Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Since I misplaced parts 2 and 3, I was recreating them, when blender made the jump to 3.0. So if anything does not look 100% the same, just go with the flow. The first few articles are going to try and draw your attention to different parts of the interface so you can orientate yourself. By no means is this series a deep dive, I do not work with Blender every day, I got it to make isometric landscapes and threw up my hands in frustration more than once, so I know how it feels. Picking up a book, I found that they used words for things I had no idea of. On top of that, English is not my first language and I know there are many more people like me. Here, I attempt to get you up to speed, the fastest way I know how. Later on we will make a penguin and maybe a low poly landscape.
When you fire up blender now, you have the choice of keeping the old settings or loading the new settings for blender 3.0. The choice is yours. I suggest going for the newer settings as things only move forward.
Last issue we looked at the mouse buttons, ctrl, alt, and we identified the lights, camera, action part. If you missed this, quickly start there.
Our focus today is to get around with your mouse and keyboard. If you have a trackball, bully for you! If you have a mouse and keyboard, pay attention.
Like our lights, camera, action bit, we will be looking at our red, green and blue bit. If you are colour blind, it is the X,Y,Z component, representing the three axes. As soon as you click on any of these points, the demo cube in the centre view screen immediately rights itself to that axis. With a cube, this is not easy to see, as all sides are the same. Trust me on this for now. Here is where mouse users need to follow along please. Clicking and dragging inside the invisible sphere that these red,green and blue points occupy, will rotate your cube. Try it a few times, you may not get it the first time. If you don’t get it at all, right click and hold X,Y,Z and drag it in any direction. The nice thing about Blender is, there are many ways to do things. If you have a numpad, press the numpad key, activate and press the numbers 1-9 to see what each one does. Move your mouse cursor into the main viewport and holding down the middle mouse button, move the mouse for the same effect. You will notice that your view moves around “action”. That point in the middle of the viewport. What if you need to move the “action”, but not the generic grey cube in the center? You apply the same principle as you did earlier, you click on the hand icon, below the red, green and blue, and while holding your primary mouse button down, move the mouse. You can also hold down the shift key and middle mouse button drag. We talked about these modifiers in the first issue. Do that again, but without holding down the shift key. The mouse zoom may seem intuitive, but just like the previous examples, you can use the magnifying icon above the hand to get you close or further away. Left click and hold the magnifying glass and move your mouse forward and back. Again we have another option, the plus and minus keys on your numpad. You may have noticed that I skipped 0 on the numpad. That is because it gives you a view from your camera. (See what your camera sees) So left clicking the camera icon, will give you the same view. The last one is an oddball, that grid icon. No, it does not bring up your brain, when you click it, it actually switches views. Look at the top left of the screen when you click on it. You will notice that the word orthographic changes to perspective. And that is actually what it is, it gives you perspective on your objects, currently the nondescript grey cube. This only becomes apparent when you have more than one object. You will also notice that the icons along the right side disappeared. We will talk about different modes in an upcoming issue.
Sometimes your try at home may not gel with what I am telling you here. That is because blender acts on what is selected, or not selected. Remember we said that selected objects go orange? (Default) Now a lot of times, things will work the same, but not always, please remember that. If something behaves differently than expected, click the object, or if the object is selected, click the background and try your operation again.
Above red,green and blue you will see four spheres. This is the level of viewport shading. The first one will give you outlines, or wireframe. This becomes important with complex shapes. Go ahead and click each one to see what they do to your cube. If you have a lower end CPU, there may be a slight delay in clicking the sphere and anything actually happening. I tried this on a Celeron laptop with 2Gb memory and it actually took a few seconds before it reacted, so if you have something in that line, take a deep breath. Next to the four spheres, is a drop down arrow, the contents here change in relation to the sphere selected. We won’t cover that now, but please be aware of it.
Well done! You now know more than most people about blender. Please don’t stop playing with it just because the next issue has not arrived yet. There are many great tutorials on the web, but I find that they tend to start explaining and then continue like you know everything they are talking about. We are taking it slow and steady, and if anything was unclear, please drop us a message at: misc@fullcirclemagazine.org