Introduction to Blender For Beginners - #1 - Introduction

1. Course Outline: welcome to the introduction to bend a course for beginners. This course will help you learn almost everything about Brenda. Within a short amount of time, we'll cover everything starting from the interface, and then we go deeper and look at three D modeling, animation, lighting, rendering, video editing and so on. I've been a better use of for nearly five years now. Over the course of those five years, I've learned so much about Blender and have made four animated short films, a few short webisodes and some three D art. Using Brenda, you can send a bit of a blender fanatic. I feel that I am now at a level where I can pass on this knowledge to you guys said one day you can make whatever you dripped off making, whether it be games, movies, three D art rendering simulations, animations and so blender is no longer as difficult as never getting a rocket. It is possible to make high end stuff using this open source software, which find frankly, not that many people know about you. If you have the skill and talent, you can certainly create something that might blow. Not only your friends or your family but also picks up off the chairs. But let's not get too ahead of ourselves. Let's focus on the outcomes that you get from this course. You will learn nearly everything about Brenda. Now I put nearly italics, since it isn't exactly possible to learn everything about Brenda or you will pretty much be here for many years. On top of that, the Bennett developers are really active. That means it's going to be tons and tons of new features added to bend away the time. And, of course, I will do my best if you have an update this course accordingly. What I meant by nearly is that we learn the main stuff like three D modeling, animation, lighting, rendering compositing and so on. By the end of this course, you will know your way around the Bender interface. You will gain confidence in making wonder of it is that you dreamt on making Perhaps you want to make your very own animated movie all you want to model pretty objects and sell those to some marketplace. Maybe you want to make virtual environments for virtual reality, or perhaps you want to make a game or create virtual simulations. These are all possible with Blender also. Hopefully, by the end of this course, you will gain a sense of control and mastered over blender. In other words, you'll start to feel like I earn this thing. This course is filled with lots of practice materials and assignments to help you with this . Finally, you will also become so comfortable with Bender that you would ditch a lot of three D software. It has features that rival Dicks most expensive through the software. And best of all, it's all free. Okay, that's probably a little bit sales, I swear I during world for Nor am I really affiliated with Benjamin and in any way it's just an honest opinion, that's all. Okay, so enough about me. Let's talk about, you know, to be successful in this course and with Bender as well. Of course, you will need to possess a couple of things festival. You don't need to know anything about Brenda. Even if you've heard of render for the first time today, you will still benefit from this course. You don't need to know anything about three D graphics. Either. You do, however, need a keen interest and motivation in three D graphics. I mean, you don't really need it, but but that might not really help motivate you to finish this course or, most importantly, have fun doing something. I'll assume the reason you enrolled is because you have at least some level of interest for three D graphics. You will need patients practice and persistence. So if you expect to finish this course with the mindset of making something better than Finding Nemo, for example, then this course may not really be for you. This course will only help you master Blender. You will only reach great artistic levels through patients, practice and persistence. So let's have a closer look at the topics that we will be covering throughout the entire course. First we start by learning how to navigate the blending interface. We don't look at the properties window, which I'd like to call the heart or the core off Brenda. We then learn some navigational controls and vendors such as had a new stuff. Rotate zoom. You didn't cover three modeling basics, and you will get the chance to work on some practice part. It's We'll also look at giving out three objects materials and textures recover lighting to help light About three D World. We didn't learn how to carve our objects. If you can't, Mulligan will, through the sculpting tools. We learned basic animation as well as the particle system creating here for rain. We look at the physics system in vendor to help us simulate real world physics. Here's a look at how render and also get the biscuit renders after diet. You will learn how to use Bender video at a time. Finally, you will learn about the pasta to make renders. Once you master these topics, you will have added confidence reading. Whatever you. It's only a matter of time before you can. I hope you enjoy this course. Please feel free to keep Austin questions. I'll be more than happy, and that's pretty much all I have to say. As for Brenda, Commuter regularly tells keep also suspect YouTube Channel will join the most. I look forward to seeing you 2. Those Dreaded Shortcut Keys: those dreaded short keys, perhaps one of the main reasons why so many people are frustrated by blender. There are way too many short keys that memorizing them is a massive time waste. While this was the case a few years ago, quite recently, they changed it to become much more user friendly. Still, however, shortcut keys aren't always a bad thing. When you know about vendors show car keys, you can get things done really quickly. It's how I was able to make a couple of animated short films pretty quickly over three years. But still people turn a blind eye to bend due to those confusing shortcut keys. Good news, though, is that with the recent development in Brenda, it is now designed to be a lot more user friendly. A majority of the controls that used to be available. The shortcut is now available in the menu bar, and you can see the shortcut key that is used. This means you don't really need to rely on memorizing shortcut keys anymore. Most controls can now be found through some button or menu option. This is how everyone in my class reacted when I try to teach them benders Shortcut case Everything you do on a shortcut Key has a corresponding button somewhere in Brenda, so you don't have to worry about memorizing shortcut keys. But if it is that important, then check out some of the infographics. He's one infographic that was created by gooey Danske from Gdansk dot com that teaches you all the main shortcut keys in Brenda. I suggest you download, print and stick this near your computer road station before easy reference. Show. Car keys can be confusing to memorize, but obviously the more you use blender, the more comfortable you will get with using shortcut case. If you do manage to subconsciously memorize the most important shortcut keys, you'll find that your workflow will become much faster, which will in turn offload a lot of tasks such as clicking and finding buttons, which will help improve your productivity overall. And that's it for this video. I hope this video was useful to you subscribe to YouTube channel for future video tutorials , or stand up using your email address on the official upside and remember, keep lending 3. Downloading and Installing Blender: in this video, we will get straight into downloading, installing and setting up bender on your own machine so that you can start creating awesome three D graphics in no time. First go to Bernadotte Dog, All right, Not that we weren't blend of hot dog. Go ahead and press download vendor. The version that I have here could be different to the one that you have in your own screen . That's purely because at the time of recording, this was the version off. Brenda. You should expect to have a higher version of this, which is obviously better, because newer versions would obviously have a lot more peaches than the one we have here. That the one I have on my screen here. So go ahead oppressed, download blender and follow the prompts. If you have a Windows computer, I have suggested using the dot M S Science Tola that will automatically installed blender on your computer. If you have Mac, obviously click that one, and if you have a clinics, you click on that one and obviously choose the version. If you completed the 32 bit computer, Donald, any one of these mirrors in a 64 bit computing down on any one of these mirrors. Um, since I have windows, I can go ahead and use the, um, 64 bit, I think Michael, to set up a 64 bit. And after a while, Bender will start downloading. So while that downloads, I will pause the video and we'll come back. So once you 15 stolen, you'll see this blender set up. Wizard. Just go ahead and go next and just use the default, except that of the conditions. Uh, this is always better read that. But since I mean using blender for while I'm quite happy with the terms and conditions there, some sort of I'm just gonna go ahead and press it next. Okay. I'm happy with that. It's just default location. There. You can choose your own default location where everyone and financial presents stole. All right, So after a few minutes, installation completed, and I can just go ahead and press finish to exit the set up stage. No, when I run blender, it should be must be available. And you will know that you have the latest version of Bender available and running when you can see the version that you took from the website. So my case was 2.78 a. So that's pretty much it. We've successfully downloaded and installed Bender on our computer. It's a very straightforward process. Where to do was click on the website download set in Stolen and once it's installed with it runs, I pretty much do something and done. So that's it. A pretty straight for video. I hope this video has helped you. Andi, I hope to see you in the next video. When we start actually doing stuff with Brenda, see them. And of course, keep lending. 4. Windows: Hello and welcome to the first video off the blender for beginners course. We're gonna have a look at the blender interface to begin with. So before we go ahead and make some movies on some awesome three D models, let's spend a bit of time understanding the blender interface. So at first class you would notice that the Bender interface looks quite different. It doesn't look like a typical Windows application or Apple application or Android or any other operating system. It sort of looks unique in its own way. And you might be thinking that this is an interface as probably operated by some rocket scientist from NASA or something on. This is probably one of the main reasons why a lot of people do tend to shy away from Brenda. It's because it tends to look a little complex and clunky at first glance. But I do promise you that wants to get the hang of this interface. You'll feel like you are in full control as an artist, as a filmmaker, as a game developer and so on. So now I'm just going to share with you one important concepts about blender. Blenda is made up off windows, and I don't mean like Windows 10 or anything. I mean, like it uses the window ing system. Everything that you see in Brenda is composed off windows and windows are great for multitasking. For example, you could have Google Chrome opening one window and say, Media player, if anyone still uses it in another window. So this allows you to listen to music using Media Player and at the same time using Google Chrome to do your homework or check your Facebook and things like that. And that is to make our life a lot more efficient and convenient. And that's tested, even met, one of the main reasons why people tend to prefer win the window ing system. So in Blender, it's pretty much the same thing you can have, say, the three D View port opening one window and a video editor open in, say, another window. So things tends to make it very convenient for a three artist to going in and quickly make you know whatever they want to make, um, descriptive. If they're using a three report and video editor at the same time, that probably making a movie, and obviously these things here like the Three D View port that the timeline theme out liner, the properties Window, the video editor and all these things are called editors in blender, and only one editor can be opened within one window. So, as you can see, if I click this button here, you can see the list of ALS the editors we have within blender. So as you can see right now, we're in three D view selected. If I change this to the video sequence editor, this window will not be comprised off the video editor. If I change back to the review will go back to the review again. This one is the timeline, not mistaken change to any other, um, up or editor. We've been blender and yep, that's pretty much it's. We'll have a deeper look at each of the editors in detail throughout the remainder of this course, but I just want to let you know the basics. Um okay, so just a little bit more windows, Um, you could have multiple windows open in one screen. So, for example, if I want to change the size of one of these windows, I can drag the boundary line or the edge and just moving up and down to my liking. You can also move from left to right and so on to add a new window. A lot to do is drag as you can see this three diagonal lines here, just click there, left, click and drag upwards and that will, you know, create an extra window for you. And you can obviously resize this and do whatever you like with this window is well okay. And if you want to delete a window, you have to left click drag and seven up you go down and you will see an air Dulic of emails and you will see these arrows here. So I'm not letting go of my mouth yet. So if I hover my mouse over the top of this window, you see the arrow pointing there. If I hover the mouse below the diagonal lines, you'll see the arrow pointing down there. So if I let go that window, what does it disappear? And the top window will expand out to make well the extended view. So as you can see, that window has not disappeared. And I have that one big window now. So, for instance, if I just changes back to the timeline, you some three artists likes to have multiple three D view ports, but with different views. So that is pretty easy to do. All I have to do is say I can close down this window. I want to split this and 1/2. So I was gonna select the three diamond lines from top and just drag out a new window. And then I want to create a one here on lift drag up here. And now I can say I can ask which the viewpoints of front view, Um, inside view, right for you. Whatever. Uh, top view and I don't know, uh, left for you. And generally artists contend to, you know, from here that are just content to work in multiple views Don't worry. If you don't know how I did the front right top left that I will show exactly how he did that later. Tutorial Just don't want to bombard you with too much information to begin with. All right? So, uh, yeah, that's pretty much what I have to say for this to obviously delete the windows, I'm instead of going in the left direction and we're in the right direction away from the window, so that will remove. And then I just left. Click left. We drag. Want to see the Aurora just let go, and that will remove the window. And that's pretty much it for Windows. I hope this video was useful to you, and it wasn't too overwhelming. In the next video, we'll start to look at the Brenner interface. I look forward to seeing you then and keep lending. 5. The Blender Interface: Hello. In this video, we will learn about the blender interface. The first thing that you see when you open Bender, is this default seen over here. So I'm now briefly gonna describe everything that you see in this default Blend the scene. So let's start with a three D view port. The three D View port is where you will make your three D animated movie so you will create your three D models here. You animate them here, you'll see them come to life here, and this is one of the most important editors in Blender. It would be pretty difficult and pretty silly to animate our model. Something with that three people open. And if you notice as I go to the left, use notice that these buttons here pretty much carry out some functionality that pretty artists tend to use quite regularly. Previously, you'd had to memorize some shortcut key for that, so this actually makes it a lot easier. This pretty much allows you to not have to memorize those short car keys and just do it, doctor. Here. And even when I hover over some of these buttons, you can see the shortcut key actually been shown. So, for example, G is to move an object. But if I hover here, you can see that the shortcut. It shows exactly the G, and if I pressed translate the object moves as expected. But again, I prefer using shortcut keys. Yeah, if you hate using Shakaki's, there are the buttons right there. And if you want you just for transforms for rotation scale and if you can also do stuff of creating objects, um, relational stuff, you don't need to know what they are. I didn't key firms for animation doing some physics reading stuff. Increase pencils for just drawing sketches and things like that. The next is the outline every three object that you have in your view port, so that includes your cube, your camera. Your lamp will be visible in the outline. So if I click one of these items, for example, the tube, the key respected guy took the lamp. The lamp expected If I could click the camera, the camera expected. So the Outlander shows you pretty much a bird's eye view off every single three D object that you have in your scene and you marry thinking, What's the point of having that. That's not useful. I can just selected directly from the three Report. Well, actually, it is quite useful if you have so many three D objects in your scene and you want to find that exact object just by searching, say, you're working on a massive epic scene involving thousands of soldiers, for example. Well, you might struggle to find the soldier named Bob in the three report alone. So in the outline, er, you can actually search by typing the name of your three d object. So in this case, if I search for Bob, that list will feel to the shoulder soldier and the night and then I can click that object directly and find where Bob is exactly hiding in the three people. So to actually search for an object, I'm just hover over the outline er and scrolled down. That is dio I'm sure more the the top bar here Or if you don't want do that, just drag out this window and you see everything and then in the search part, just tied the object that you're looking for. In this instance, I want cube and data. You can see that you right there. If I click that that you will be selected, the next is the properties window. This is pretty much the core off all off blender, especially as a filmmaker. This is if you're a filmmaker of your game deal. But this is pretty much the dead set coal that controlled 90% off. Brenda. This editor pretty much sets of the properties for most of the objects and bender. So if you need to render something, you will need to come here. If you want to add materials to your objects, will need to come here if you want to add some modifier or some constraint boyfriend. Some physics, such as making your objects collide on making a lot. What if we just do some stuff, like at ahead? You have to come to the properties window. If you want to add some advanced camera fixed like depth of field on motion blow, you will need to come here and even things like you felt a change. Dimensions are your three world. You should also come to the properties window. It is one of the most important editors in Blender, just like that's really view port in some cases, it can actually be more important than three people. All right, moving along. This is the timeline window. So in the timeline window, you can pretty much play your animation back. You can pause, you can go to the beginning or the end of your animation. The start frame shows where the animation starts the end parameters with the animation ends . And this one shows with on what frame your you're currently on at the moment. So yes, pretty much basic and pretty much straightforward. Not much else to say The last window that's open. And I don't think a lot of people noticed this, but it's this window here. Yes, this is also a window. And in this window, we have the info editor. Um, I can prove it if I just dragged us down. Change this to say, the graph editor or three people again. You know that this is also window. It's always better to keep This is the info editor because obviously the in for for stuff like saving, you're gonna file opening file. Um, you know, rendering you'll surrender from here is well, by the way, but obviously you can't control things like the resolution where you want to store your animation and things like that. You can also said options to make your windows full screen and get help. So is that just the basic defaulted menu bar that you're seeing general applications? So, yeah, that's pretty much the basic default blender interface that you see here. And yeah, that's pretty much all I have to say regarding the Ben interface. I hope you learned something from this video and that this video is useful to you. Keep lending, and I look forward to seeing you in the next video. 6. Screen Layouts: Hi. Everyone in this video will be learning about screen louts in Brenda. Screen layouts help in organizing your work space so that you can work more effectively and more efficiently and obviously have a lot of fun doing so well. First, look at the default screen last that we haven't Bendel, and later on we'll look at how to add your own screen nails. The ability to add your own screen melts is another benefit off blender. As an artist, you should feel free to control how you want to work and how you want to organize your own workspace and screen labs help you do exactly that. So if I hover my mouse over here, you can see the message that say's choose screen layout. So when I click that you'll see a bunch of different screen layouts, a screen layout is pretty much just that layout off Blender for a specific purpose, for example, for purposes of animation, compositing for game development, video editing and things like that. So it's What does it do? Well, if I select animation, for example, it pretty much does nothing extra, then changed the layout off the windows and change the editors within those windows in a way that sort of makes it convenient for for this purpose, for example, for the purpose of animation. Um, it looks like having a dope sheet editor and an F curve editor three d editor, a top manager as well, as well as a little preview camera ate it up is perfect for the animator. Well, that's what at least blend that things will be perfect for the animator. You might not like it, but ah, that's basically default, If ever, to the video editing screen out, you'll see that the windows have now been divided in this way to have the video in its previous. So it sort of looks like movie maker or Adobe premiere or things like that, and you can see the place where you can add your video strips and audio strips and someone , and that's ah, graph editor. If you need to do some advanced complex uhm ki framing such as like if you had fixed, like fading, fade out that kind of stuff, so but it doesn't actually do any kind of extra processing or anything. It just changes the windows and the layouts on those windows so just changes the editors and the layouts for those windows you can switch back and forth, say default animation. Changing the selection here is only going to change the window layout on the editors. Within those windows. It's You don't have to worry about changing the state off blender or that your computers will blow up. If you select the wrong button here or anything like that, it just does. Nothing is just just to make it convenient for you. And it's just a layer on layer system. That's it. So, for example, if you if you don't like the left, for example, you don't you don't like the animation that you think it's too too many things that are going on here that you don't need. Well, you can obviously make your own screen layout. So to do so, you can just press plus and pressing plus copies the same screen layout as the one that you were currently on. But it is. It is its own screen layout now, so you can rename it something else, say my animation mail, and then you can obviously create your own nail something. Maybe this is too big. I probably don't need the Africa of editor in real life. I don't actually work with after that editor that much. I do need a timeline. It's important. But most of my time my work is done with adoption later. So I guess I can remove that. So to do so, I can just remove that and then maybe drag out a new window and then for the dope sheets of death. Andi, I don't really need to see the properties window. Generally, I don't look probably window. I just need the outline. Second, select objects like the lamp the camera on. Yeah, that's pretty much all I need. And to me, this will be a pretty much a pretty good lap if I save it. This level, we pretty much saved for me. So it's just handy. Little things like that that can help. I hope this video was useful to you. In the next video, we'll start to look at the brain interface. I look forward to seeing you then on keep lending 7. Scene Management: Hi, everyone. In this video, we will learn about seeing management in Kendall. So if I go over to the info editor off blender, you will see a drop down tab called Sing. Um, basically, what this means is, for example, you could animate two friends having a phone conversation. One friend could be at home, and the other friend could be in a different country or just hopping off the train or something. So in blender, you could create two different scenes and then joined them together in the video editor. I want to start with a A cube. Just, I don't know, just random cube scene. We're gonna make this an alien cube like planet, for example. All right, now that is my scene. So that is all the default scene that's created a new scene. I will make it new, and then I'm gonna add another one called UV sphere, and this could be just planted. So I'm safe a scene and this one 80 and seen so as you can see. So as you can see, it's even switched between two different scene. This makes it pretty useful to create those multiple scenes in one bender file. My personal opinion is, I really, ever touched this. I don't I don't need I don't ever use scenes unless I really, really need to. When I make movies, it always tends to be a lot easier just to have one seem to work with, animate all of that in the one scene and then create a new blender file and then create my second scene. It tends to be it does tend to add on the megabytes, but it tends to be easier and a lot more quickly work with files that doesn't have as many three D objects. So, for example, you can imagine if I have one epic landscape scene with lots of trees and rocks and mountain scapes and another scene with which is a city scape with lots of skyscrapers and things. If I put that all in one Bender file, I can expect it to crash or be very, very clunky to work with. So that's one of the main reasons why tented separated out in different, different vendor files, but it does have its uses. I remember seeing some tutorials online. They used multiple scenes to create one epic composite render, maybe one scene was used for the sky. Another scene was used for the main full ground. And then they somehow combined those two scenes together to make this epic Rendah What do I just put that out there? Just in case you might be wondering what that exactly does, but yeah, personally, I don't use it as much, but it's always good to know that that that's there. And that's all just a short video. But I hope that was useful to you. And you learn something new. Andi keep bending and I hope to see you in the next video.