From the course: Blender 2.8 Character Creation

A brief introduction to Blender 2.8

From the course: Blender 2.8 Character Creation

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A brief introduction to Blender 2.8

- [Instructor] Blender 2.8 is an exciting new milestone in the history of Blender, and with any big release comes a lot of changes. So, what I'm going to do for this video is assume no knowledge of Blender whatsoever. So we're just going to begin right from scratch when you open up Blender 2.8 for the first time. And when you do, you get this new splash screen. And here you can choose what you're going to select objects with, either the left mouse button or the right. And for years, for more than a decade, the default has been to choose objects with the right mouse button, but that was different from 99% of the software out there. So for 2.8, they now have Blender defaulting to the left mouse button. So you can choose whichever you'd like here, and there's some other settings here that we can also choose but I'm going to go ahead and click next and jump right into the navigation. Now, we can choose what kind of file we want here, or we can just click outside the splash screen and close that. So we're initially presented with a 3D object, a camera, and a light. And this large window here in the center is the 3D view. To navigate around this view, you can press the middle mouse button and click and drag and it will tumble around, you can also press shift and the middle mouse button and you can pan, and you can also press control and the middle mouse button and drag the mouse and you can zoom in and out. Then you can also scroll the mouse wheel as well to zoom in and out. To select objects as we said, you can select with the left mouse button, you can click on an object, and to deselect it you can click outside the object. So I can click on the cube and highlight it, and then click outside to deselect it. Now I can also select everything with the A key here, or I can deselect everything with alt A. In addition, with this button selected, you can click and drag a frame around objects to select them. So I've selected now the light in the cube, or I can select the light in the camera, and to add an object to the selection, we can press shift, and drag or click on it as well. Now if we only want to see the cube here, we can select say the camera and the light and delete them. So I'll select the camera, hold shift and click the light, and then I'll just press the delete button. And if I wanted to zoom in to this particular object right here, I can press the period key on the number pad and that will zoom in and that will focus the tumble around that object. Now if I deleted this object, just hit delete, and I wanted to create a new object, we can always press shift A and bring up the add menu here, or of course there's the add menu up here as well. And I can go to mesh and create another cube right here. Now if I want to move this object around in a 3D view, I can come over here to the move, rotate and scale tools here. So if I click on the move tool, we get this move gizmo. I can move this up in the Y axis or in the X axis. So you can see the red, green and blue axis here and those correspond to these here, X, Y and Z. And as you can see if I click on one, it will view the scene from one of those axis. So if I click on the Z axis, it'll spin around to the top view, and on the X axis it'll spin around to the right orthographic view. And if I tumble around here, you can see we go back to the user perspective view. Now we can switch between that orthographic, or very flat view, and the perspective view by pressing the five key on the number pad. Here it is. So now you can see everything is kind of flat with really no perspective here, and then if I hit the five key we can go back to the perspective view here. Now with these over here you can click rotate and you get a rotate gizmo. We can click on one of these axis and say spin it around the Y axis here, and we can also click on scale and here, we can click and drag on one of these axis, say stretch it out in the Y axis as well. And if we want to undo any of our actions, of course we can press control Z and go back to the original position of the cube. Now we can also view our objects from the X, Y, and Z axis by pressing keys on the number pad. So the one key on the number pad takes us to the front view, the three key takes us to the right orthographic view, and the seven key takes us to the top orthographic view. If I click the middle mouse button and tumble around here we go back to our perspective. Now, so far we've just been working with our object in object mode, so you can see up here we've got object mode, we can click on this menu and you've got several other modes that you can use to work with your object. And we'll be dealing with texture painting, weight painting and sculpting as the course goes on, but for now I wanted to mention edit mode. And if I click this, you can see we get a lot of other tools here, and our object changes in a kind of subtle way. I'm going to press alt A to deselect everything. And here you can see the basic components of any object. There are three components of any object. There's a vertex, or the vertices of an object, and those are just the points that define the connection of two or more edges. So we've got eight vertices on this cube. Now, there's also edges of course. If we switch to edge select, you can see over here we've got vertex select, edge select and face select, and we can also switch between these with the one, two, or three keys on the keyboard. So if I hit the two key, now we can select edges here. I hit the one key, we can select a vertex, hit the two key, we can select an edge, and if I hit the three key we can select a face. And up here of course we've got the vertex, edge and face menus. So every object, or every polygon object I should say, is created from these three components, vertices, edges and faces. So of course we can scale and rotate and move our objects, but if we want to create something with any detail, we really need to go into edit mode. There are of course many tools that you can use in edit mode and we'll be covering quite a few of them, but the two main tools that I think you can use to create really almost anything are the extrude tools and the loop cut tools. You can find extrude over here on the menu here, and the loop cut you can find here. But the shortcut keys for these are E for extrude and control R for loop cut. So, now with this face selected, what I'm going to do is come over here to the move tool right here and once we do that we get a movie gizmo, and I'm going to click and drag on this and bring it down. Maybe not that far, maybe I'll bring it down to about right there and I'm going to tumble around here and click on this face here and bring this up so it kind of sits on the grid there. You can see it's kind of sitting on top of that grid. So, now I can take this face here, and let's say I want to create something like a candlestick. What I can do is I can hit E for extrude and I can pull up, and then I can click to confirm the tool. Now I could scale this in, I could come over here to the scale tool and click here, and now if I click and drag on this little circle right here, I can scale that in, I can scale it in or out, and I'll scale it in just a bit like this. And then I can go back to the move tool and pull it down a bit, let's do that. Now there are shortcut keys for the move, rotate and scale tools. They are, if you hover over the button here, the shortcut key for the move tool is G, for grab and move. The shortcut for the rotate tool is R, and the shortcut for the scale tool is S. So, if we then want to extrude again I'll hit E and I'll pull up just a little bit with the mouse, and then I'll click and then to scale that in I'll hit S and then scale that in like this. Now we can scale this up again. I'll hit E and drag up. There we go. And now maybe I'll add a little flair here to this. I can hit E and click to extrude, and then I'll hit S and scale out like this, and then maybe I can hit E and pull up, and E and then S and scale in. And then I can hit E and pull up again. Something like this. And then maybe we could create the top here where the candle is going to go in. So I can press E, and then S and scale out. Maybe I'll bring this up just a little bit like this. And then I'll hit E and pull up. And then maybe I should just press E and hit S and scale in and then maybe I could pull down just a bit. Let me hit E and I'll pull down just a little bit. There we go. So now we've got a very basic candlestick. Now, in addition, we can also use that loop cut tool here and you can see that the shortcut key is control R. So maybe I'll press control R. You can see as I hover over an area, I get some indication of where that loop, that edge loop, is going to be placed. So maybe I could put one here, and then I can drag the mouse and move it around and I can click here and that will place it there, and then maybe I'll press control R and click and then drag and then click again. Let's do that up here too. I'll click, and I'll click again, and then I'll press control R and drag and click again right here. Now that creates geometry that I can do something with. So let me switch to face mode here. You can see I'm in edge mode. If I hit the three key I switch to face mode, and now I can select these faces all the way around. I'll press shift and click, shift and click, all the way around here, and then I'm going to press the period key and zoom into it. Now I can E and click, and then I'm going to scale in. I'm going to hit S and scale in, so just to create a little detail there. I'll do the same thing over here. I'll click here, shift click all the way around and then I'll hit E and S and maybe scale in like this. There we go. So now we have a very basic candlestick. Now I want to get back to object mode so I can maybe create another object, say the candle. So I can come over here and I can pull this menu down, but instead what I'll do is just hit the tab key. And the tab key switches us between object mode and edit mode. So I'll just hit the tab key to go back to object mode. Now what I'm going to do is just create the candlestick, and all I need to do is just press shift A and let's go to mesh, and cylinder. I'll click here, and there it is. So now let's go over to the move tool, drag up, and I want to scale down so I'll hit the S key and scale it down until it's about the right size. Let's move it down into place here and see if it is the right size, I just hit the period key. And that looks pretty good, so now what I want to do is just make it taller. What I can do is tab into edit mode, go to face mode, I can hit the three key to do that, and I'm just going to click on this face at the top of the cylinder and just click and drag up, and maybe it's a candle that's about, I don't know, this tall. There we go. Now I can tab back into object mode, and there we go. We've got a very basic candle and candlestick. Now we can combine these together into one object. Currently we have two objects. You can see over here in the outliner, in this collection, we've got the cube and the cylinder, that's what they were called when we created them. We can combine these together by selecting one and then pressing shift and selecting another, and then pressing control J to combine them, or join them, together. Now they're all one object. You can see over here we only have one object, it's been called cube, but we can change that by just double clicking on it and let's call this candlestick, there we go. Now we can maybe move it over and duplicate it to make two. To duplicate, I can press shift D, and then click, and now I can just come over here and grab say the X axis and drag it over, and there we have two candles. Notice that it's just called the second one candlestick001. It'll just keep adding that on every time we duplicate the object. We could go ahead and create a table for these to be on too. Why don't we press shift A and go to mesh and cube. And let's scale this down in the Z axis. So you can see the blue axis here is the Z axis, so to scale just in the Z axis with the shortcut key, we can press S and Z and now when we move the mouse it'll only scale in the Z axis. So maybe let's make it about this thick. And we can also do the same thing with the Y and the X. So S, Y, scale that out. And then S, X, scale this out. There we go. So there's a table, we could take our two candlesticks here and pull them up so they're sitting just on the table here. And then I'll shift select that table top and let's just drag it all up here, there we go. Now let's take this table and, I don't know, add a few legs. What we'll do is just press shift D and then click and I'll drag this down and then press S and scale in a bit. There we go, so we've just got kind of an under piece for the table, and now let's create the legs. I'll press shift A, mesh, cube, I'll hit S and scale it down a bit, an then I'll hit S and Z and let's scale it up about like that let's say. Now let's go to that front view with the one key on the numb pad right there, and I'll just move this over and move it up some. It's a little too tall, isn't it? So maybe we can press S and Z and scale it down some and then move it to here, all right. Now let's press shift D and duplicate it, and now we can slide it in the X axis by pushing the X key, and now we can just slide it over. Something like that. So now I'll take these two, this one and this one, and move it over a bit, say to here, and now with these two selected, let's go ahead and duplicate and move them over here. So let's press shift D and then Y, and now they can only be moved in the Y axis and we'll pull them over here. There we go. And to deselect I'll press alt A again and there we go. Now we've got a banquet table with two candlesticks. So it's pretty amazing what you can create with just creating objects, moving, scaling and then in edit mode just extrude and loop cut. Now as I say, we'll learn more tools as we go, but with just those fundamental building blocks, just those fundamental tools, it's amazing how much you can create. And lastly what I'm going to do is clean up the outliner here. What I'm going to do is just select all the pieces of the table, all the legs, this piece, and the top, and then I'm going to combine it all together as well with control J. And now let's come over here and instead of cube, let's call it table. All right, well I hope that's helped to kind of introduce you to Blender 2.8. In the next video, we'll begin by bringing in the reference images for our character.

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