Written by: Daniel Sefton
Time: 1 hour
Difficulty: Beginner
Requirements: Blender 2.40+

Introduction

Moving on from the interface, we are now going to look at the basics of using Blender and becoming familiar with some useful shortcuts. If this is your first time using Blender and you haven’t already read my previous tutorial, then I suggest you do so before continuing. Now, open up Blender and lets begin!

Moving in 3D space

First of all we need to learn how to move around in the 3D space. When you first open Blender, by default it is set to ‘orthographic ‘mode. Orthographic means it has no vanishing point and you see everything without a distance. It looks strange but is useful for an accurate fixed view on objects when you are editing. Below is an example of a long cube in orthographic mode:

To rotate the 3D view, hold down the MMB and drag. Alternatively if you don’t have a MMB, you can use ALT+LMB. You should see the view rotate according to the direction in which you drag.

As you rotate, you will see that the cube is not filled, this is because it is in wire frame mode. To switch to solid mode, press Z and you can press it again to return to wire frame mode. Note that this will not affect rendering.

To to zoom the view, you have four options. Either scroll the scroll wheel, hold Ctrl+MMB, hold CTRL+ALT+LMB or use the number pad. + and - keys.

Finally to pan the view, either hold SHIFT+MMB or SHIFT+ALT+LMB and move your mouse. If you have a scroll wheel you can also hold down SHIFT then scroll to pan up and down and CTRL then scroll to pan left and right.

To switch to top view, either select in the window header View>Top or press 7 on your number pad.

To switch to side view, either access it from the menu or press 3 on your number pad.

To switch to front view, again either access it from the view menu in the window header or press 1 on your number pad.

Now, to get a real feel for the 3D environment, we need to switch to perspective view which simulates the way we see things with our eyes. To do that, you need to either select from ‘view’ in the window header ‘perspective’ or press 5 on your number pad which you can use to change back to orthographic mode as well. Here is the same cube you saw in the previous image but in perspective mode:

When switching to the top, side and front modes, it is best to switch to orthographic mode rather than in perspective as it allows more accuracy when working with objects.

Transforming objects

Next, let’s have a look at how to move, rotate and scale objects using the shortcuts and the transformation widgets.

To select an object, hover over the object you wish to select then press the RMB. Then to deselect it, hover over the selected object and press SHIFT+RMB. To select multiple objects, press B and drag a box around the ones you wish to select.

First of all we will go through the shortcuts used for transforming objects. To move an object, select it and press G. You can select which axis you drag it across by either cycling through pressing the MMB or by directly pressing X,Y or Z.

The rest is fairly similar. To rotate an object, select it then press R and again to cycle through the rotation axis, press the MMB or X,Y,Z.

Finally, to scale an object, just press S then to scale on different axis, again press X,Y or Z or cycle through them using the MMB.

Next we go onto using the transformation widgets. In the 3D window header, you will see a hand button also with triangle, donut and square buttons to the side of it.

Grey indicates it is selected, if you turn the hand off by clicking on it, this will disable the widgets. The triangle represents movement, the donut represents rotation and the square represents sizing. If you select the different ones, you will see the widget changing according to the one that is selected. They are also in different colours according to the axis. Red is X, green is Y and blue is Z.

You can also have multiple widgets at a time, just hold SHIFT while selecting the ones you want. It will look like this:

Your probably wondering what the drop down menu to the right is. Well, Global mode positions the widgets corresponding to the alignment grid, so they will always stand vertically. Local mode positions the widgets corresponding to the object’s rotation.

Finally, the fastest way to transform objects is by simply using your mouse. Drag your cursor in the following shapes to move, rotate and scale objects.

Creating objects

Now we move onto adding shapes and objects. To start off, we are going to take a look at the Add menu. You can access it either at the user preferences bar at the top or the secret shortcut menu in Blender which you can access by pressing SPACE.

For now we are only interested in mesh and surface objects. Mesh objects are made of flat faces as shown below on the left and NURBS Surface objects are smooth objects which are made up of curves shown below to the right.

To add an object, either select a surface or mesh object from the add menu. Objects always appear where the cursor is positioned, and their rotation depends upon the angle of the scene you are viewing at. For example if you want the object’s rotation to be angled vertically then you would add the object when in top view and to move the cursor, just click where you want it to move to in the 3D view.

To change the attributes of an object, press N or select ‘Transform Properties’ from the object menu in the 3D view header. There you can accurately change the object’s rotation, scale and position. You can also define the name of the object (OB) and define an object to make it parent to (Par).

Conclusion

I hope now that you are beginning to understand the program more, now that the hard part is over, you should find everything else fairly easy. The next tutorial will explain how to edit objects. Until then, happy Blendering! ;)