From the course: Blender 3 Essential Training

First steps: Navigating the interface - Blender Tutorial

From the course: Blender 3 Essential Training

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First steps: Navigating the interface

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- Welcome to the Blender 3.0 Series. In this chapter, we're going to cover the basics of Blender. We're going to get a feel for the program, how it functions, what are some of the major tools, and by the end of it, you're going to create your very first 3D render. I'm so excited to take you on this journey. So let's start with the most important thing, the 3D Viewport. The 3D Viewport is where everything happens. It is a 3D representation of all of your objects in the scene. For example, I can left-click on this camera, my cube, or the light. And I can see that these are three separate objects in the scene. On the right, you'll notice a few different tools and this weird kind of gizmo thing. If you left-click and drag on this gizmo, you can see you can rotate the view. You can even click on any one of these buttons to get a more orthographic or flat view. You can left-click and drag on the gray sphere here to move around, and you can even use these buttons to zoom in or pan around or even go right into camera view. This button changes perspective to orthographic. It's quite handy. On the left are going to be all your tools like Move or Rotate. You can go ahead and click on any one of these and you'll see a new gizmo appear, a blue, green, and red that allows you to move your objects in 3D space. The viewport is where you're going to spend the most amount of your time, but there's still a few other important areas inside of Blender. So let's go take a look. At the top-left is our File menu. This is where you can Open and Save scenes, Import, Link, et cetera. Your Preferences are under Edit along with a few other things like Undo History, which allows you to see all of your moves in Blender and pick on any one of them to go back to that point. Rendering will be really important throughout this chapter and this course. But for now, just know that this is where the menu exists. Window and Help are also quite useful tools if you ever want to research more into Blender. At the top here, you have different layouts. If you click on any one of them, you can see how they change the way that Blender looks. Blender has a very robust system that allows you to have different customizations if you're modeling, sculpting, or painting textures. And it's fully customizable by you as well where you can create your own layouts. At the top-right, you'll see the Outliner. Now this Outliner is a hierarchy view of all the objects in your scene. Scenes are made up of things called collections. They function a lot like groups. And this collection has a camera, a cube, and a light. Below the Outliner is the Properties panel. And this is going to have every single kind of property, from rendering settings to the color of the light to the orientation of the camera. Everything lives inside of Properties. If you ever want to change anything about an object, check the Properties panel. And finally, at the bottom is the Timeline. This allows us to play back our animation simply by clicking on this Play button. And when we're done, we can go ahead and click on Pause. One more thing I want to mention, as you're moving around your mouse, you might see this little area down here where the mouse icons change. This is like the Tooltips area for Blender. As I'm clicking on different things or even switching into different modes, this whole area down here will give you different hints as to what shortcuts or mouse buttons you can click. At first, the Blender interface can be really daunting. But knowing where all your tools are and how they all work together is going to help you on your Blender journey.

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