it seems difficult to figure out how to save your work. Notice that every time you save over an existing file, your previous save becomes a back-up file and is saved with a new extension (.blend1). This always gives you a back-up if a problem occurs. Here s what you see when you hit the save command: 8
Basic Render The render editor located in the properties panel, is where you specify the type of output you will calculate for your scene. Most or the time the outputs we use are either static images (for modeling) or video (for animation). Via the render settings you can set up the output of your image, the quality, the fps of your movie etc. We will often come back to rendering for different purposes but for now we are only interested in creating a simple image render. At the end of the render widow you will see the Render Output panel. Hover over and set the file format to.jpeg. Now hit the render Image button on the beginning of the list, to bring up the render window. Notice that you are rendering form camera view (what you see when you hit NumPad 0). To save the.jpeg, with the render window still open, go to the bottom of the render window and select Image > Save as Image. 9