foreign [Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers. com this time it's an extended episode in which I'm going to show you how to start building 3D objects in blender specifically we'll begin with a 12-minute segment that'll introduce the interface and some key modeling tools and then we'll move on to build a precise specific object based on this drawing for over 30 years I've been building 3D objects in different 3D modeling packages everything from bioprinters to space-based solar power stations characters to all kinds of computers and computer parts and one thing I've discovered is if you want to learn a particular 3D modeling package or a part of it the best way to do it is to set yourself the goal of building something quite specific so let's go and get started foreign ER is available for Windows Mac and Linux and free to download from blender. org for this tutorial I've installed a clean copy of blender 3.
4. 1 so if we run it up I've got it on my desktop over here and as this is the first run it's given us a quick setup where you might want to change the spacebar function from play to tools which can make it easier to do modeling and after that we'll click on next and I'll click again to get rid of the splash screen and to give us maximum screen estate I'm also going to go up here to window and I'm going to toggle window full screen now as we can see our default view here is called layout there are lots of different workspaces available but for now we'll stick in layout which like all the workspaces is divided into a number of areas which can be configured as we wish so for example if I go over to the boundary between these two areas and I click and drag I can change the size if we hover over the top left corner of an area we can also see it edited type which here is 3D viewport down the bottom here we've got a timeline area that is not something we really need for modeling purposes let's just push it down there for a second and then up here we've got an outliner and this shows us all of the different items in our scene which are a light a camera you can see it highlighted there in the viewport and also a cube which we're going to be working with in a second and then our final area here is properties we can see that we hover over that there we are it's called properties and this is showing some information on the cube selected in the 3D viewport and it's worth being aware that any area can be set to any editor type so for example I could go up here and we could change this to be preferences like that and there's lots and lots of preferences available all sorts of things you can control in blender it's great for that and one the ones I really like is the fact we can change the resolution scale of the interface I can drag there and look every piece of software in the world should be able to do that shouldn't it but they can't but the blender can let's leave it on that 1. 25 a little big for normal use but good for making things clear in a video but with everything okay here I'm going to set this back to be properties and I would point out we could have gone to preferences by another means we could look it up to edit and preferences like that you will find in blender there's always lots of different ways to do the same thing anyway let's now turn our attention to the 3D viewport and here by default on the top right Edge we have this which is an interactive navigation tool and if I click and drag in there you can see we can rotate our view like that which is a very good and if we move down a bit we've got a zoom tool if I click and drag on there we can zoom in and out on the display below that we can move things around as you can see and then below that we've got a toggle to show the view from the camera in the scene like that we'll be using this if we're doing rendering in this video we're not doing rendering this is a modeling tutorial so we'll go back to a normal View and then finally down here we can toggle between a perspective and an orthographic projection like that it's also worth noting we can also control our view using a mouse or a trackpad if using a mouse we can zoom in and out using the wheel on the mouse like that I'm using my mouse wheel to go in and out like that and if we want to rotate our view if you hold down the wheel on the mouse like that and move around I can rotate The View if we want to move the view if I hold down shift and hold down the mouse wheel the middle Mouse button I can move again move around like that and if we're using a laptop we can do a similar thing specifically whilst moving one finger on the trackpad controls the mouse moving two fingers together rotates the 3D view whilst holding down shift and moving two fingers moves The View and if we hold two fingers on the track pad and move them together or apart we can zoom so it's perfectly possible to use a laptop for modeling in blender now Having learned how to move around in our viewport let's manipulate this exciting Cube and we can do this using the tools on the toolbar over here and as you may have noticed some of these tools have got a very small arrow on their bottom right and on those tools if we click and hold we can see we can select different tools from the same icon here for example select box select Circle or select now so although we'll leave that on select box and of course we'll use that for selecting an object like that moving down we have got the 3D cursor which I'm not going to cover in this video so let's move down again to move which as I'm sure you would guess is for moving things around and we can either drag on a particular axis like this or if we move our pointer to the middle of this circle we can go in all directions at the same time and what I'm going to do here is to press Ctrl Z to bring things back to where they were moving down we've got rotate I'm sure you would guess this rotates again if we click in the middle we can go in all directions at once which normally isn't very helpful it's normally more useful to use a particular axis like that and it's even more useful to hold down the control key and to use an axis and drag and when the control here held down we're working in five degree increment because often we want to do a 90 degree rotation things like that next down let's selected again we have got scale and if we click inside the circle we can scale in proportion by dragging and holding like that make it very very large or very very smallest depending on what we want to do bring it back back that size I think and we could also use the handles to scale in a particular axis and then finally I want to put it back to a normal again down here we've got transform which gives us all the tools together so we can do a bit of moving and a bit of rotating and a bit of scaling all with the same tool which gives me more things to do oh and there's another tool let's just select this again and that other tool we accessed by the keyboard and if I press the G on the keyboard for grab this happens you'll see the color changes and our cursor changes and if I move my mouse I'm not clicking and dragging here I'm just dragging and if I now click we put the object to a new location let's do that again I press G on the keyboard nothing happened with the mouse now move the mouse click and wither grabbed and moved the object although again we'll put it back where we started and this gets us into the subject of keyboard shortcuts and there are loads and loads and loads and loads of keyboard shortcuts in blender so for example you can access anything in a toolbar using a keyboard shortcut and to do that by defaulting blender to access the toolbar you would press shift and the space bar but you might remember on our first boot we told blender to use the spacebar directly for tools so here if I press the spacebar like this it brings up a menu and I could select something like that to say get to rotate or I could do spacebar and for example B to get back to select spacebar and two to get to transform things like that and many people will tell you learn the keyboard shortcut straight away in blender and that's good advice to a certain extent but because there's so many of them I would suggest just learn a few and I'll give you a few more in this video but initially to keep things simple as you learn just click on the toolbar icons and in this video that's what I'm going to be doing so you can clearly see what's going on now so far what we've been doing has been manipulating this cube in terms of rotating it sizing it moving it around that's exciting but we haven't been changing its geometry and that's because we're in what's called object mode but if we use this top left menu and we select edit mode we go into well edit mode where we can change the geometry of an object and there's a very useful keyboard shortcut for this I told you I'll be coming back to keyboard shortcut and that's the tab key if I press tab we can flick between object mode edit mode object mode or edit mode you can have endless fun just flicking between the two using the Tab Key and what happens here in edit mode is we can work with either what's called a Vertex which is a point on the object or we can manipulate an edge or we can manipulate individual faces or polygons of the object and if we start with vertexes let's select one vertex like that and go for example to move I could now pull that point around like that and you've got to be slightly careful doing this because if we just rotate this view you'll see we've now got a four point polygon which clearly isn't flat in other words we've created what's called illegal geometry we can do this on screen in a 3D package but this wouldn't render properly you certainly couldn't 3D print an object with a legal geometry and so you've got to be a little bit careful when moving around individual points although it's also often a critical thing to be able to do we can also manipulate edges let's select an edge like that and move the edge there we are we'll make it oh it's a Java stand crawler R2D2 is being sold down there possibly you never know that's control Z out of that and let's also pick a face like that we could pick say the top face move it down we've made our Cube slightly thinner let's move on and use another tool and there's lots of tools down here if I just scroll down if I can get the right place to grab the scroll bar there they are because I've got a large scale factor here they've gone off the screen so what I'm going to do is just to go like that and pull across and they all fit on the screen which is very handy and the tool I want to show you is this one a very handy tool called Loop cut and if I go across to the object like this you'll see it puts a cut through the object in the three possible planes depending on where I put the mouse I want to cut in this plane and what I'm going to do is to hold down the mouse I've not released it yet and I can now drag that cut to where I want it on the object let's leave it about there and you'll see the tool now remains active it wants us to do another one because it's a very excitable tool blender doesn't put down its tools until you select another and what I now want to do is to select a face we're going to select that face there and we're going to go to another very useful tool called The extrude Tool over there you can guess what this does let's pull this up there we are with extruded part of this object we're building a kind of a little bracket it's very exciting indeed and what I think we'll now do I'm just repositioning this in anticipation of exciting things to come is I'm now going to show you the bevel tool and for this I'm going to select an edge let's select that edge there like that and then we'll now go to Bevel over here like that a handle comes up and if we drag it we bevel that edge of the object isn't that exciting and as the tool has been activated we can now see a call out down here as you'll see with all tools if I click on that we get to controls for this particular tool where here for example we could increase the number of segments add a bit more geometry in like that we could change the width you can set things accurately by typing values in if you want as well this really is very powerful indeed we've done a nice little bevel and we can also bevel lots of edges at the same time let's just rotate around something like that I think isn't it fun moving around in 3D space in blender and what I'm going to do is Select this Edge at the top hold down the shift key so I can select multiple edges and then select another Edge and another Edge and another Edge like that and then we'll drag the little thing like that and again move it out the way so we can see where we're going to have our controls and we'll add a few more segments like that I think as well and again we'll make it a slightly bigger like that there we are I think that's a good place to leave this particular object and if I press tab we go back to object mode where we can take a look at the Masterpiece we have created isn't that exciting and so now it's time to move on to build something specific with exact measurements and in the process we're also going to learn more about the blender interface foreign sketched out with dimensions in this drawing and which bolts two connectors and a switch to the end of this breadboard so over in blender in a new scene I thought we'd start out by deleting everything I'll get rid of that Cube I'll select the light get rid of that and the camera we don't need those for our modeling purposes so we've got a completely blank workspace and what we'll now do is to start adding things in so I'm going to add a mesh and it's going to be a cube I just got rid of a cube but I wanted to show you how I could add one in so I'll go into Cube like that and the call out for cube down here is useful it allows us to change various things but it doesn't allow us to set different sizes for the different edges of the cube because I guess it's a cube so what we have to do is to press the N key on the keyboard like that to bring up the transform plane where I can enter some specific dimensions which are going to be 63.
5 millimeters by 14 millimeters by 7 millimeters for the base of the bracket like that and you're probably thinking that's a bit small Chris but do not panic I'm going to do this I pressed here the forward slash key and what that does is to go to view and to frame selected as you can see from the menu although pressing forward slash is quicker and I'll also press the End Key again to get rid of the transform panel and before we start working on this object I think we'll do a little bit of reconfiguration of our workspace and to let you know about One potentially very useful keyboard shortcut if you press Ctrl and the space bar you maximize the current area that can be very handy and do note that that depends on where you are on the screen if we're over here in this area that one would maximize over here would do the 3D viewport and here in the viewport we can have lots of different views and one way of selecting them is to press the tilde key the one just below the Escape key to press that we can select a view so I can select for example top view I often find that very handy we can get out of the view like this going up to the Gizmo over here and rotating it that takes us back to a perspective View and if we want to we can also get to the different views by clicking on the axis up here in the Gizmo although personally I prefer to press tilde and do views like that although for most of this modeling I'm actually going to work in what's called quad view so I'm going to hold down control alt and press the q key and here we are we can see four different views of the object the standard three projections and a 3D view but the strange thing here is if I move around at one of each quad views or I actually zoom in it doesn't stay in sync with the other views which would drive me absolutely crazy but we can fix this we can press the N key again to go to the transform panel go down to view scroll right to the bottom open up quad view it's hiding down here and here we have to have lock rotation ticked which is by default but also sync Zoom pan like that I'll press n to get rid of that panel and now if I move around here you'll see our quad views are linked together which makes things much better and you can probably notice we've got a grid here and the resolution the grid changes as we zoom in assuming like that you can see this is working at a millimeter resolution that's very handy for what we're doing here although we can't see the goods through things here so what I'm going to do is to work largely in wireframe mode going up to the top here changing the shading to wireframe rather than solid it will stick in wireframe and note that for all views we can use this control to turn off what's called x-ray mode so with x-ray mode on we see all geometry with it off we already see front faces and it's worth noting with a keyboard shortcut for this it is out Zed if I try it like that it toggles back and forth that's very handy because if we go here into edit mode you can't see the controls for x-ray mode but we can still use out Zed to turn them on and off and I'll come back into a object mode for now I'm also going to go across here to the properties Pane and go to scene properties where I'm going to change units to be in millimeters it won't shoot any sizes here it just means when we display things it'll be millimeters rather than meters if I break up the transform pane again as you can see this is now in millimeters our object is got exactly the same dimensions but expressed with millimeters against them so we'll close that one off and also put that back over there and if I deselect the object by clicking somewhere else you'll see it's displayed with black lines on the dark gray background and I don't find that very helpful so what I'm going to do over here is to go to the preferences like we saw in the last segment of the video go to themes and go to 3D viewport like this and down here we can set the colors so I'm going to set a wireframe or whitish color something like that I'll get there eventually and I'm going to set wire edit to a bluish color before reasons I'll explain in a second that blue I think will be okay and if we just go back over there now we've now got a far clearer display of the object on the screen when things aren't selected as we can see and if we go into edit mode if we deselect that it's now in blue but if I for example try to select a Vertex we'd select a vertex in white which is why I didn't want that in white it has to be in a contrasting color anyway I find it very handy to make these color changes and I'm also going to go up here to the overlays and turn off the display of the 3D cursor because it just drives me insane and in fact I think I'm also going to go back again we'll also turn off here the text information given our scaling we don't want to have our screen too cluttered oh and whilst we're talking about interface it's worth telling you if you want to get rid of a toolbar you can press T to a turn the toolbar on and off that can be rather handy and as usual in blender we're getting wound up in the interface but the last thing I want to say about the interface is we have our different workspaces at the top we're currently using the one called layout there's one called modeling we could be doing our work in modeling and it's just a zoom the object up it opens in edit mode the modeling workspace but we can change it like that I think we'll keep this as a nice 3D View and we'll use a layout for most of our building oh and if you're wondering making changes to these workspaces and you can use anyone you like it really doesn't matter what you do with them they're simply labeled areas they haven't got a particular function regardless of the labels at the top but whatever changes we make here will be saved with our file so if we just show that let's just save this file let's call it uh bracket like that and if I bring in a file I've actually been working on separately over there you'll see it comes in with its own settings I've actually changed the name of the workspaces at the top here I've got a detail one so either do view one I find it easy to flip back and forth using these views and it is worth pointing out that in blender you can split different areas if I go down to the base of this area like this so I get the arrow I right click I could do say a vertical split here like that we've now got two views we could move around like that some people like to work in different views like that but personally I find it much easier to work with a quad View and going across some full screen views like this one once was if you want to put it back again go across to the join and join errors you'd probably have guessed that to put things back as they were anyway we're now in entirely the wrong object so let's just go back into what we were working on which is our bracket over there do we want to save this no we don't and we'll Now set about transforming this piece of geometry into our final object and to do that we'll go into edit mode I could use the Tab Key I tend to do either of them we'll pull out all tools as we did on the last segment so we can see them nicely and we're going to select our Loop cut and we'll put a loop cut in here we wanted to cross that way come on blender give me that direction doesn't want to play there we are sometimes you have to know that way that way here we are that's where we want it excellent and we'll do it like that and in fact we'll move it around individually after that because I need it in exactly the right place and to put it in exactly the right place what I'm going to do is to go to snapping I'll turn on snapping little magnet up there we'll go to the snapping settings and we'll select absolute grid snap it'll snap to the grid so if we now pull this around it's snapping to our one millimeter grid one two three four it's down four millimeters that's now in the right place next we're going to do an extrude of the plane at the back we'll select the face like that and to select our face easily here I'm going to go onto an out Zed to go turn off x-ray mode so we can select easily we'll then come back again we'll now do our extrude we'll pull up the region like that although I want to set an exact distance so I'll use the call out I know it needs to be 37 millimeters I don't need to put the millimeters in now do I set the measurements but I'll do it anyway it keeps me amused like that and our object is now starting to look a little bit like the one in the drawing except that in the drawing the front edges here are curved so we will sort that out we will go and select that vertex like that and that vertex hold down shift like that and guess what we're going to use bevel and it isn't going to work properly at least initially so let's click on bevel and we can pull out the handle but if we do Hmm this is not quite right does it go away second and if we just move across you'll see the bevel is not even on each side and if we do in fact look at the call out it thinks it's 257 millimeters that bevel which is strange given the whole object is 63. 5 millimeters across something is clearly going wrong so what can we do about this well the first thing we're going to do is to press Ctrl Z to uh get rid of that and we'll go back into object mode and I'm going to select the object and bring up our transform panel where we can see the size really is 63 millimeters across but it isn't really because what's going on here is that blender created a cube which was much bigger and applied some scale factors on the different axis and that's what's throwing off our bevel so what we need to do is to go across from that panel and press Ctrl a and apply the Transformations that are giving us the problems I'm going to apply all transformations can't go wrong doing that and we can now see the scale is correct so we turn off that panel I'll tab back into edit mode pull out our bevel again and ah that looks much better doesn't it I know it actually wants to be a two millimeter bevel and it needs to have a few more segments say nine segments let's make it nice and rounded there we are we've got our bevel correctly on the front of the object and in general if you're working on objects and transforming them it's best to go to control a and apply the transformation as soon as you can but I wanted to show you here what happens if you don't do it now the next thing we want to do is add a couple of holes in our object to take some bolts at the front so to do that I'm going to go back into object mode and we're going to add in a mesh which is going to be a cylinder and when you add a cylinder the call out is very useful it gives you all the things you need we can make it say 24 vertices doesn't have to have a lot of geometry for this it's going to be a tiny hole I think the actual diameter is 3. 5 and that's going to be over 2 for the radius so there we are it'll do the mass for us we'll make it say 10 millimeters tall that will be ample and there you are you can see we've got our cylinder down here and what we need to do is to move it into the right place just click to get rid of that call out down there and what I think I'm going to do is to go control alt and Q to come out of our quad View and then I'll also use the tilde key to select a top view like that and we'll zoom in a little bit to give ourselves a bit of space to uh to work in a nice controlled way and so I'll now select the cylinder and it needs to be down this bottom corner and it needs to be positioned so there is exactly 56.
5 millimeters between the two holes we're going to put in and to achieve that I'm going to add in a mesh which is going to be a cube it's going to be just a guide for us and I'm going to make that our 56.
