From the course: Blender 2.91 Essential Training

How to install and things to know - Blender Tutorial

From the course: Blender 2.91 Essential Training

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How to install and things to know

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- [Instructor] Now, first thing is first. Let's go ahead and install Blender. You're going to want to go to blender.org/download. At the time of this recording, Blender 2.91 has just released. If you're on different versions, like Windows or Mac or Linux, you can go ahead and download different ones right here, or you can even install it from Steam. Now here's something to note. Every time Blender does a major release, say from 2.8 to the 2.9 series, we'll go ahead and update the course. But generally speaking, 2.91, 92, and 93, which are hot on the heels of a release pretty soon, are fairly similar. If there's something significantly different, I'll go ahead and update this course, but generally speaking, the interface, the names of things, and the locations of everything are going to be about the same. Now, if this is your very first time running Blender, you're going to be greeted by this splash screen. There's a couple of ground rules I want to set before we dive too deeply into this course. The very first thing is we're going to be operating off of English. Our shortcuts will be the standard Blender shortcuts and we're going to be selecting with left, and our spacebar is going to play. Now of course, if you come from Maya or ZBrush, you could experiment with industry compatible. And if it helps your eyes, you can try any one of these incredible themes that are included with Blender. Okay, once we have this all set up, you can go ahead and save your new settings and click away, and then come up to your edit preferences. There's a couple of preferences that I highly recommend you take a look at. The first is resolution scale. You can type in any number in here and that will make the entire resolution bigger. I've been staring at a computer for as long as I can remember, so for me having a bigger resolution scale really does help. If you come down to key map, you can see where we can change our select from left to right, along with changing what our spacebar does, et cetera. Under system, if you have a GPU, you can turn on either CUDA, OptiX, or OpenCL, depending on the graphics card that you have. In my case, I have CUDA, So I'm going to turn that on for both my graphics card and my processor. If you have trouble undoing, you can always fiddle around with undo steps or even undo memory limit, which'll help save on a lot of RAM while running Blender. Save and load is a great place to be. You want to make sure that auto-save is on and I have it set to the default of every two minutes. However, if you find yourself saving and taking a long time, you could always change this timer to be a little bit later. Now, auto-save will only save one previous version. So if you want, you can dial this up a little bit and save a couple of different versions. I'm going to keep it at the default for one. If you find yourself losing a lot of hard drive space, I recommend compressing the file. You don't need to have this on, but it is kind of handy. It is useful to have auto run Python scripts on, especially when you install other ad-ons or use other rigs. So I'm just going to leave it on for the purpose of this course. Okay, that about does it. There's a lot under the hood to mess with Blender, but at least we've got our general settings dialed in. Now, let's go ahead and start working inside Blender.

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