Tutorial 1: The Interface

First off, let me say that this is the first tutorial that I have done,
and it will be a work in progress. The aim of these tutorials will be to
get the user to a familiar working understanding of the program.

The Blender program is a powerful 3d application, and best of
all it is free. You can download the program at Blender.org,
and while you are there you can find galleries of work done in Blender.

The most common complaint heard about Blender is the interface.
It is true that the interface is not something that you will normally find for
a graphics program, but do not let that turn you away. The interface is designed
to allow a fast, economical workflow. Once you are used to it, you will wonder
why more programs are not designed like it.

Without further ado, lets get down to business.

This is what you see when you start blender up for the first time.
I have numbered the items for an easy way to see what I'm describing.

1. This is a cube, which is a primitve, seen from the front view.


2. This is a lamp. You need at least one of these to light your scene.


3. This is a camera. When you render your scene, what you see in the camera
   is what you will render


4. The 3D workspace. Where you work your models.


5. The file menu.


6. The panel area. This is where most of your tweak work is done.

Ok, now that we have the general layout, we can start to figure this beast
out .

The primitive is the building blocks of your models. There are a few different
flavors that you can use. They are:

• plane - just an ordinary flat plane


• cube - a box


• circle - a hollow circle


• uvsphere - a ball


• icosphere - a ball made of triangles


• cylinder - a tube with the ends closed


• tube - just a hollow tube


• cone - a cylinder with one end reduced to a point


• grid - a plane that is divided up.


• monkey - who knows, but if you want to use it, its there

The lamp is what lights your models. Lighting is probably the most overlooked
aspect of 3D modeling. There are a few different types of lamps

.

• lamp - just a plain old lamp.


• area - directional light source


• spot - same as above, but like a spotlight. in other words, a cone


• sun - the light source has parralell rays, instead of coming from a point
  source


• hemi - hemispherical light source. you can place this lamp anywhere, and
  it will still shine on objects.

The camera is pretty straight forward. what you see in the camera is what you
get. you can set the properties of the camera i.e. the focal length

The 3d workspace is where you will manipulate your models.

With the file menu you can set up your file paths, user preferences and so
on.

The panel area is where you set the properties of the objects that you are
working on.

Next Tutorial - Your First Model

Tutorial 2: Your First Model

We are going to start with a simple model a flower pot thingy
, . Open Blender. You will notice that you have a cube(primitive), lamp, and
camera on stage(3d work area). The perspective that you start in is top-down.
In other words, birds eye view. You can change your view by using the numpad
keys. #1 will shift your view to front view, #3 will put you in side view, and
#7 will put you in top view again. Most times you will want to be in front view,
so lets go ahead and do that now. press the #1 on the numpad.

You will notice that the lines that intersect have changed from
red and green, to red and blue. the lines are there to represent the coordinate
axis. Red is the axis that goes from left to right. Green represents the depth(forward
and back), and the blue represents the vertical axis.

Next thing that we need to do is go from object mode into edit
mode. If you press tab it will switch you between object and edit. Go ahead
and do that. You will see the object go from being outlined in pink to having
the faces highlighted in pink and you vertices highlighted in yellow. You have
to be in edit mode to well, edit the object.

If you press the A key, it will dehighlight everything. If you
press it again, it will rehighlight everything. Press the a key once. Nothing
should be highlighted. Now press the B key.This will call up a select tool.
Click and drag to form a box around the top two vertices.

.

With the vertices selected, press the X key. That will erase the
selected vertices.(helpful hint: if you want to completely start over, you can
press ctrl+X. That will erase everything and start you back to your startup
configuration)

Now hit A again and that will select everything. With that done,
press the E key. The E key stands for extrude. You will use this ALOT. When
you hit E, it will show a menu, and you can select Region, Only Edges, or Only
Vertices. Region will extrude the vertices, edges, and faces. The other two
are pretty much self explanatory. We want to only extrude the edges.

If you hold down the ctrl key at the same time, it will extrude
out at regular intervals. You can count the "bumps" to keep track
of the lenght. Go ahead and extrude just the edges, for three "bumps".
The reason we did it that way was to have the top "face" empty.

Now we are going to resize the top a bit. With the same vertices
still selected, press the S key. That is a hotkey for resizing something. go
ahead and strectch it out to the width of 5 units.

Next we are going to do another extrude.Go into top veiw(numpad
7).Press the E key again and select the "edges" option, then press
the S key again. Reduce the size a slight bit

OK, now we are going to extrude once again...Didn't i tell you
that you would do this alot... This time we are going to constrain the extrude
to one axis.Go into front view (numpad 1). Start to extrude as normal, and if
you push the Z key it will pop up a highlighted blue line (that would be the
Z axis). Extrude down to just shy of the bottom of the pot.

Now we need to resize again. Hit S and scale it down.

Last extrude for this one . Go into top view again. Start extruding
and then resize( E then edges then S) aqnd while resizing, if you press 0(zero),
it will reduce down to a singularity.

Congradulations, you are done with the model!!! Now we just need
to fix the lights up real quick, and then render.To do that, hit Tab to go back
into object mode, and then right click the lamp. Once it is selected, press
F5, which will open your shading panel. select HEMI. Now, if you press F12,
the scen will render. If it looks OK there,m press F3 and it will ask you to
name the file. It will be saved as a JPEG.

Here is what mine turned out like

OK folks, I guess that wraps this one up. Untill next time........

Materials Part One

This tutorial is for the materials in the
Blender 3d application. The reason for the breaking this tutorial into multiple
parts is because there is a lot of stuff to go over. With that said, lets get
started...

The first thing to do is to have an object
to apply a material to. you can use a cube or whatever you choose for this tutorial,
but i am going to use the flower pot thingy from the previous lesson

Once you have your object modeled, press F5(shading), or just
click the button I have labeled "1". When you do that, it automatically
pulls up the materials button(which I have labeled #2) and you will see below
a button that says "add new"(button #3)

Once you press the "add new" button, you will see the panel block
change. Iit will look like this :

If you click the gray box where the red arrow is pointing, it
will give you a pop-up that looks like this :

If you click the sample button in the upper righthand corner,
it gives you an eyedropper tool that is really handy when you are wanting to
match something thats allready there. You can grab the color from anywhere inside
the Blender interface. You can also put in a hex code, rgb value, or just use
the slider dot at the bottom and then the dot in the gradiant box. Once you
move your cursor out of the color pop-up panel, it will apply it to your model.(if
you feel froggy, you can add a material to more than one abject at a time by
copying and pasting the material to more than one data block, but thats for
a more in depth tutorial in the near future )

All I did in this one was to pick a reddish color by the sliders
that I talked about above.

and this is the render of it.

You can also change the background and lighting from the materiels
panel. if you want to chang the lights, first you have to get into object mode(tab)
and then right click the lamp that you wish to configure.

To change the background color, you first need to click on the
world button(#1) and then you need color bar(#2)

Here is the render from making the background white :

Well folks, there is a lot more to materials, hence why I am breaking
this up into multiple parts. At least now you shold be able to get around in
the materials panel, and the best way to learn it really well is to just get
in there and play....remember that Blender has a pretty lenient undo(ctrl-z)
so you can go back if you need to.

The next part will be about the textures, which is part of the
material panel.

Untill then, clear skies all,

Derrek