Blending for the faint hearted - Sphynx's guide to Blending

Tutorial 1: Introduction

Some of us do not have much money. Some of us have money, but need to justify to ourselves when we spend large amounts of it. Some of us try only to use Open Source products. Some of us like a challenge. Some of us just like to be different.

It does not matter which of the above categories you fall in to, if you are reading this then chances are that you have something in common with me - you chose Blender as your 3D application, and now you want to learn to use it to its full advantage.

Well, that may not be easy. Not because Blender is a pain - in actual fact, from a learning and interface standpoint, Blender has drastically improved in only a few recent releases. The main hinderance, is that even experienced BlenderHeads still learn new short cuts and capabilities on a daily basis. There are manuals, there are tutorials, and there are FAQs all over the place and still there are capabilities and methods of using Blender that are continually being discovered.

This is the first, and most non-3D oriented tutorial in a long series that ultimately hopes to explore each and every section of Blender. I certainly will not even tempt fate by being arrogant and saying that we will cover everything, because we won't. We can't - it's as simple as that. If I tried, if I made sure that each and every thing that I show you also includes all of the other alternative ways of doing the same thing, you would end up with a document that was totally unreadable.

Instead, what I intend to do is to introduce you gradually to Blending and 3D modeling. If you are a little more experienced; if you have been using Blender a while and just want to know more, or you have come to Blender from another 3D application, just bear with us - from the numbers that I see on various forums week after week, there are plenty of new Blender users who desperately need help, and who are very new to 3D let alone Blender. As the tutorials progress, there will be less hand-holding and more core information.

As a result, most of these tutorials (other than when we really to just need to wade through menu options) will each follow the same format. First, they will show something basic. Something that is a key to the particular tutorial in question. In the first activity tutorial for example, we'll just build a simple cube. For the rest of the tutorial, we'll use what we built to explore a set of Blenders menus and capabilities, taking in both Blender and general 3D concepts along the way.

First however, lets look at some general concepts that it would be useful to know about before we even start the tutorials properly. Start up Blender and we'll take a look around.

Image: The Blender Interface

Windows

To change the purpose of a window (the Window Type), click the double-arrow button to display a drop-down menu of the different types available.

Exercise

Pick a window, and remember the icon and type that it is displaying. Display the menu and choose a few options - just to see what they look like. You may not understand what they all do or mean, but just get used to this window-type menu. It's pretty typical of drop-down menus in Blender. When your comfortable, put the window back to what it was before.

Editable fields and settings buttons

Many of the buttons that you can see on the Blender screen are just buttons - nothing more. You click the button, and something happens. Others however - and it is not always obvious as to when something is not just a button - do more. There are essentially two different types of these 'other buttons'.

One type is used to display a setting - usually in a numeric form, but sometimes with or using an accompanying slider.



These buttons will contain the name of the setting, the current value, and the optional slider. They may also however, contain an arrow on either side of the button. There are a number of ways that you can change the current setting on these buttons.

If you click the arrows, or often anywhere on the button on the general side of the button where the arrow is located, Blender will move the setting up or down. On some buttons (not all), where you click will effect how much the setting is moved up or down. If you click one of the arrows or the slider bar but hold down the mouse button, then drag the mouse left or right the setting will usually change in a continuous motion.



You can also click the numeric setting itself. This will place the button into a text-field editing mode and allow you to type the setting that you require - useful if the current setting is 2 and you want to enter 80,000!

Exercise

If you've started up an empty Blender file, then chances are that you are on the Render menu. Take a look at the button marked [Xparts] in the second menu, titled [Render]. You can see that it follows the pattern of what I just described, and that currently it probably has the setting of 1. Click on the arrow on the right hand side of the button and it should jump to 2. Click and hold on the arrow then drag the mouse around, and you'll see the numbers change pretty rapidly. Try the same type of thing with the left button.



Finally, click pretty much in the centre of the button and it should switch into text-editing mode. Don't worry if it does not work first time, your probably just a little off in your position. Try it a few times till you get the feel of how it works. When the field is editable, delete what is there and return it to 1, then press [Return]. Do it a few more times, till you are happy with how it all works.

A similar button is used to display the names of objects, materials, and a wide variety of information that require naming with a text value. In order to change the name of the information (usually these are names of data blocks - see later), just click on the button and the button will enter into a text-editing mode. Change the text to what is required then press [Return].

Many buttons have several functions and will change their appearance and usage depending on circumstance. A good example of this is the button that is used to attach a material to an object. We can't really look at the material button till we create something, so we will look at it a little later. For now, this is how it works:



Initially, this button will appear as a simple button marked 'Add New', but with an up-down arrow next to it. Clicking on the 'Add New' part of the button creates a new material (usually just called 'Material') and attaches it to the mesh (see below).

Next to this button however, is an up-down arrow similar to that which we saw on the 'Window-Type' button (above). Clicking this up-down arrow will display a menu of materials that already exist, and allow you to select one. Once selected, the material is attached to the object in place of the words 'Add New'.



Once a material has been selected however, the name of the material is displayed on the button (usually prefixed with a few characters indicating what the data block is - in this case MA for MAterial). To change the name of the material, just click the name being displayed, change the text and press [Return].

The Cursor

You will see even now, a cursor in the 3D view that comprises of black horizontal and vertical bars and a red and white circle. The 3D cursor will appear in all 3D view windows as it reflects a point in 3D space and not just on a 2D monitor screen. If you want to know where it really is, take a look at it on two different 3D views at right angles to each other so that you can see depth as well as its horizontal and vertical position.



The cursor is used for a number of different purposes - not least of which being that the current position of the cursor will be used to locate the centre of any new primitive meshes that you create (see later). It will also be used as an anchor point for various operations that you perform to modify the contents of your 3D view. We'll take a look at these as and when we get to them.

We position the cursor in the 3D world by clicking the mouse button at some point in space on a 3D view. Remember again however, that you are clicking a 2D monitor screen. To really position the cursor at a point in 3D space, you need to also click at a point in another 3D view - again, at right-angles to the first so that you can account for depth as well as horizontal and vertical position.

I am a bit of a perfectionist, and one of the few annoyances with Blender is the inability to directly specify accurately and numerically where you want the cursor to be. As you will see later, you can hit [n] to directly enter values for object positions, but the cursor is more convoluted. To accurately position it, you need to select the [View] menu on one of the 3D windows, then the [View Properties...] item. There are also a couple of different ways to position the cursor based on the position of other things by using a context-menu that will appear when you press shift-S. These allow you to jump the cursor to the nearest grid intersection (remember that it's an x, y and z grid!), or to the current selection (such as a mesh).

Exercise

Click somewhere in the 3D view and watch the cursor move about. Unless you've made some changes, it will be the left-button that you need to click. Put the cursor in various random positions until you feel comfortable, then try putting the cursor back in the very centre of the view. It's not easy (or overly important at this stage that you get it right) - even if you think that its in the perfect centre, its probably not. Remember that you are limited by the resolution of your monitor screen, but the position of the cursor goes down to 3 decimal places!

Mouse buttons

Blender seems to have been designed by a left-hander! Within the 3D windows, the more common operations of selecting an object, vertex, face or edge (see later) is performed by using the right-mouse button. Meanwhile, the left mouse button is relegated to positioning the cursor and clicking the menu items and buttons. Arguably, 'positioning the cursor' fits in with modern UI (user interface) thinking, but the problem is that in terms of overall use it is far more likely that you'll be selecting rather than positioning so it makes sense to reverse the buttons.

To do this either switch one of the windows into configuration / information mode or, which I recommend to avoid confusion, use the existing window. Wonder where that is? Simple - it's the menu bar at the top, with the majority of what we need hidden from view.

Exercise

Use your mouse and grab the bottom of the menu bar (left mouse click and hold - your mouse pointer will change when you are over it) and drag it downwards a few inches. This should reveal some configuration options that we can choose. Explore this configuration area and get a feel of whats here.



Don't change anything too important, or if you do, make sure that you put it back the way it was. When you are finished, grab the botton of the window again and drag it back up to the top - you can't drag it too far, and Blender will make sure that that the menu bar is always visible.

If you do want to change your selection mouse button (I did...), select the option that reads [View & Controls] and this should display an area labelled [Select with:]. To switch the mouse buttons, just select 'Left Button'.

Screens and Scenes

When you first start up Blender, chances are that you'll be in the modelling screen. At first, grasping what a 'screen' actually is can be a little difficult as other 3D applications often only have a single main screen then open up other windows to display details of a particular task that you need to perform. We are not really talking about anything physical here, just a reconfiguration of what you are seeing.

In effect, a 'screen' in Blender is a particular configuration of windows that have been set up to perform a particular task. The default modelling window has a single 3D window in the main part of the screen, with the menus and toolbars along the bottom. This is not always however, the best set up for other editing practices such as sound, animation of material editing, so Blender allows you to configure a screen that is more suited to the task. Blender allows you to switch back and forth between these window configurations in the form of 'screens'.

Nowadays, Blender has a series of these already configured for you, but we'll show you later how to change them if you want to.

How do you know what screen you are currently using? Simple - look to the main menu bar along the top and find the button that contains the prefix 'SCR:' followed by a name. Older versions of Blender had these screens named 'screen', 'screen.001' etc. but later versions have more intuitive names, such as '1 - Animation' and '2 - Model'. Remember that this is one of those examples of an editable data block name - click in it and you can change the name (just press [Escape] to abort without changing it if you tried this).

You'll also see an up-down arrow next to it - click this, and Blender will give you a drop down menu to show you the screens that are available or even create a new one. The big 'X' at the side just allows you to delete the screen configuration if you no longer want it - though I would not really advise it in this case unless you really know what you are doing!

Exercise

Click on the arrow next to the screens button and switch into some of the other screens. Take a look at the layout and how it differs from your main modelling screen. Just be comfortable with fact that there are differences for now - don't bother trying to understand what they do. We'll come back to it all later. When you are finished, go back to your modeling screen.

The 'Scenes' button is right next to the Screens button in the menu bar but this is prefixed with 'SCE:'. Don't get confused by the two! We won't say much about the scenes button for now - we'll come back to it later.

Reconfiguring Windows

If, like me, you have come to Blender from another 3D application then you may be confused by the state of the modeller screen. A single window? Well, OK, you can use this single window to jump around different views, and this also may not be new to you for some 3D applications or if this is your first application. Those who have used older applications and those of us who come from an old style technical drawing background however, will probably want something familiar - such as the traditional 'three-view'. Curiously enough of course, this three-view actually comprises of four windows - a top, left and side view and a 3D or camera window.

For this example, we'll look at how to get the typical layout as used by the Lightwave modeller - we're looking at configuring a modeling environment here, but this window setup process is pretty standard for creating other types of window as well.

(Note: Because of the menus along the bottom of the screen, this layout may not be ideal even for modellers who are used to Lightwave unless you've got a big screen with a good resolution. This is because the new windows we are going to create are relatively small compared to the whole screen. Lightwave positions menus in a very narrow bar down one side of the screen, so there is much more room to play with.)

Exercise

First, we need to make some more windows in the centre of the screen. To do this move the mouse to the bottom of the 3D window (the one with all of the grid lines on it) and position it until the cursor changes to the 'up-down' arrow that would allow you to re-size the window (as we did above with the information window).



Don't click the left button this time however, instead click the right to display a context-menu. To split the window in two, select the menu item 'Split Area'.



A vertical line will now appear dividing the window in two and attached to the current position of the mouse. Move the mouse left or right until the line is pretty much in the middle of the screen then click the left mouse button again to confirm the position of the split.

Do the same thing, but this time on the vertical window border between the two new windows that you have just created. This time, the split will appear in the left hand side and when confirmed by clicking the mouse button in the place that you want to split, this left window will divide in two. Do the same with the right hand window by moving the mouse to the right-most border of that window and repeating the process. You should now have four 3D view windows, in a 2x2 arrangement.

Image: A four window 3D view

At present, because we have split the same window multiple times, they are all displaying the same thing. To change this, click the [View] menu on each window and select the view that you want to see. Normally, the top left window is used as the Top view (or select NumPad 7 with the top left window activated); the bottom left is the front view (NumPad 1); and the bottom right is the side view (NumPad 3). The top right view is normally reserved for the 3D view or the camera (Numpad 0).

If you want to remember these short-cuts just think about the way we've set up these windows (Top, Front and Side) and take a look at the position of the 7, 1 and 3 keys on the keypad - they match their positions with the views on screen.

Finally, if you want that little-bit more room then you can turn off the menu-bars that are attached to each window. To do this, move you mouse over the menu (Blender calls this a window header) of the required window and press the right mouse button - in the context menu, you can use [No Header] to remove the menu bar or change its location and get that little bit more room for modelling. This may be counter-productive long term however, as you'll see later that we need to use the contents of this menu bar quite a lot. For some things, we can leave only one window with the menu bar activated (tip: use the 3D view for this, so that the other three remain consistant), but for others, the menu bar needs to affect only the window that it is attached to. You may therefore need a separate menu in each window.

Saving your environment

Right - if you've been following all of this and trying things out on your screen, then your Blender environment may well now be a total mess and your starting to panic. Should I reinstall the entire thing to reverse my changes? Well, the answer is no, you don't need to. All of the changes that you have just made are actually saved into the current Blender file that you are using. If you have not saved your file yet, then the next time that you come into Blender all of your changes will have disappeared. Phew!

But what if you get a really nice setup that you like and want to use all of the time? There are two ways of doing this.

First, you can set your environment up then save it all down into a Blender file with a name that you will remember. Each time you want to start a new 3D adventure, just start Blender and load that file before you start adding anything. Then, save the file down as a new file reflecting what you've been doing.

A second option is to save all your changes down as a new set of defaults. To do this, setup your environment then go to the [File] menu. Select [Save Default Settings] (Ctrl-U) from this menu and all of your changes will be saved into the default Blender file that gets loaded each time you start Blender.

The Blender file

Unlike other applications that store objects, images and scenes in separate files, Blender stores everything about a project in one single file. These invariably have the file extension '.blend', so you could have 'myproject.blend', 'starship.blend' or '3d_scene.blend'. Blender files can therefore become quite large, but no more so than if you totalled the size of all the files in the project directory of a different application.

Within this file, there can be lots of different, distinct data blocks (see below).

One initial puzzle that many people have when coming from a different 3D application, is how to re-use their models in different scenes. Well, rest assured that this is not a problem - Blender has a few answers to this. Within Blender you can browse a '.blend' file in a similar way to looking at a directory or folder on the disk, then select different data blocks to 'append' to your current project - effectively importing them for re-use.

Alternately, it is also possible to tell Blender to use different '.blend' files for the foreground activity and for the background environment. We'll deal with both of these later as we come to them.

Data Blocks

A large amount of what you do in Blender will consist of 'data blocks'. The best way to think of a data block is to regard it as its own unique set of information regarding some aspect of a Blender scene. Amongst lots of other things, a data block can contain mesh data (see below), details of a material or texture, a sound or information telling an object how it is animated.

OK, so why should you need to know about the internals of Blender and how the data is organised? Well, unlike other applications, data blocks are very visible to the user and the names of data blocks in use are displayed all over the Blender UI. By encapsulating this information into distinct data blocks we can do all sorts of things far faster and with much greater ease. For example, a data block can be created once - say for a material - but then attached to other things multiple times. What this means is that all you need to do is to modify one data block for everything that uses that same data block to be updated automatically.

OK, so that's not unique in 3D applications, but translate this to an animation. If you set up the details of the animation once, for one mesh, then it also means that you can attach that data block to a lot of different objects. Makes sense to do it this way rather than having to set up the animation of every single separate object now, doesn't it? Again, there are lots more advantages and uses of data blocks, but we'll see them as we come to them.

The one thing to watch however, is that by default if a data block is NOT being used by something when you save your file, then it will not be saved at all (this does not apply to mesh objects, which are always saved). The next time that you load your Blender file, that block - whether it's a material, animation or anything else that was not being used - will simply have ceased to exist.

You may have seen while you have been browsing however, little buttons marked 'F' next to some fields that quite obviously could have text in them - the little 'F' means 'Force' and is the way in which you get around this default feature. If you press 'F', whatever data block was visible in that field when you pressed it is 'forced' to be saved, even if it has no current users.

You may also have seen while moving your mouse around, a tooltip appear refering to 'make single-user copy'. Don't worry about what this actually does for now - all it really means is that it allows us to make copies of data blocks so that we can edit them and make them unique without having to build them totally from scratch.

Construction of a model

Well, we've mentioned vertexes, edges, faces and meshes already, so I suppose we should explain what they are. At their very basic, these things are the building blocks of a model.



A vertex is simply a 'point' in 3D space. A vertex will normally never be visible outside the modelling environment, but they still show up in 3D views. So if they are normally not visible, what use are they? Well, join two vertices together to form an 'edge' and you now get a line in 3D space. Take three or more 'edges' joined in, well, lets say a triangle, and you can create a 'face' (or a polygon , or 'poly' in alternative terminology).

Once you get to the stage where you have 'faces', things start to take on a whole new dimension (pun intended only if you think its funny, otherwise disregard...), as these 'faces' can be joined into larger and larger groups then 'rendered' into a final 3D image.

Blender faces

Blender has three different types of face: 3-point polygons (triangles), 4-point polygons (quads), and something called 'f-gons'.

3-point polygons are the basic building blocks of most 3D applications. Why? Because any shape with three corners simply can't be 'bent'. Some 3D applications don't use anything but 3-point polygons. Put four of these polygons together, vertex to vertex, and you get a three-sided pyramid.

4-point polygons are the next step up and while they can be 'bent', they are also extremely useful. Think of a simple cube - construct it out of square polygons rather than triangles (two triangles together to form a square) and you literally halve the number of polygons. There is more to it than that, but a polygon count saving on this scale is a real benefit - as well as making the on-screen display during modeling a great deal easier on the eye.

Finally, Blender has 'f-gons' - lovingly, but a little inaccurately referred to as 'fake-polygons'. Primarily, 'f-gons' really exist in order to make the modeling process easier. It is possible to take a number of triangle or quad polygons and, as long as they are all 'flat' (in the same 'plane') and visually join them together so that only the multi-point outline is actually drawn. There are some implications and side-effects to doing this, but only if you are using some special modelling techniques. Otherwise, they are a God-send in the modeling environment - we'll show you how to create f-gons later. We'll walk before we run..!

Take a look at the following example of a typical 32 sided circle made from 3 and 4 point polygons, and one converted to an f-gon (note: it's more usual for quads to be used to create more conventional rectangles. This image is for reference only).

Meshes (or 3D Objects)

What's a mesh? Well, look in a dictionary and you'll get some sort of description sounding a lot like a net, or a series of lines, cords or ropes knotted together at points. Curiously, once we join our vertices, edges and polygons together on screen, they start to look a lot like a well shaped, but still clearly identifiable set of nets or... meshes. It's as simple as that.

Well, that's enough concept for now. Let's get Blending.



What's in tutorial 2?

In tutorial 2 we'll build our first mesh and perform a little more configuration that will make working with meshes much more intuitive. Once we have something to look at, we'll also look at how to move around in Blender's 3D views.

From then on, we'll start to manipulate our simple mesh and get down to the real beginnings of mesh modelling.

Copyright (c) 2006, Craig Robinson ("Sphynx")
Permission has been granted for inclusion on www.FourMadMen.com