Telescope Reviews: blender tutorials

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........

Tutorial 1: The Interface

Tutorial 2: Your First Model

Materials Part One