Blender Secrets for Beginners & Intermediate Users

1. Introduction: Hello. I'm Momo. Welcome to Blender Essentials for beginners and intermediate users. This is not the usual blender course that guides you in making your first cute creation. Instead, it's a dive into Blenders workins to help you find your way complete tasks more quickly and be aware of common issues and how to solve them even before you encounter them. This class is inspired by my own struggles in my three years using blender. I've packed it with things I wish I knew when I started, tips and tricks I've gathered while working on projects and creating tutorials for my YouTube channel. Hopefully, these insights will save you time and spare you some confusion and headaches. As a beginner or intermediate user of blender, I'm confident you'll find this class enlightening. In 19 lessons, we will cover installation, navigation, interface tweaking, shortcut management, and more. I recommend watching this class before taking my other classes and keeping it as a reference for later. I'm sure you won't remember everything, and when you need the information, it will be here for you. Well organized and easy to access. The class also comes with a downloadable list of free resources to help you gain deeper knowledge. All you need to attend is your computer and an Internet connection. So if you're ready, let's start. 2. Project Instructions: This class, I want you to relax and either follow what I do on screen, especially if it's your first time using blender, or just watch the lessons and take notes when you learn something new. For the project, download the zip file from the projects and resources tab, extract its contents, and open the file named project in a text editor. The file contains questions or assignments that you can complete after finishing each lesson. Type your answers under each question and take a screenshot when asked. You can do this as you progress or after you finish the course. This exercise will help you reinforce your learning and better memorize the lessons. However, you don't have to answer all the questions as some lessons may not apply to you. Once you have fit in your answers, go to the projects and resources section, click the submit project button and pass the questions and answers into the description field. To add your screenshots or media links, place your cursor where you want to insert them and click one of the buttons at the bottom. Add a title and an image that represents your project, then hit the published button. That's it. Again, just relax and enjoy the ride. No stress, lots of fun, and lots of knowledge. 3. Download Blender: Blender is a free software. You can go to blender.org and download it for free. On this main page, you can click on the download button. It will take you to another page in which you can click and download the default version for your system. In my case windows. Or you can go here. You can download Blender LTS LTS for long term support. These versions of blender are a little bit older, but they are the most stuble versions because they are supported for two years in which they get critical bug fixes. You can also download any of the previous versions since Blenders creation, and if you go down, you can also go experimental and download one of the versions that are still in development. This is great if you want to test new features, and if you want to help in the development by testing the newest versions and report any bug you find. That's a great way to support Blenders development, and it costs you nothing. Or we can also go here, click and we get this drop down from which we can download blender for any system. Windows, Mac OS, Linux, or the steam version. For windows, we have three options, the installer, which is the default one and the easiest option, the portable, or the Zip version, or we can get blender from the Microsoft store. You can choose any of these depending on your system and your preferences. For myself, I will download the Zip file and show you how to make it portable. The project to open the project text file and write down your operating system and the version of blender you downloaded. 4. Install Blender: In the installer is very simple, and we've done that countless times with countless softwares, so I will show you how to install the Zip version. It requires a little extra work, but it is more flexible. Once you download your Zip file, you double click on it, you right click on this folder and choose copy. Then on my C drive, I creates a folder named blunder. Let's double click on it, and here we can right click and choose past. In Windows 11, it's this icon here, you can do, of course, Control V. And we copy our folder here. Now you see that we downloaded Blender version 4.1 0.1. The second one is a corrective release and the real version is 4.1. We will rename this folder to blender space 4.1 enter. You see that I have here other blender versions that I installed with the same method, and I do that for several reasons to test files in older versions, for example, or to test the newest features In the versions that are still in development, like here Blender 4.2. That way, I can be the first to test new features. Also, if I find any bogs, I report them to developers. Now I can double click on my folder, and to open blender, I can double click on the Blender launcher executable file here. Since this method doesn't create any shortcuts, we can right click and create a shortcut. I think it's under show more options. Create shortcut, and then I can put this shortcut on my desktop. Or you can also pin blender to the task bar. Let's delete this shortcut. By default, even if it's called portable on the blender website, this installation will behave just like the installer version. You can start using blender right away, but if you want to make it portable, we will see that later. For the project in the project text file, type the method you use to install blender. 5. Update Blender: Now, how do we update blender that we installed using the ZIP method? If you are upgrading to a whole new version, like from Blender 0.12 Blender 0.2, you will create a new folder and follow the instructions that we saw earlier. When you open your new version for the first time, you will have the option to import your settings from the previous version. Now if you are upgrading inside the same version to a corrective release, for example, from 4.1 0.124 0.1 0.2, or if you are using an experimental version, and it is getting bug fixes almost daily. The healthiest way to update it is to go inside or folder to delete all the contents inside and then replace them with the new files that you downloaded. So you delete everything here, and don't worry about your settings and customizations because they are stored in a different location, and then you go to your Zip file You go inside, select all the contents and copy them to your folder. The ten old files before installing new ones is a good practice, even if you use the installer method because sometimes there is instability in the software because you just drop new files over old files and some conflicts happen. Answer the simple question in the project file. Why do we need to update blender? 6. Go Portable: Want to make blender portable and not lose your settings if you open it in a different computer, with a new blender installation, you go inside or blender folder, and then inside this folder with the version number, in this case, 4.1, you go inside and you create a new folder new folder and name it Cf. D. In Blender 4.2 and later, the method is different. You create a new folder, not inside the version number, but here in the root folder, besides the version number folder, besides the blender launcher file. Here, you create a new folder and name it portable. Enter and your D. But what if you already used blender and you already customized it and you already installed a few addons? In that case, you need first to locate where your sittings are stored. In the case of windows, the should be in your main drive inside the user's folder, and then your user name, then you'll need to allow displaying hidden folders. In Windows 11, you go under view and under show and enable hidden items. Now you go inside the updata folder, Roman, and then blender foundation, Blender and you find your version number. If it's 4.1, you go inside, and you copy the config and scripts folders, right click copy, and then you go back to where you install blender and inside the version number, and here you will pass your config and scripts folder. In the case of Blender 4.2 and later, you recopy those files here inside the portable folder that you created earlier. Now if you want to update portable blender, it is a little bit tricky because when you are deleting your files and replacing them, you need to be mindful of the config and script folders. But in Blender 4.2 and later, it is much easier because you can just select everything and exclude the portable folder in which all your settings are stored, you delete the rest and pass the new files. Answer this for the project. Did you go portable? Why or why not. 7. Customize Settings: You first open blender, you have the possibility to import your sittings from a previous version if you have one. You can also customize these sittings here if you wish, and then you can click on Save New sittings. Now you will be greeted with this splotch screen. On the right, you see these resources links, and on the left, you have these five startup files to choose from general to the animation, sculpting, VFX, video editing. It's amazing what all blender can do. You can also access these startup files from here file, New, and you choose one from here. We will go with General, but we don't have to click here because the general startup file was already loaded when we started Blender. There are a lot of settings in Blender that you will learn about over time and customize to your needs, and a lot of those settings can be accessed here under edit preferences. I will first go under the interface tab and increase the resolution scale. This is mainly because I want my text to be big and clear in this course and in all my tutorials. I will then go under the Themes tab and I will install a custom theme. These are XML files that you can download from the Internet for free or with money. Let's click on this button and find my theme. I will choose this one and click on Install theme. This is a free theme that I made called Momo Mundo. If you like it, you can find the link to download it in the resources file. Now I will go under system and here under memory and limits endo steps. You see that Blender has 32 endo steps to undo anything you do in Blender. But 32 is really a low number because Blender will count even selecting or deselecting something as an endostep. So we need to increase this. At least to 100, I think If you have enough memory in your system, you can go for the maximum 256 enter. If you hover here in this bubble, smaller values conserve memory. If you see that blender is taking a lot of memory or the system is slowing down, you may want to decrease this number. Now the settings that we changed will be saved automatically when we close blender. But if you don't want that, if you are afraid that some settings may be changed accidentally, you can go here on this icon and click on it and you can check auto save preferences. Now we have this new button here and we will have to click on it to save our sittings manually, and this star here means that there are some unsaved settings, so let's click and the preferences are saved. You can also from this button, reset your sittings and load factory preferences. Now, let's close this sittings window. For the project, do you prefer to save sittings manually or automatically? 8. Manage Areas & Workspaces: What makes each of these startup files unique are the workspaces that are made of. Here, for example, we are on the layout workspace, and all these other tabs are other workspaces. Each workspace is made of these windows called areas, and each area contains an editor. For example, here we have displayed the three D viewport editor, and you can change it from the stop left icon. If you click on it, you can choose a different editor, like for example, the asset browser. Let's change back to the three D viewport. Can create your own workspace by clicking on this plus sign and choosing one from these lists or choose to duplicate the current workspace. Let's do this, and now we have a new workspace. You can double click on its name and change it to custom, for example, enter, and now you can customize your areas as you wish. You can move your cursor to the border of areas and click and hold to adjust the size. And if you want to split an area and create a new area, make sure you are inside that area, then go to one of the corners, and when the cursor turns into a cross, you can click and drag horizontally to create a vertical split. Or again, to the corner, the cursor turns into a cross. Click and drag vertically. And you create a horizontal split. To close, expand or merge areas. Again, make sure you are inside an area you want to affect. Then go to the corner, and when the cursor again turns into a cross, you click and this time, you drag outward towards the area you want to merge, and you can keep holding your mouth button, your left mouse button, of course, and you can move it to choose which area to close. And the darker one is the one that will be closed and merged into the lighter one. Release the mouse button, and let's strike again. Let's go inside this area. Let's go to the corner. The cursor turns into a cross. Left click and hold and go outwards, and now you see this arrow, and it means this area will be closed, or you can turn it back and close this area instead, and then release the left mouse button. Valla. You can also swap areas if you go to a corner, see this cross, and then hold the control key, left click and drag to a different area. And you see that the pointer changed to this new icon. If I drag it on this area here and release the left mouse button, these two areas were swapped. Strike again to the corner. Control, then left click and drag to this area and release the left mouse button. You can also again, go to a corner, cursor changes to this cross, hold shift, and then left mouse button and drag just a little bit. And something happens. It's not obvious. But what happened is that our window or our area was cloned to a separate window. This can be useful if you have multiple monitors. You can move this window to a different monitor when you are working on your project. Let's close this window, Let's try again with this area. To the corner, the cross is visible now, whole shift, left click and drag a little bit, and we created a new window of our outliner. Let's close this window again. If you don't like this drag in business, you can instead go to the border and when the cursor changes, you can right click and choose from this menu. If you choose, for example, vertical split, this line will appear, and you can move it to any area you want to split that area. You can also press tab to switch between vertical and horizontal split. And when you are satisfied with the location of the split, you can left click and v. Now again, on the border, right click and join areas, and we can choose to close one of these two areas. You can find more options under the view than the area menu. And in some editors, you can find those options if you right click on the header of that area, like here on the outliner, escape or here on the header of our properties panel. Right click, and you can, for example, maximize this area to make it take the whole screen, and then you can go back by clicking on this back to previous putin. And you can also right click full screen area to make it go full screen without even those top menus. Here if you want to go back, you can go to the corner to the right stop corner, and you see this little icon that appears, and you can left click on it to go back. You can also, of course, use these shortcuts to maximize area control spacebar and to go full screen Control Alt space bar. So while the cursor is here, Control Alt Spacebar, will go first screen, and then you do it again to go back Control Alt Spacebar. For the project, create a custom work space at a few areas, take a screenshot and post it. 9. Save Startup File: Make changes to your workspaces and areas, or when you change any settings in your startup files. You need a way to save those settings for when you open blender next. You can change almost anything in your startup files. Like for example, the settings in these panels, or you can have more objects here in the three D viewport. You can delete the default cube, for example, to shift A to add new object, mesh and add a monkey. You can add more objects, you can have no objects at all. Delete change the position of the camera, you can have more cameras. You can also create more work spaces. Or delete some work spaces that you may not need. If you don't sculpt, maybe delete the sculpting workspace, and let's delete, by the way, this custom work space, right click and delete. I won't tell you what you should or shouldn't change because that depends on the way you use blender and the default settings that you use most of the time. If you are new to blender, you will figure that out with time. And to save your changes, you will need to go to file, and then defaults and save start up file? This works with any of the startup files. Let's go again, Defaults Save startup file. Left click, and then you get a confirmation dialog. Okay, Save startup file, and you click again and it's done. And you can do this every time you make new changes to your startup files. For the project, did you make changes to the startup file? If so, what are some of them? 10. Viewport Navigation: Navigating three D space is one of the most basic and most important things or skills that you will learn, especially if you never used three D software before. To follow this luson fully, it's best to have a middle button and wheel on your mouse and to have a separate nam pad or numbers pad on your keyboard. If you don't have either or if you are graphics tablet user, we will cover alternatives in the next luson. Can follow up this lesson using the default startup file or you can use this file. It's called XYZ cube. It's part of the downloadable package that comes with this class. The first thing I want to show you is how to zoom in and out. Using the mouse wheel, rotated backward to zoom out and rotated forward to zoom in, and then to orbit or to rotate the view, you press the middle mouse button and drag the mouse in any direction you want. Again, let's zoom out and rotate and you see here that we are in three D space or in a three D world, just like in a video game. We see a few objects, a cube, a source of light and a camera. To select these objects, you just left click on any of them. Then you see these two lines here. This one, the green one is the line that goes from front to back, and it's called the y axis. This other line is the x axis, and it goes from left to right, and there is a third line that is not visible, and will make it visible by going here to the overlays button here and to this arrow. We will talk more about overlays later. So you click on this arrow and you enable the display of the z axis. And now we can see a blue line that goes from top to bottom, a vertical line, and that's our third three D axis, and they cross each other in the word center. We can hide the cube to see that better. You can either hide it by pressing the H button H four hide or by going here and clicking on this y icon, and now you see how the three axis cross each other. So let's hide the cube again by pressing this ie button, and you already know the most basic things about navigation, zooming in and out and biting. Now let's talk more about bit. The Alt key will give you more control. The first way the alt key can help you is if you press the alt key and then press the middle mouth button, now the rotation or the orbiting will happen around the new point that you clicked. Again, lt and press your middle mouth button anywhere. And you see that the viewport focuses on the point that you clicked, and when you bit middle most button and drag, you will bit on that point. Let's do it one more time. Alddle Most button, to focus on our cube. Then if you press Alt and click the middle Most button and drag a little bit, you will face one of the axis. Here we are facing the x axis. As you can see, the pink pace of the cube is facing us, and also the x axis is facing us now. Then again, alts and let's drag sideways. Now we are facing the y axis, the axis that goes front to back. Now let's do alts and middle most button and drag down. Now we are facing the z axis or the vertical axis. A middle most button and drag to the right. At middle mopton, drag to the left. Let's again drag with the middle most button alone. And the third way the Alt key can help is this time to click and hold the middle Most button, and then you can start orbiting, and then you press alts while still holding the middle most button. And now the view will snap on the axis when you are close to them, when you are facing anyone of the axis, and also on the diagonal lines that are between those axis. I think I release the middle most button by mistake. So make sure you click and hold your middle most button drag and then press out and you can move like this, and it will snap on the diagonals and also on the views facing the axis. Again, to summarize, pressing and dragging the middle Must button will bit freely. Pressing Alt, then click in with the middle most button, we'll change the center point on which the rotation is happening or the orbitin Then if you press Alt first and drag a little bits using the middle Must button, you will face one of the three D axis, and if you do the opposite, press the middle most button and drag, and then you hold the at key. You will snap on the views that are facing the axis or the diagonals between Stead of the middle most button, you can use the numbers eight, six, two, four on the Nampad. Use them like a cross and a joystick and orbits like this. Eight and two will rotate vertically, and four and six will rotate sideways. We have also one that will take you to front view, three, that will take you to side view, and seven, that will take you to a top view facing the Z axis. That's bits again a little bit. You see now that the view is a little bit different. We can't see perspective anymore, and to switch back to normal, you can press five on the nam pad. So five will give you a view with perspective, in which the closer something is the bigger it appears. And then five again, and this view in which there is no perspective is called the orthographic view. So again, five, and now we have nine that will take you to the opposite of any view that you have. So we press nine, and this is the opposite view. Line again to our first view, and then we have zero that will take us to camera view. This is what we can see if you look through the camera, and then zero again takes us back to where we were, and then we have the dot on the Nampad. If I select my cube, left click, and then I hit the dot, now it focuses on my cube, and the orbit and now will have its center on our cube. Now, what if you want to rotate the view without changing the direction that you are looking at. That's called a roll. You may not understand what I mean, but to do it, you need to hold shift and then use the four and sex putons on the nam pad. Hold the shift key and then press four, and you will rotate like this, then sex, and you'll rotate like this. You see that we are still looking in the same direction, and another way to navigate is to do panning, and panning is going sideways or top and bottom without rotating the view. To do it, you need to hold shift, then press the middle most puton and drive So now we can move in any direction without rotation, and to do it with the Nam pad, you need to hold the control key and then use the four, six, eight and two buttons like across and pan like this. Again, the roll shifts and four and six, and the pan is control and four, six, eight or two. All using the middle most button, you do shifts, middle most button, and direct. And the last thing about navigation is zoom in and out. We saw that we can do it with the mouse wheel, and you can also do it by holding the control key pressing the middle mouspon and dragon, and this will give you smoother zoom in and out. Please to shift middle moputon and pan a little bit to put the cube in the center of the viewport. Doing it with the Namat you can use the minus and plus sign. These are three methods of zooming in and out. Minus and plus sign, mouse wheel and using control and the middle mopin. If you need more options, or if you forget any of the shortcuts, you can go to the view menu here in the viewport, and then you go down to viewpoint, and here you see that you can go to camera view and you see the shortcut Nampad zero, go to the top to the bottom, and each one has the shortcuts. This is one I didn't cover, for example, to go to the top, you do seven, and to go to the bottom, you do control and seven. We have here navigation, how to orbit, how to roll, how to pen, how to zoom in and out, fly navigation, walk navigation. This is a little bit advanced and I want to cover here. Align view, and we have all these options to align view. You can take your time and explore these two. Then there is another way to do navigation, and that is using the gizmo here and these buttons here. I don't have these displayed, go to this button and enable the Gizmo. So you can just left click on the Gizmo and drive and you can bit. You can click on any of the xs here to go and face that axis. You can click again to go to the opposite view. We are looking at the bottom, and here we are looking at the top, can do the same with y and with the x axis two. You can zoom in and out using this button. Again, left click and drag in any direction. You can pan using this button called move the view. You can go to camera view, using this button, click and then click, and you can also let's orbit a little bit here. Zoom out a little bit. Let's pan a little bit, and we can switch between perspective and orthographic projection or view, using this bon. Lastly, a quick tip, if you start using your middle mouth button to bit, for example, and then you don't want to finish this action, you can either hit the escape key or the right mouse button like this and you b. You can do that with panning also, so shift middle mouse button, you start panning and then right click. Sell the Set navigation for beginners. Now we will see what to do if we don't have a separate Nampad and a middle mouse button. For the project, which navigation method or methods seem more intuitive to you. 11. Numpad Alternatives: We already saw a few ways and alternatives to do navigation. But the Nampad still has some unique features, and if you don't have one, you will need an alternative. The most obvious one is to use the top numbers on the keyboard as a Nampad, and to emulate the Nampad, you need to go to the Edit menu preferences, open the Input tab and check emulate Nampad. If you don't have auto save nat, you need to click here to save this new preference. And now we can use one on top, two, three on the top or zero to do what the NAPAD can do. The downsides of this is that if some of those keys on the top are used as shortcuts for something else, you won't be able to use that shortcut anymore. For example, if I go and click here and change to edit mode, we will see these modes later. You see that we have these three buttons to change from point selection, edge selection, and face selection, and they use the shortcuts one, two, and three on the top. Now we can't use those shortcuts anymore. Let's click again and back to object mode. Another downside is that we no longer have that shape of a cross with the numbers four, six, eight, and two. It's harder to do orbiting with those pop numbers. Another downside is that we don't have a dot key along with the top numbers. We can't focus or frame an object like this. Do have though the minus and glass buttons to zoom in and out. This leads me to another alternative and thus the Tilda key, which is to the left of the top numbers on a querte keyboard. And if you press it, we get what's called a Pi menu with a few options to change view, and with this option to view selected, that will frame an object. If you don't have a Tilda key on your keyboard, you may want to try a few keys in that region and see if one of them opens this menu. And to use this menu, let's do escape or right click to get out first. Will either press on the Tilda key and then choose one of these options and left click on it, or you can press the Tilda and hold, highlights one of these options, just hover over it, and then release the Tilda key. If you get used to this, if you use it a lot, it will be a very fast way to change view. And of course, an obvious solution is to just buy new keyboard with a Nampad or those smaller Nampad only keyboards and plug it to your laptop, for example. We will later talk also about changing shortcuts. If there is a key that is not working or a key that is missing. You can always replace it with a new shortcut, and we will see that later. For the project, why don't you have a nam pad? And how do you deal with it? 12. Middle Mouse Button Alternatives: Middle mouth button and wheel are essential for navigation and for other things too. But sometimes you just don't have access to a middle mouth button. The button may break and you need a quick alternative, or you only have access to your laptop touchpad, or you're using a graphic tablet. And that's why blender offers various ways to do navigation, and you also can emulate the middle mouth button. Let's go again to edit preferences, inputs, and emulate three button mouse. The bubble says emulate middle mouse with ult plus left mouth. Let's ab it and save your preferences and then close this window. Now we can use the left mouse button with the Alt key to bit or alt and shift and the left mouse button to pan, and then alt and control left click, and this is useful as a replacement for the wheel also to zoom in and out. Talking about the wheel. It is also useful when using a few tools, like for example, with the cube selected, if we go to edit mode, we have here a tool called loop cut, and we want choose the tool but only get the shortcut from the bubble, it's Control R. Now let's hover over our cube and do control r and move the mouse little bit, and now we see a loop cut. This yellow square shows us where the cuts will be added to our cube. If you turn your mouse wheel, you can increase the number of cuts. As a replacement with this tool, you can either use the plus and minus sign buttons or the page up and page down buttons. This works with a lot of tools. If you are following a tutorial and they are using some tool and using the motel to increase anything size or cuts or whatever. Sometimes that tool might use the plus and minus button, and sometimes they use the page up and down, and sometimes both just like this tool. Let's do escape, and let's go back to object mode. Now to the downside of using the middle mouse emulation, is that again, just like with the Nampad, you won't be able to use the shortcuts that use the art key with the left mouse button? If you find yourself in such a situation, I created a work around to be able to tougle the emulation on and off quickly so that you can tougle it off, use your shortcut, and then toggle it on again. If you need that, find the link to the video in the resources file. For the project, why don't you have a middle mouse button? And how do you deal with it? 13. Shortcuts & Quick Favourites: Bundt shortcuts are awesome. They do seem overwhelming at first, but they can speed up your workflow greatly, and with practice, they will become second nature. For example, some of the tools that you will use most are the move tool with the shortcut G and the rotate tool with the shortcut r. So G four grab and R f rotate, of course, and then we have scale S f scale. You can either switch to one of these tools and then use these helpers, these arrows. You left click and drag. And then you can release the left mouse button or right click if you want to cancel the operation. We have these squares. This one will move the cube in what's called the Z plane, and that means it will move it only in the x and y axis and not vertically. Right click to cancel, and you can use this circle over operate and then left click, and now you can move the cube freely. Right click again or escape. You can use the tool like this, or you can just stay with your selection tool. And use the shortcut G. Now we can move the cube freely, and if you hit z after hit and G, now, the cube moves only on the z axis. If I do y, now, it moves only on the y axis, x, and it moves on the x axis. If you want to move the cube on the z plane, you do shift. So again, let's do right click. First, you do G for grab, and then you can press shifts x, for example. Now the cube moves only on the x plane or on the z and y axis. Right click to cancel, for rotates, you can do r to rotate freely, and then you can after pressing r press y, for example, and now the cube rotates on the y axis only. For scale, you As, if you want, for example, to scale the cube only on the y and z axis, you do shift x, and now it is scaled only on what's called the x plane. The cube gets larger, but the width of it doesn't change to control z. So I think you see now how this can speed up your workflow. Instead of going and switching back and forth between tools, you just stay with your selection tool and you use the shortcuts to move or rotate or scale instantly. Then once you finish your operation, you don't have to switch tools again. Now if you don't remember the shortcuts, especially if you are new to blender or with operators that you may not use often. Blender offers a few ways to find those shortcuts. The first one is to hofer over a tool like this, and when the bubble appears, you can see the shortcut. Here we cycle W, and this will cycle between the different modes of the selection tool. To access these mods, you can also click and maintain the left mouse button and you can see the four mods and select one of them. Here you can see the shortcut G. Here you see the shortcut r. I can go here and wait for the bubble. Here, there is no shortcut. Here we have the shortcut. O. The second way to find the shortcuts is by going under the menus and find the operator, and each operator, if it has a shortcut, you will see the shortcuts beside it. An operator is anything that you press or click to do something inside blender and to find an operator or a shortcut. You can also do F three, and here you get the search box and you can look for anything like for example, scale, and I can find scale. I can see its shortcut and I can see the menu in which I can find scale. It's ender object transform. Let's do escape, and the fourth way to find a shortcut is in the key map. To access the key map, you go to edit references, and then open the key map tab. Here we have all these dropdowns with all the shortcuts in blender. We can also look for shortcut either by name, we can type scale, and we find anything that has scale in it and all the shortcuts, or you can find it by key binding. If you tie, for example, Shift Alt H, you can find the operators that you use that shortcut. Of course, you can delete a shortcut, you can change a shortcut either from here, you left click and then you press a key or combination of keys, or you can go under the strop down and also change the letter here and choose if you want to use shift control or Alt or all three, and there is an easier way also to add a shortcut. Let's close this window. Is by just right clicking almost on anything. If I right click here, I get this menu, and I can find something that doesn't have a shortcut. Right click again and left click on a sign shortcut. Here I can press a key or combination of keys to create a shortcut. Let's do, for example, control shifts F, and now Shade Smooth has this new shortcut Shift Control F. You can also delete a shortcut from here. Right click again and remove shortcut. Or you can change the shortcut to. Let's remove the shortcut. If there is an operator that you use a lot and that doesn't have a shortcut or that has a shortcut that you don't like, you can either create a new shortcut or change that shortcut. Or if you don't want to be overwhelmed with shortcuts, you can instead add your item to Quick favorites. For example, is go here under this menu and find something like Shade Smooth again, right click and add to Quick favorites. To access Quick favorites, you just to queue on the keyboard, and here is Shade Smooth. Instead of remembering a bunch of shortcuts, you just remember the shortcut Q. Just be aware that each mode has its own quick favorites. If I go to edit mode and press Q, you see that the menu here is empty and I need to create new quick favorites for this mode. By the way, the shortcut to go between mods is control tab that will open this sy menu and here I can go to object mode again. I harbor over it and release control and tab. There's a quicker shortcut to go between edit mode and the current module R N, and that's just tap. Tap to Edit mode and tap back to the module wear. For the project, so far, how do you feel about the shortcut system in Blender? 14. Overlays: Overlays are visual helpers in the viewports that are not shown in the final render, like the axes and this grid, and even this light object or this camera object. You can disable overlays by going to this button, the show overlays button, and you can customize them from this drop down. For example, we can hide or unhide the axes, et cetera. Sometimes there is an additional button beside this one, for overlays that are specific for certain modes like Edit mode or for certain types of objects. For example, let's selects the cube and go to Edit mode tab, And now you see this additional button and an additional dropdown with the overlays specific to edit mode into our cube object. We can, for example, disable the faces here, and now you see that the faces are hidden when I disable this, and you can disable these additional sittings also using this main overlays button. Let's go back to object mode. Tab. No thought the gizmos here are not affected when you disable the overlays, but have their own button. And not only this gizmo, but also the gizmos related to, for example, moving or rotating the object. For example, if I select my move tool and I disable overlays, I still can see the gizmo for moving the cube. And to hide it, I need to click on this gizmo button. I can also customize my gizmos under this drop down. For example, if I have my selection tool selected, I can enable the gizmoph moving the cube and rotating it and scaling it to. Let's disable them again, and let's enable our overlays again. Working on your scenes and projects, you will want to disable overlays a lot to see or scene without all the clutters, and there is a default shortcut that is shift and Z to toggle the overlays quickly. I think this is a new shortcut, but I always used a different shortcut. Let's right click on the overlays button and do a sign shortcut, then type D, and now D is our shortcut for toggling overlays on and off. If you don't want to do it, or maybe you are using D for something else, you can just keep the default shortcut Shift Z, and it still works. For the project to open the overlays drop down menu and name two overlay types you see there. 15. Shading Modes: Shad and mods affect how the objects in your scene are displayed. You can change shad and mode from these four buttons here. For example, here we are in material preview mode in which we can see the materials our cube is made up. If we change to render display mode, now we see a difference in lighting because in material preview, there is a standard lighting like coming from everywhere, and here in rendered preview, the cube is lighted using this source app. We have solid view, and here we can see our materials, but only our aw object, and then we have wire frame mode, and here we can see the frame the cube is made of. There is also a pipe menu to change modes that can be accessed by pressing the letter Z, and here we can hover over material preview, for example, and release Z, and we are back in material preview. And with this drop down here, this arrow, we can customize each of these modes. For example, here, we can change the lighting. Let's choose another one of these. This sphere here is called an HDI, and that is what is providing the light here. It's like a 360 image surrounding our CN and emitting light inside it. We can change it to something else like this one and see that the lighting changes. If you wish, you can even make the solid view look just like the rendered view. You can, for example, enable the scene lights so that the light sources will light our cube, and you can disable the HD I scene world here and now it looks just like the rendered view. Let's disable these again. Then we have this button and it's called total x ray. This mode can work, for example, in Edit mode, so let's do tab to Edit mode. And now if you enable x ray, you will be able to see the edges and the vertices that are on the other side of your objects. If you want more options in your Z pie menu, you can go to edit mode references to the key Map tab and enable this one extra sad and pie menu items. Now if you do z, you will have toggle overlays in your pie menu to ena z overlays, and you have x ray to toggle x ray on and off. As a bonus, we have this drop down here, and you see a lot of object types here, measures, curves, text, green pencil, armurs, lights, cameras, and it says selectability and visibility. If you want a type of object b cameras, for example, to be hidden, you can do that from here. If you want to make it so that you can select your cameras, maybe because they are over some other objects, so you can disable selection and also hide any type of object from your scene. These are the overlays, the gizmos, this menu here, and the Shad and moths, the x ray are always to see and interact with your scenes differently to be able to fine tune your works. For the project, why do you think Shad and mots exist? 16. The Outliner: The outliner is this editor that allows you to see and manage your items in your C. They are listed alphabetically and can be organized inside collections. Let's duplicate this cube to have more objects. Shifty drag and Left click, and then select again shifty Drag and Left click. And we can select our objects from here. We can select multiple objects by left clicking and dragon, or by selecting one object, and then selecting the last object and doing shift left click, or you can select one object, and then control selects any other object. You see that one of these objects has a lighter background, and that means that it is the active object, and to make another object active, you do control and left click on that object. An object active is important, for example, to make it parents. It will be the parent of all the other selected objects. If we parent an object to another one, the parented object or the child object will be moved inside the parent object. To create a parent, we can select this light, for example, and then shift select the cube in the viewport. And in the outliner, you would select the light first again, and then control, click on the cube. Now the cube is active. We go to the viewport and we do control P, P for parent, of course, then set parent to object. Now you see this dashed line going from the origin of the light to the origin of the cube. And if I select the cube and move it with G, the light will move with it if I rotate it. Translating the cube will also translate the child as if they were one single object. But we can move the child independently without affecting the parent. Back to the outliner, you see that we can't see the light anymore, and that's because it's under the cube here, but we can see it as an icon here, and you can actually select it from here. Select the cube, and then click on this icon and you select the light. We can also view it if we expand this arrow and here we see our lights and this cube. Now, we can add more collections, either by right clicking here and doing new collection, or to escape by selecting a collection, and then pressing this button, add new collection inside the selected collection, or by selecting an item like the light, and then doing to move and do move to collection, new collection. Let's click on this, and then we can give it a name. Let's name it L lights or Lights. Maybe a collection to put all the lights inside, and then we click Okay. Now we have a new collection with the light inside. Maybe you'll notice that even though the cube is the parent of the light, they can be in different collections. And you see here that under the cube, the text of the light is dimmed. We can also move items to other collections by dragging them. I can lift click and drag the cube to this collection and release the most button, and now both objects are inside this other collection. Want to rename an item, you can double click on it and rename it to whatever enter. And if you have a lot of items here, you can search for them using the search box. If you lose your way, if you have a big scene, or if you just move away and can't find an item, you can select it from here, anyone, the light, for example. Then go to the viewport and do the dot on the Nampad or do F three and look for frame and do frame selected. It's under the view menu, so we can also go here and do frame selected, and here you found your object easily. We can also choose to hide an object from the viewport. Or hide it from render. So you can have an object displayed in your viewport, but hidden from the final render. And we have some filtering. If you don't want the icons for disabling renders to be displayed, you can hide it from here. So now we don't have that icon anymore. And you can add more icons like this one, for example, to make an object selectable or unselectable. If I disable selection from the camera, for example, now I can no longer select my camera in the viewport. Enable it again, and let's hide this one and hide this one. Then you see that we have show mod column. This is a column that will show the mode you are in. Since we are in object mod, there is nothing. But if we select a cube and go to Edit Mode tab, now we see a new icon that shows us that this cube is in edit mode. You see dots beside the other cube. If you click on one of those dots, you will quickly switch to edit mode for that cube. This can save you a lot of time. Instead of going to object mode and then selecting the other objects and then going again to Edit mode, you just switch quickly here. If you want to go back to object mode, you can also left click on this icon and Bingo. The outliner can also be useful if you have multiple cameras, Let's duplicate this camera, shift D. Now you see that one has this hollow triangle and this one has this filled triangle. This means that this is the active camera, and when we do zero on the Nam pad, that's the camera that we will switch to. If you want to change the active camera, you can use these camera icons here. You click on this one and now changed to the other camera. This can also be useful if you by accident, let's select this cue, for example. By accident sometimes, you may be working on your keyboard. And you press the control and zero key on the Nampad. And now, what happened is that this cube is the active camera now. This happened to me before, and I had no idea what was going on. And a quick fix is to select a camera and do control zero again to change it to the active camera, or you just again, left click on this icon. And it's fixed. And lastly, the outliner does not only show the objects in your seal, but it can show every piece of data inside blender. We have here some modes, and if you expand this, you can show CNS. You can show the items inside your video sequencer if you do video editing. And if you click on this blender file, you can find every piece of data inside your blender file. The brochures cameras, the collections, the images, the materials. And this can be useful to clean your file, especially maybe if you want to sell that file or to put it online for download. For example, here, I have this material that I don't know where it came from. I can right click on it and delete. But be careful when using this mode here because you may break your file and sometimes blender crashes, so make sure that you back up your file before messing with the stuff here. Let's go back to view layer mode. For the project, add a few objects, put them in a collection, then take a screenshot and post it. 17. Interaction Modes: Already had a glimpse of mods during this class, especially object and edit mode. Mods are there to allow editing different aspects of your objects and they may be different depending on the type of object. I won't dive into each mode in this lesson, but I will give you a quick explanation of the most common ones and give you taps on switching mods and objects. Start with this primitive mesh object, that is a cube, of course, and Blender has other primitive mesh objects that can be used as a base to model more complex creations. Let's add some objects by doing shift A, A for, and choose mesh, and we have all these options. Let's choose a cylinder, for example. Move it with G. Then again, shift A and choose something else like the sphere. G, and move it to the side. Now if you do control tab to switch mode, you can see all the mods available for mesh objects. We have weight paints. This is useful, especially for rigging, but for other things too. We have object mode. This mode allows us to move objects, resize them, rotate them, to duplicate objects to select different objects, and this mode exists for all object types. We have sculpt mode that allows sculpt in the surface of objects. Edit mode, and it is probably the most important mode for model and stuff, and that's why it has an easier shortcut that is just tab. We have texture paint that allows us to paint on the texture or the material directly on top of objects, and we have vertex paints that allows us to paint the points or the vertices of object. Let's right click to Conser switch and mold. I will zoom out a little bit and we two other types of objects here, we have the slide. If I do control tab, you see that it has one mod only object mod. Then the camera, it's the same, it has only one mod, and now we can add a different type of object. Let's do shift A and add a grese pencil object. Let's choose this monkey. Greene pencil objects are for doing drawings and animation, even frame per frame animation. You can do two d 2.5 d or three D animations and drawings and paintings using green pencil. If I do control tab here, I see that I have almost the same mods except that we have a special mode for Greens pencil and that is draw mode. Let's right click to Csle, change in mods again, and I will add another object, shift A, and this time, I will add an armatur. Armaturs, let's do G again and move the armatur away from our cube meters are used with mesh objects or with grease pencil objects to rig and animate those objects. With my armter selected, if I do control tab, I would switch to a mod called pause mode. This is the mod that allows moving the bone and animating the bone and the object connected to it. Then if I do control tab again, I will switch back to object mold. If from object mode, I do tap, just like with other objects, I will switch to edit mold. Then if I do tap again, I will switch to the previous mod, that is, of course, object mold. Now from Edit mode, if I do control tab, here I will get the Pi menu. Since we have only three modes, it is faster to use just the shortcuts instead of the Pi menu. But here in Edit mode, we need this to choose either from objects or pause mode. If I switch to pause mold now, I can switch back to edit mode just do in tab, and from pause mode to object mode, I can do again control. Tap. This can be a little bit confusing, but it's actually very simple. If you plan to use blender four regain, I suggest that you take some time and practice switching mode using control tab and tap. Now let's select one of our mesh objects and switch to a different mode like for example, weight paint. You see here that we have a brush, this red circle here, and we can use it to paint weight on the object. So the closer, the color is to red, the more weight there is on that spot, and the closer it is to blue the less weight there is. Now if you want to switch to another objects and weight painted to, you either go back to object mode by doing control tap, object mode, and then selecting that object, and then again, control tab and go to weight paint. But this is not the ideal method. Best method is to go here to the outliner, and you can see that our mesh objects that are not in weight paint mode have these dots here in this column. We saw how to activate this column, if you can see it, it's called here show mod column. Here you can switch easily to weight paint mode and that different object. You can also here use the shortcut altQ. If I hover over a different object and do lt Q, I will switch more to that object. Alt Q again, lt Q again. You can see how this can save you a lot of time. If we are an edit mode, this gets even better. Let's do tab to switch to edit mode. Now I can also switch to other objects like this and I can go on a dot and do control and left click, and now I can edit all these objects at once. I can select any vertex from any object and move it with G. Let's go to object mode, and I can also do multi editing if I select multiple objects, so I'll select the cube and then shift select the cylinder and do tab. And now I can edit these two objects together. This multi editing works only with two modes that are edit mode and pause mode. Let's go to object mode by clicking on these icons, and select the armor and duplicate it shifts V. Now I can select both and try to do control tab. You see from these icons that bot now are in pause mode. This is a way if you have two characters, you can animate them at once without going back and forth between your characters. Or Sometimes you may have one character with two armaurs. One, for example, for the face and one for the body. I don't know. You can use the same method here to win control and left click and choosing which armaur you want to be in pose mode. Again, let's do control tab, and we are back in object mode. Finally, there is a setting in blender under Edit that is called lock object mode. It is by default enabled. If you have an armatur in pose mode, for example, you can't select any other object. Well, except the other object that is also in pose mode. But if you disable it edits and disable lock object mods, now you can select this Q and then you select back your armatur and you are automatically back to pause mode. You can also select a camera, for example, and this can be useful if you are, for example, doing posing, and then you want to edit the settings of your camera. So you switch to the camera and the settings of the camera are displayed here in the properties panel. You change your settings, and then you select your armatur quickly and you are back in pause mode, and you can finish your animation. You would also do that if you want to animate the camera too. Then if you are doing rigging, maybe you select your bone and then select your character. From here, do Control tab and switch to weight paint and weight paint your object, and then you can switch back quickly to your armature. F weight paint since we have this brush, if you just left click on a spot, blender we think that you want just to paint something and not to switch objects. So to switch to the armature, you do t and left click. And here you are in pause mode, and if you select your object again, left click, you are back again to weight paint mode, and you can do it from the outliner two, so Armature pause mode, and then cube weight paint mod. Out zabbalin, this can be useful and switching it on or off depends on what you are doing? Sometimes you don't want to accidentally switch to a different object, and of course, it is a very useful feature that you need to be aware of. Note that it doesn't work well with edit mode. If I go to edit mode for this cube and then try to switch to the armatur. Now I am in pose mode, but if I switch back to the cube, I am no longer in edit mode, but in object mode. Just a little detail to be aware of. For the project, how do you feel about having to switch modes in blender? 18. 3D Cursor & Origins: Three dcursor is the thing with the three D cross and the circle, and it is here in the center of the world. The origin point of this cube is this little dot here inside the cube, and they happen to be on top of each other because both the cube and the three dcursor are placed in the center of the world. If I move the cube, G, the origin point will move with it. When we say that we are placing an object in a certain place is actually the origin point that we are placing there. The origin point is by default also the center of the pivot point on which the cube is scaled S, and you see this line that goes to the origin or rotated. By default, the origin point, let's do escape is in the center of the cube. If I right click, I can here set the origin differently. I can place it in the center of mass, the mass of the cube, in the center of geometry. Can also move the origin to the three D cursor. Let's left click on this, and now the origin moved to where the three D cursor is. I can again right click and do set origin to geometry, and now my origin is back inside. Another way to move the origin point is to go here to options and open the drop down and change here, transform, affect only origins. Now if we press g to move, we want to move the Q, but only the origin point. You can move it just like you move any other object. For example, you do y and you move it only on the y xs. Now, if I try to scale my Qe, for example, now it won't work, I will scale the origin. Let's go again under options and the Zale origins, and now I can scale and it will scale with the origin as the pivot points, and I can do r and to rotate like this too. Let's do control Z to undo this rotation and then right click set origin to geometry again. We saw that, we can move the origin to the three Dcursor. But how do we move the three Dcursor? We can move a three dcursor to the place where we want the origin to be and then place the origin on the three Dcursor. The first way to do it is to do shift right click, and here we can move the origin points anywhere we want. You can shift and right click and maintain your right mouse button press and then move like this. Can also use this tool, the three D cursor tool. You click on it, and now you left click and move the cursor wherever you want. You can also use the three D cursor pie menu that can be accessed with the shortcut Shift S. Now we have all these options. Selection to cursor, for example, will move the e to the cursor. And by that, we mean that it moves the origin point of the cube to the cursor. Let's move it again G, and we have also Shift S again. We have selection to cursor. We have selection to active, selection to grid. We have here cursor to world origin, and then shift S, and we have cursor to selected, which will take the cursor and put it on the origin of the selected object. This works also in edit mold. Let's do tab and we can select a vertex here and to shift S, and then do cursor to selected, and now the cursor is on this vertex here, and we can go back to object mold and right click on the cube and do origin to three Dcursor. This is the way to move the origin point to a vertex or to anything that you select. First, you move the cursor to that selected point, and then you right click on your object and you set the origin to the three Dcursor. Now we can rotate the cube on this point and scale it on this pivot 0.2. If you don't want the origin point to be your pivot point, you can change that too. You can go here on this button called transform Pivot point and click on it and you get this drop down. Here the pivot points is by default median point. That means it is the origin of your object if there is only one object selected. But if you have multiple objects, it will be the medium point of the object selected. You can change this to three D cursor. Let's change it, and then we can move the cursor using shift right click here, for example, and with the cube selected do S to scale, and now it scales with the three Dcursor as the pivot point. And the rotation works the same.'s to escape. Let's place the cursor again to the world origin. Let's right click on our cube and set origin to geometry, and then I will do Alt G to reset the location and place my cube in the center of the world. Finally, there is a more precise way to translate the three D cursor, and that's by opening the side menu by pressing N on the keyboard or by going to this little arrow. Left click on it, and you go to the view tab, and here you see some values for the three D cursor to change its location and its rotation. You can type any value here and you can also left click and drag sideways to change the XY Z location or the X Y and Z rotation. Let me do a right click to counsel. Keep this in mind, you may need it in some of your projects. Let me now hide the side menu by pressing n. For the project, add a few match objects. Select them all. Click on the Transform Pivot Point button, switch motes, and try resizing your objects each time. What did you notice? 19. Add-ons: Add ons or extensions are pieces of software that add functionality to blender. Some of them are pre installed and others you may download from the web for free or for money. To manage add ons, you go to edit preferences, and then to the add ons tab, and here, you see that you have a bunch of add ons if you are using Blender 4.1 or lower, and most of them are disabled so that they don't add a necessary load to blender and you only enable the ones that you need. So you can search, for example, for Wangler. This is a very useful add on if you use notes in blender. Another popular one is iga fy. If you do character rigging, and if you use Grease pencil, another essential add on is the type grease. This one, Grease Pencil Tools. So you just click to enable the add on. And if you click on this arrow, you get some information, and in some add ons, there are some settings that you can change here. Additional add ons that you can download from the web come usually as zip files. To install an add on, if you are using Blender 4.1 or lower, you go to the piton InStyle and look for the Zip file you downloaded. Click on it and click on Install add on. And here it is. It should display the name of the add on in the search box and the add on itself here and just ab it from this checkbox. From this dropdown, you see that we don't have any additional sittings, but we can remove the add on if we wish. Let's see if it works. Let's close this window, and with our cube selected, we go to dit mood tab, and one of the things that this add on can do is moving the origin point to something that you select. For example, if I select this vertex point and then go under mesh snap, this was added by the add on origin to selected, so I click on it and the origin moved from here to where this point is. In Blender, 4.2, things are a little bit different. This extension website was created and a lot of the add ons that used to ship with Blender were moved to this online platform. If I go from here to the sentence edit preferences and add ons, you see that we have a very short list of core add ons that come with blender, and to get more addons, you need to go to this tab, get extensions, and from here, you can get additional add ons or additional teams. You see this message here. Internet access is required to install and up date online extensions. You can adjust this later from system preferences while offline use install from Disk instep. Here we can continue offline or we can allow online access. Let's click on this and now it is getting data from the servers, and here we get a list of a bunch of add ons that we can download and install directly from here. We can type in origin, and we have here the addon that we installed in Blender 4.1, and we can install it from here. Or we can install it from the website. From here, you can click on your addon and then click on Get add on, and you can either download it and install it manually, just like before, or you can click this box here and drag it to blender, and then release your mouse button and it so check in for the extension. Do you want to install the following add on? You can choose to a the add on on installation, and then click to install it. We still can, of course, install add ons manually, either from this tab and you go on this arrow and choose install from disk or from the Add ons tab, again, under the strop down and you choose install from Disk. And you look for your add ons. This is still relevant because not all adults are free and not other addons are on the official extensions website. Sometimes you just don't have access to Internet or you don't want Blender to connect to the web. For the project, go to the Blender Extensions website, choose download and install an add on. W one did you install? 20. Timeline & Animation: Timeline is this editor here that shows you the frames of your animation, and if you can't see it for some reason, it's easy to edit. Let's join the areas and close the timeline and then open a new panel, and we can choose timeline from here. In the header of our timeline, we have some sit ins, we have playback is useful if you have audio, when working on a scene or on a video sequence. And here we have sync play every frame, and this may create some lag because audio usually plays faster than video or your viewport animation. Often, it is best to change to frame dropping or sync to audio. Sync to Audio works well. Then we have scrubbing, and this allows you to hear your audio when you are moving the playhead like this. And by the way, you can't add audio to the timeline, but you need another editor that's added temporarily called the video sequencer, and here you can add audio, you can drag it and drop it or you can add it from this menu here. Let's close the sequencer again. Then we have here the frame range, the start and the end of your animation. You can choose anything here, and here it starts from frame one, two, frame 250. I want to change this to 24 because I want to create a simple animation, and I choose 24 because it is the frame rates of my animation. And here you can change the frame you are N. You can't type anything here. So instead of moving the playhead, you can type directly the frame you want to go to here. And then here we have these buttons. The first one is called auto key in. So this one, if enabled, blender we creates key frames automatically, when you animate your stuff on the viewport. To show you how it works, I will go to frame one, either by typing one here, or by pressing this button to jump to the first end point, or by doing the shortcut shifts left arrow. This is a shortcut that I use a lot. Shift left arrow to the first frame, shift right arrow to the last frame of my frame range. Then I will move my cursor to the view parts with the cube selected. I will do I to insert new key frames and see that slender added these key frames here. I expand this drop down, you see that it added key frames for location, the location of the cube, for the rotation and for scale. So this is what a keyframe is. It records the state of my objects on this frame frame one. And you can view the values of these keyframes, if you go to the viewport and do end to open the side menu. And here and the item, you see that I have all these values and the color yellow. That means that the playhead is on a key frame. And then I want to add another key frame on frame 25. So I'll type 25. And I want to rotate my cube. If I do it with autokine disabled, I I move, for example, my cube using G, I have this brown color here on location, and this color is like a warning because it means that the changes were not recorded on this frame. So let's undo our change control Z, and then I will enable autokine again on the viewport, and I want to change the rotation of my cube. I want to have a spinning cube that rotates on the Z axis. I'll do r Then Z. Then I want to turn the cube 360 degrees. I will type 360 on the Nampad and hit enter. Now you see the z value changed to 360 degrees and it turned yellow, which means that a key frame was created on frame 25. The reason I created it on 25 and not 24 is because 3600 are bicically the same angle, and I don't want to have a duplicate frame in my animation. I will zoom using the mouse wheel and move my view using the middle mouse pattern. Here and Zoom in, and now I can try to play back my animation using the space bar. This is not what I expected because the cube seems to be slowing down and then starting rotating again. I will select the z rotation frames here or key frames, so box select, and then right click on one of them. And here we have interpolation mode. By default, it is Bezier, which means that the animation will start slow, will accelerate, and then go slow again and stop. That's why we have that slowing and accelerating animation and to fix it, we change to linear, and now we play again. You can also play using this button, and now we have a continuous spin of our cube. As to pause, and you can also play backwards. And I can jump to my key frames using these buttons. Now, the timeline is not the only editor to edit key frames. I will add a new editor here, and I will choose dope sheet. The dope sheet has more advanced features, but it doesn't have these sitins here on the header of the timeline. That's why what I do is I have a timeline like this collapse so that I can see only the header of my timeline, and then I put the dope sheet on top of it and I can work on my key frames. Then the Db sheet has different modes. We have the default Db sheet mode. The action editor will allow us to edit actions. Here we have a default action called Cube action, and it contains our animation, and we can close this action and start a new animation and have our action in a list. I can close like this, and I can do a new animation. I can do again and go to frame 2025. And this time I want to add maybe a y rotation, so R, Y, 360 enter. I will expand this and select Yes, the y this time, select my frames, right click, and change interpretation to linear and play my animation. I have this. I have a new action with a different name with this 001 at the end. When you switch between actions, you need to protect your action by enabling this shield button. If you see the previous action, I have zero. That means that it is not used by any object, and if you close blender with this zero here, this action will be deleted. To avoid that, you need to enable this shield. Or what's called fake user. Now you see that we have F on it. Let's select the first action again. Let's add that shield on it. Let's name it U zero rotation. And then select the second one and name it u y rotation. Now we have two actions with fake user, and it means that both are protected. And having multiple animations for object is useful in another editor that's called non linear animation that allows us to add and stack different actions with different animations and combine them in one animation. Little bit advanced, and it's not my topic here. I just want you to have a basic understanding of these frame editors. And then we have grease pencil. So this is useful if you do frame per frame animation. This mode shows you the frame per frame animations you do with gre pencil. I think this is all. I hope now you have a basic understanding of these editors and the differences between them. For the project, create a simple cube animation. We will need it for the next lesson. 21. Rendering: Once you finish working on your project, it's time to bring it to life by rendering or exporting it as an image or a video. You can choose any frame on your timeline to render it as an image, and you can choose a frame range from here to render it as a video. In this case, it's from frame one, to frame 250. But before we render anything, there are some settings that we will check. First, in the render panel, you can choose the render engine, either EV or cycles. Work with grease pencil, you will only need EV, but for measures, cycles results look better than EVs, but it takes much more time to render. Let's switch to cycles, and there is no visible change because we are on material preview and to see how cycle looks, you need to go to rendered preview. Here, If I try to move my cube, you see that I have some artifacts, some noise, and that's because cycle is slower than EV and needs some time to render and update what we see on the screen. And by default cycles is using the CPU, but you will want to use your GPU or graphics card. If you don't have a good graphics card, cycles will be a pain to use, especially in heavy scenes. One important setting for cycles is this the samples and the render. If you want better renders and have a very good graphics card, you will want a higher samples value. Of course, it takes more time to render. You may want to lower this value and compare the rendering time and the quality of rendering and see what works for you. Here we have also the noise. Cycles renders are often noisy, and this feature allows the noise in the renders, and it works rather well with these default settings. But if you see some weird artifacts on your renders, it is possibly because of the noise. Let's switch back to EV, and then we go to the second panel, so we were on render, and now we go to output. Here, you see that we have the resolution of our image or video. Then we have the frame rates. You can choose anything from here or do custom and type anything you want. Then we have the frame range, so we can change it either from here or here, and then we have step. So I maybe you are rendering just a test animation and want the test render to be quicker, you may change the step to two, for example, and this will make blender render one frame every two frames. From this 250, we're under 125 frames, and you can increase the step and have blender, for example, under one image or one frame every four frames, and this will make your under much quicker. You may also, if you are doing a test, lower the resolution for that test video. Then we scroll down and we have output, so here you can choose the folder where you want to put your rendered or exported image or video. And here with this checked, Blender will add extensions automatically, and if you uncheck it, you will need to add extensions manually. Then we have file format. It is by default PNG, and you would want to render your animation as a PNG, especially for heavy projects because some problems may happen, blender may crash. If you render a few frames before Blender crashes, you won't have to render frames again. And also, you will have better rendered quality. Then we have black and white RGB for color or RGB A. If you want transparency in your PNGs, you will choose this option. But it won't work unless you change another setting, and for that, we need to go back to the render panel and go under film and enable transparent. Here in the viewports, you see that the background now is transparent and our renders will be transparent as well. I'll back here to the output. And if you want to render as a video, you will click here and change to FF MPEG Video and go under Encodin and change here to MPEG four. Keep these settings as they are, and here under audio, if you have audio, you change to AAC, and you can keep the settings as they are. Of course, you can choose any of the file formats from here. I'll just gave you the most common ones. Then we have Fst processing. As we said, Blender does video editing two, and if you have strips in your sequencer or video sequencer, Blender will render from that instead from the viewport. So if you have the wrong render, you may want to disable the sequencer here. There is one last setting that you may want to check. It is under render again under color management, and here, you have a bunch of options to change how your colors and you see how there is a slight change in the look when I changed these values. Now it's time to test rendering. Let's go to the viewport. Let's do zero to switch to camera view, and I will go to the rendering work space. And again, we have our timeline here. We are on frame 123, and you can just do F 12 to render an image. So F 12, and we have this a cube with transparency behind it. You see that it popped in a new window. If you don't like this, I personally don't like it. We can close it and go to the preferences, edit preferences, interface, and go under temporary editors, and render in change from new window to image editor. Then you can save your preferences. Let's close this and try to render again F 12, and now it renders here in this image editor instead of a new window. And you can save your image by going here. Save and choose a file format for your image and acation, then do Save as image. Let's do consul and to render an animation, the shortcut is Control F 12. Or you can go under the menu, render and you choose render image, the shortcut F 12, or render animation with the shortcut Control F 12. And you have more options here. For example, if you have audio in your video sequencer, if you do video editing, you can render the audio only, and you can render what you see in your viewport. Using these options are the shortcuts F 11 and Control F 11. For the project, render the animation you made for the previous lesson as a video. Upload it to a social media platform like YouTube and post the link to your video. 22. Outro: That's a wrap. I hope you found this class enlightening, and that it helps you navigate blender more confidently. If you enjoyed the course and found it helpful, please take a moment to write a review, your feedback helps others discover this class and lets me know what you like the most. Don't forget to follow me on Skillshare and subscribe to my YouTube channel Momo Mundo for more tutorials, steps, and tricks. This way, you'll stay updated on new content that can further enhance your blender skills. I'm grateful for your participation and excited to see your project. If you have any questions or need further assistance, feel free to reach out. And the next time, keep experimenting, keep creating, and most importantly, have fun with blunder. See you in the next class.