From the course: Blender 2.91 Essential Training

First steps, navigating the interface - Blender Tutorial

From the course: Blender 2.91 Essential Training

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First steps, navigating the interface

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- [Instructor] Welcome to the Blender 2.9 X series. In this course, we're going to go over how to use this amazing software called Blender. We're going to focus on the 2.9 X series. At the time of this recording we're working with Blender 2.91. But with subsequent releases, generally, everything's going to be the same. If there's something that is significantly different though, I'll go ahead and record a new video to update this course. Now, the very first thing we need to do in this video is go over the Blender interface. In fact, this entire chapter is going to be about your first hour in Blender. And by the end of it, we're going to create a 3D scene. Let's talk about some of the major parts of Blender. Right now you're looking at the 3D view port. This is where you're going to do most of your work. At the top right you have this little gizmo that you can left click and hold and move around. This will let you rotate the view. You can also do this by holding down your middle mouse click button. You can hold down Shift and middle mouse to move around this way. Or Ctrl and middle mouse to go in and out. Right clicking will bring up a context menu. This is going to be really useful throughout Blender. This will constantly come back to this menu. In fact, there are a lot of menus in Blender and they try to make it really easy for you to select everything. At the top left you'll see a couple of the major menus. View, Select and Add Object that are reliant on the Object Mode. Blender has different modes for working. Whether you're working on overall objects, editing the objects, sculpting them or painting them. Each one of these different modes will open up different tools on both the left and different menus on the top. Let's go back to Object Mode. On the top right you'll see this thing called an Outliner. This literally outlines everything inside your scene. They're organized by a thing called Collections, which if you really want you can right click on the little collection box and change the color of them. You can think of collections as groups. But the cool thing about a collection is that a 3D object can be in multiple collections at once. This allows you to easily manage the data. Say you want to have one collection on over here but one collection on over there all with a click of a button. At the bottom over here is the Properties panel. Now, if you need a little bit of real estate you can always put your left mouse button over these dark lines and left click and drag them. Now that we have a little bit more room we can see our Properties window. There is quite a few properties. Render properties, Dimensions. Or how big the image should be. Different layers. What you want to see visible when you render. Scene, et cetera. All of these will be dynamic. Changing depending on what object or what scene we're working with. The last two things I want to talk about are the top bar and the bottom. The top bar is separated into three parts. Our typical File menu. Our Layout tabs. Which if I click on any of these, you can see how they change the layout of our current Blender view. And our View layers and Scene tab. These are different ways of organizing your 3D scenes either by viewing layers that is a different set of collections or overall scenes. Finally at the bottom is the playback window. Which I'm going to left click and drag up here. Playback window lets you move along in time or outright in play. At first, this interface can seem daunting. But knowing where all the tools and menus are will help you in your 3D journey inside Blender.

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