Welcome to Blender VT and this is a blender video tutorial for the vital functions in Blender version 2.34. Let’s discuss the vital functions in blender like loading, saving, a very quick overview on rendering and the user preferences and themes.
Blender uses the [.blend] file format to save nearly everything—objects, scenes, textures, and even know if your interface windows settings. Some users have also been known to use this format to save material, libraries, texture libraries, mass library and so on with the same format. So to load a blender file from disc just press F1 or you can use this main menu, drop down menu, click open that works as well. Now the focus window then temporarily transforms into the files selection window.
And to load a file, just select with the middle mouse button and then press center or are simply click it with the middle button. The upper textbox it shows the current directory path and the lower one contains the selected filename. The P button, or you can also use the P button on the keyboard, moves you to the parent directory and the button with the dash maintains the list recently used paths in the windows operating systems. The letter also contains a list of all your current drives.
Alright, this is a warning, Blender expects that you know what you are doing when you load a file you are not ask you to save unsaved changes to the same you are previously working on. Completing this file dialogue is regarded as being enough conformation that you do not do this by accident so make sure that you do save your files.
Alright, so let’s load a file, you just click on it, you can press enter or use the middle mouse button or you can just a middle mouse button to skip all those steps and it will take a moment for it to load because I am capturing at the same time. You also know that rendering is going to take enough a long time too. That’s how I do this. There we go—there is one of my Blender projects. Saving file is just like loading files. Now you press F2 or again you just use the file menu, save as, the focus window temporarily changes into a file selection window. Click the lower edit box to enter in a file name that you want and if it does not end with [.blend], do not worry we will put that there in automatically.
So let’s say it changes to that. Okay and then you just press enter and overwrite the file. After you press enter to finish your input, okay there we go. Alright now, for file had the same name as that one, then you will be ask to confirm that you want to save the file at the overwrite prompt. Alright, then when we go back to the save dialogue, it also contains a little feature to help you to create a multiple versions of your work, pressing the plus and minus keys on the numerical keypad will increment and de-increment a number contained in the filename to simply save over that current file, to currently save the filename you can just press control W instead of F2 and just confirm the prompt.
So for you do that, control W confirms, there we go we just saved our work. Alright let us do a very quick overview on what you will need to render an image, so just to get you started. Alright, let’s click on the scene content, scene context and the rendering sub context. Okay we have a whole lot of options and we are not going to worry about these, we are just going to worry about these once right here on the format panel. You will see the size, okay, you get set the size using these size buttons and you can also set the pixel aspic ratio by using these buttons here. Okay clicking on this selection dialogue box, it brings up a menu with all the available output formats for images and animations.
For still images, we might chose JPEG for example or my favorite right now it is Ping because its lossless, okay now that the settings are done the same can rendered by hitting the render button or by pressing F12. And I find just pressing F12 is better because you can do it anywhere without having to switch to this contexts and sub-contexts in the buttons window. Alright, depending on how complex or what your settings were using, you can just take anywhere to a few seconds to a few minutes and since I am capturing at the same time, so it take about ten times as long right by now we have been done, so but its no because I am capturing at the same time.
Alright so anyway, if you do not see anything just make sure that your scene is consorted properly, make sure you have lighting, the cameras position’s is correct and that all the layers that you want to render are on. And also you see when you press a render button, this window pops up, the blender render window pops up to let you know the progress, and this is done for frames so if you’re doing animation this will only show you the status of a current frame and that 92 in my cursor lets me know the current frame that I am on.
Okay, so it disappeared, now it’s done. Now if you want to save the current frame, because you render a single frame it does not save automatically, you have to decide ‘okay, this is the picture that I want’ and then you can save it. You press F3, then it will bring up the save window and you will notice that since this is the last window that I have been focus that replaces here, so I can just press escape and do not worry, the images is not lost it is actually behind this one. One thing I know with Blenders is that, it has three windows open. Well, two at the start, three when you have blender render going and then I am going, you cannot see this, I am going to go down to my task bar, click on that window and there it’s still there. So as long I press F3 with that open, I can save it.
So let us say ‘oh, actually a good day’ because I just did this few months ago okay, I am just going to save this as png, save overwrite, yes as you do, and it will now save that file and save that image to that file. Now blender has some options that are not saved with the current blender file by which do applied to all of the users’ files instead. These preferences primarily concern user interface handling detail, system properties like mouse, fonts, and languages and since this preferences and themes are hardly use, they’re hidden above the main menu, you can reveal them by clicking and dragging the window border, putting that down and now we can you can see them now.
Okay, you know that there are seven categories because mostly this sort of self explanatory or you can display a helpful tool tip if you hold the mouse still over them, we want to describe this in detail but we will look at a few helpful ones and go over each category.
Your first category you will on the far left is the view and controls. Okay this settings concern how the user interface should react to user your input, such as which method of rotation should be used in 3D views for example which can be switched. Where is that? Oh, it is right here. Seems we’re in between track bar or turn table, track was better. Now there is an option that will allow you to swap with the left and right mouse buttons so that the left mouse button selects instead of or the right mouse button which is more conventional for windows programs.
Now, before you get all excited and switch to that immediately, I recommend that you go through the beginning tutorials first. After you’ve given it a chance, then you should decide on what you like better. The main reason why I say this is because throughout the beginning tutorials, I’ll be constantly referring to right mouse to select, left to mouse to confirm, so we can get it engraved in your minds. And if you change that now, you’ll get really confused. And later on, I will be assuming that you are already know what buttons does what and I will just say select this object and I usually just leave it at that.
Alright, and here you can also activate three-button mouse simulations if you have a two-button mouse, the middle mouse button can then be input as Alt left browse. Some other feature here is the ability for you to change how the zoom works. You can switch it to dully so that the zoom is base on vertical movement on the mouse instead of continuing the zoom which is almost other 3D programs worked. So instead of, if you hold down control and the middle mouse drag, you can see as you move in or out. When I stop moving a mouse, the zooming also stops so that is a really nice feature that they added, oh we can see the insights.
So I like that better just because I feel there is more control and some of you will be more use to that. So I guess I do recommend that option actually. Alright, can I have edit modes, edit modes lets use specify the details of the work, so certain editing command like duplicate.
Auto key frame is convenient right here and that you do not have to press the hot key to insert a key frame, it’s done automatically. However it could make a mess of things if you’re constantly changing frames and then moving objects around to see if you get a better placing for them and then you come to find out that those objects are suddenly animated, so if you find it that it’s more convenient to do it that way, then I would suggest change that button, for right now especially at this stage, I’ll recommend you to leave that off because it will prevent you from doing unexpected things because it will make key frames automatically for you.
Next you have language and font. Here you can select an alternative two type font for display in the interface and chose from available interface languages. So if I clicked on that you will see that it will select a sensor of font that I have on my hard drive or the one that I have previously I have selected and it will use that one instead. I also want you to know that that is actually now an Eras as the font, so kind of nice or get it that depending on what you want. And then if you click on this, it will bring up the load dialogue window and you can load a font from your computer. You can also change the font size and you can change the languages certain interface, tool tips buttons, toolbox and things like that.
Okay next, we have themes. Here you can define themes with the customized interface colors and you can create and manage all your themes from here. So to show you a little bit of this, let’s say, let’s click on, let’s go to rounded. You see the colors are slightly different but the main thing is that the buttons are not round, so if you like it that way, you can change that. And here you can change the name of the currently selected theme. You can add a new one, I just go to add new in the new user theme, I’m going to change it to my theme and I do not know we have the theme that we can access in. Here we can also change the background colors. I do not know if they also navigate routers, categories for different interface, colors, you can click on one and here are some colors that you can change and there you go.
Then you have copy-paste, the color picker works here as well. Alright let’s go back to the default and turn that off, there we go.
Okay auto save, auto saves can be set so that you will have an emergency back up in case something goes terribly wrong. These files are named to filename [.blend 1]. Well, in final name is the current name of your project by the way, so I will just add [.blend 1] for the extension or the [.blend 2], [.blend 3] you know et cetera. And you can change how many versions you want by clicking on this button here, you can also change how frequently it will save and you can even open your most recent one if you want too.
Then you have system and open GL. You should consult the section if you experience problems with graphics or sound output or if you do not have a numerical keypad and want to emulate it for laptops like here. Okay, furthermore here you can set the lighting scheme for solid and shaded draw modes and to re-illustrate, I‘m going to delete this mesh and I am going to add the monkey. Okay, so here we have our monkey and well stay, let’s move the mouth and now you can see that he is only shaded with one color instead on with the camera and some parts in a complete line shadow and sometimes you might just want more detail.
So, if you can see right here, the light one is the one we current have on and we cannot turn it off because we have at least one light. If we turn on light, click on light tool and then turn it on, now you can see open GL now and added a blue light. And if we go to light three and then we turn that one on, now we have three-point lighting systems so that we can have a better illuminated object and these panels will allow you to change the direction and the color, the specs or components of it and things like that.
Alright, then you have at the end the file paths. Here you can chose a default path for various file and load dialogues. This is really helpful especially for a data organization freak like me, if you want to load a texture, you can set your default directory to be here for the texture so that will take you there immediately. And that is good especially if you want to keep it well organized you want to save yourself a lot of time. Alright, setting the default blender scene, if you do not like blender’s default window set up or you want specific render settings for each project, you start or you want to save you theme that is no problem. You can use any scene file as a default when Blender starts up like this one for example, this file that I have open right here, I can make this as my default and Blender starts if I wanted it too. In order to do that, you just press control U and then it will take your current scene and then it will save that as [.b.blend] in your home directory.
Now you can clear the working project and revert to the default scene anytime by pressing control X or by using the main menu. Now I ask you, do you want to erase it all? And just remember to save your changes to the previous scene first, so there we go. We’re all set to the default. So that does it for the interface and next we are going to start talking about the object mode and how you can actually start modeling. And after that we’re going to start again to some really fun stuff, so stay tuned.
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