Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Whilst preparing this tutorial series. Blender has gone to a new LTS version. I will be using Blender 2.93 LTS going forward. Our focus is still on newbies to Blende,r and maybe those who want to expand their use of their Ubuntu system into new areas. Thank you to Javier Samudio (@JavierSam) for his help with this series. Since we are working in Ubuntu, our project will be a penguin. We will be making some common mistakes for you to make as well. Please follow along, just reading and looking at the pretty pictures will not grant you a skill. Fire up Blender and let’s start! Select the general option and you should see the standard Blender window.
The standard view comes with a cube. We want a nice tubby penguin and we need spheres. Right-click on the cube and go down to delete and delete it. So now in the top-left, click “add” > mesh > circle. Erm… What went wrong? Since we are sculpting 3D objects, press ctrl+z to undo the circle and go back and choose the “uv sphere”. You have to pay attention to the language used. Back to our squishy penguin, at the moment it looks like a golf ball. How can we fix that? Bottom-left, we now have, what looks like a button, that says what we just did, add a uv sphere. You will notice it has a triangle on the left, click that to expand the “button”. We have segments, rings, and radius. Increase the segments to 128 and the rings to 64. (Just type the values in, it’s easier). Click the triangle again, to minimize the pop-up and marvel at your smooth ball. Ooh, shiny. Now use your mouse wheel to zoom in on the sphere. Notice that it looks like a golf ball again when you get close enough. What the frikkin’ frik? I won’t go into details here as this is beginner friendly, just know that the more you plan to zoom in, the more triangles / squares / polygons you need to smooth out the surface. For those of you who were paying attention to the dropdown object menu, you may have seen something that says, shade smooth. This is the option you pick when you need it to be buttery-smooth.
Tip: If you click shade smooth and nothing happens, click the object again, it means you have deselected the object. If you are bad at drawing, like me, quickly watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiQUDA-i5tE Here is where things get interesting. If we look at Tux, the penguin, you will notice that he is vaguely pear shaped. We need to reshape our clay to be vaguely pear-shaped too. I will show you how to elongate the sphere. First, we need to find a point we would like to raise. Logic tells us we should raise it on the top, but we have no hands or handle. What we are going to do now is basically screw in a handle and “lift” the shape at the top, to create a pear shape. We first change our view, to clearly see the top, before we touch the sphere. Who remembers how to change the view? Bonus points if you remember the shortcut keys. (It is not using the little hand tool!). Yes, it is the z-axis or the numpad 7 or the blue dot in the view rotation circle. In the top-left, you should see “top orthographic”. Now that the red and green axis lines make a cross on your screen, please zoom into your ball, towards the center. Can you see the concentric rings? How about we make them more pronounced so you can click on one of the circles? Just above “top orthographic” you should see object mode. Please use the dropdown to get to edit mode. (Tab-key if yours is default). The image should get some lines connected by dots. Mine is orange, but yours may differ. Now that you have the plans for the death star at your fingertips, immediately notify the rebels!
Please click in the center on the little black cross with the red and white pattern in a circle and the orange lines should go black, indicating that you made a selection. Just make one click. (I only vant to hear van(one) click! - the advert still makes me smile). The reason we make one click only, is when you have a point set and you click again, you will see a line form between the two. This is not what we want, no matter how small the line is. Now we change our view back to front view (green) and zoom out (or use your numpad). Look at you, working like a pro!! Top center, you have some icons, the rightmost one looks like a pimple. Hovering your mouse over it should read: Proportional editing falloff. What a mouthful. I’ll just call it the pimple from now on. To connect our move handle, which is the four arrows on the right side unity-type menu. To connect your move handle, the following needs to be in place. You need to have the center ring selected on your sphere, you need to change the pimple to connected (if you are in an older version of Blender select connected or click the dot next to the pimple if you are on 2.93), and you need to click the move button. If you have done this correctly, you should see the directional arrows appear. (Blue and red, as you are in the green mode and that arrow is pointing towards/away from you). If you don’t see it, do it again.
Now you simply grab the blue arrow and move it upwards. You can zoom in and out with the mouse wheel, but not while you are dragging the blue arrow upwards, as that fills out the pimple you started dragging. Try that now, you can always press ctrl+z to undo. Now you know how to make a pear shape. You can drag the mouse left and right to get some interesting shapes. Just remember our end goal is to make a penguin. ;) But don’t let me stop you from being arty-farty. I won’t drag mine to keep it simple for everyone to follow along. Tip: You can do this technique anywhere, practice by doing it at the bottom and rolling your mouse wheel whilst you do it. (You should see a white circle increase and decrease as you do it). Tip: You don’t have to use the pimple shape, try the drop down with different shapes and make this project your own!
Tip: It will take you less than a minute to do this very soon, so why not experiment? You can always start over as you have the recipe now. So pears, pine cones, eggs, etc, are now within your grasp. Feel the power! This may have taken you ten minutes to complete, but know that this should take less than a minute if you are salted. Next issue, we start turning our pear into a penguin. Did I make a mistake, did I say left instead of right? Let us know and help others: misc@fullcirclemagazine.org