The Solid Modeler's Blender Survival Guide

Part 1: Kickstart

I thought I'd put together a few things I've noticed about the way I use Blender for solid modeling, focusing on the shortcut keys and modeling concepts that matter, and ignoring the many awesome but totally unrelated to solid modeling functions that lots of tutorials spend a lot of time on. We'll start at the beginning, but assume you already know 3D concepts. (If you don't, or are rusty, GorrillaCG has some truly excellent videos which will give you what you need.)

Note: I'm assuming you're using your mouse right-handed-- Blender has a lot of hotkeys assigned to the left hand section of the keyboard, because the developers assume this as well.



Meet Blender

When you boot Blender, you get a default cube in a default empty world. Because you start viewing it in an isometric view straight on, it looks like a square. You'll also see the outline of a pyramid in the lower right (Blender's representation of a camera) and a dotted line circle on the middle-upper right (Blender's representation of a light source.) Neither of these objects are likely to ever matter at all for designing printable objects.

If you want to make pretty pictures of objects, with textures, nice shading and metallic effects, the camera and the light objects are two of the most important things in the scene. I can imagine one or two circumstances where you might shine a virtual light on a model to get an idea of certain things about its appearance, but for structural components, the default "solid view" will be plenty good enough.



Looking

One of the most immediate of the many, many things that frustrate new users of Blender is looking around in the scene. One reason I've seen is that they're expecting to look around the way they do in the real world, or alternatively, in first-person shooters. This is NOT what happens when you rotate the view, by pressing down the alt key and left-dragging.

The sense that you are swooping around the cube seems intuitive enough at first. Move the mouse left and right and you swoop left and right. Up and down, same deal. Sensible. Making sure you have the number lock turned on, hit the 1, 3, and 7 keys. Your view will shift to looking directly down the y axis, x axis, and z axis, respectively.

Now, in all of these exercises, the pivot point around which the world rotates has stayed fixed, but can be changed. It's very useful to be able to do this, for example if you have say a figurine and want to focus on the head, but one thing that makes it easy to get very lost is this: Blender gives no visual cue whatsoever where this pivot point is.

The pivot point is changed whenever one slides or "pans" the view. (There are probably other times it changes but I haven't used them.) The pan commands are:
pan right: ctrl-4
pan left: ctrl-6
pan up: ctrl-8
pan down: ctrl-2
Important note: these are number-pad keys. Using the arrows or the home-row numbers will not work and in fact does other things entirely, many of which are confusing trips into the very deep and strange universe of functions that have been shoehorned into Blender over the ages. How deep? Let's just say, I've used Blender to edit YouTube videos that didn't have any CG in them.

Also: these commands will not work if you don't have the mouse in the 3D window. This is because (get this) Blender treats the command panel ("Buttons Window" to use Blender's language) underneath the 3D view as Just Another View, and many 3D navigation commands have 2D analogues in the Buttons Window.

The plus and minus keys on the number pad zoom. If you have the mouse in the Button Window, the Button Window zooms instead. This can be amusing or annoying depending on mood.

If you're ever lost, hit 7, press and hold the minus key until you see something familiar, then ctrl-2,4,6, and 8 until it's in the middle of the view, then hit 1 and repeat the process, and the plus key 'till you're home again. (This happens to me all the time.)

(Yes, lots of arbitrary stuff. Commit it to muscle memory, and you'll eventually forget you know these things, and you'll wonder why so many people seem to hate Blender for no apparent reason.)



Actually Doing Things: Mess With The Cube

Bizarre arbitrary convention: *right clicking* is the select command.

Right-click the cube to select it, and get ready to actually alter a model. (Blender calls them meshes, as do many 3D nerds out there.)

You'll see a little selection box that currently says "Object Mode". Click it. You'll see six or so options. Probably you only want Edit Mode and Object mode. You may later use Sculpt Mode, and I can think of a few instances where someone would even want "weight paint" and "pose" modes, but for now, Edit Mode and Object Mode:

Object Mode: Blender organizes a file into Objects, which may or may not be Meshes. The only reason you'll ever actually *use* Object Mode is if you have multiple meshes in a file, as with, say, a gearbox.

Edit Mode: Changing into Edit Mode lets you alter the coordinates of the corners (called vertices) of the mesh, and lines between them (edges) as well as the surfaces (faces).

Left click the Object Mode box and switch it over to Edit Mode. The render style will change to a sort of funky semi-transparent view which is useful for selecting things that are behind things. You can now right click to select *individual vertices* of the mesh instead of the whole thing.

The little 3-axis icon (depending on your view it may look like two or three arrows of different colors) will hop to whichever vertex you select.

Shift-right-clicking will let you select multiple vertices. Notice if you select two or more vertices, the axis icon will move to the geometric center of the selected vertices.

Left-click-and-dragging the arrows on the 3-axis icon will let you move your selected vertices. If at any time during this operation you realize that moving your selected vertices was a horrible mistake, you can hit escape to cancel the drag operation.

You can also move a vertex or group of vertices in the plane of the view by hitting the g key.

Hitting the s key will scale your selection. Important: the scale is relative to the location of the 3-axis icon. Since the 3-axis icon is always at the center of your selection, scaling a single vertex will do nothing, scaling vertices all on the same line will move them along that line, and scaling vertices all in the same plane will move them exclusively inside that plane.

The kickstart tutorial is just meant to get you past some of the worst of the early hangups people run into upon starting Blender. The further Survival Guides will be actual modeling exercises, and at some point should involve graphics. For a much more complete guide, try the Blender: Noob to Pro wikibook: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro

Ignore the chapters on textures, lighting, and animation and this should provide a pretty solid foundation to work from. Of course, it's a little thin on topics like keeping meshes solid, but, well, that's what the later tutorials in this series are for...

Section 2: Topology and the Motor Pinion

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