this is blender open-source 3D software that can be used to make animations visual effects game assets or practically anything 3D and best of all it's 100% free and it always will be if you've never used it before but you want to learn it well then you're in the right place this is a tutorial for complete beginners I've been using blender for 20 years so I'm going to show you how to use all of its core features and by the end you'll finish with not only the confidence to start your own projects but with your very
own dut animation and I know this looks complex but I promise you it's achievable for a complete beginner and I say that with confidence because many already have this is actually the fourth version of this tutorial I made the first dut tutorial back in 2016 and I've been remaking it every few years to keep up with blender's development in that time millions of people just like yourself have gone from having never used 3D to successfully making their own Donuts one arst even snuck his into a little film called everything everywhere all at once very clever
so if you're ready to take your first steps in 3D hit the Subscribe button and let's begin first go to blender.org download or just click the link in the description then obviously you got to hit the big download button once downloaded on Windows double click it and then just go through the install steps but if you're on a Mac just drag it into the applications folder then just find the blender shortcut and open it then once it's open open just click anywhere off the splash screen to close it and welcome to the wonderful world of
3D first tip do not get overwhelmed if you go clicking around you might find lots of buttons and some of them with very scary names and it can all get very overwhelming very quickly thing you need to know is blunder can do a lot of things which means it has a lot of tools but you don't need to know every tool in order to do what you want to do if you're familiar with the 8020 rule there's really only 20% of blender features that you end up using 80% of the time and that's what I'm
planning to teach you in this tutorial Series so stay with me and you should be fine we'll start making the donut in the next video in this one we're just going to look at the interface and I'm going to show you some of the basic navigation so for starters this view this window right here is your 3D viewport and it's where you'll spend probably 90% of your time because it is the 3D World so you can see that we have three objects here we've got a camera we've got a cube and we've got a lamp
and when we click on it you can see it's selected because it has the yellow outline so let's delete the default cube of course and replace it with something else so we could do that by going up to the add menu up here or by remembering the hot key which is shift a so shift a for add so usually the one you're looking for is underneath mesh so these are called your Primitives and it's what you use to start something when you're looking to uh make an object like if you're going to make a chair
you might start with a cylinder as the chair leg and then build out from there but the one I'm sure you're all very curious you want to click it it's the monkey so let's just click the monkey why does blender have a monkey well fun fact every 3D software has its own little random complex object because it's useful to test things like shaders or complexities of scenes so 3ds Max has the Utah teapot Houdini has the toy and I think Pig's head uh blenda has the monkey and it's actually called the suzan monkey head which
you can see in the top left there named after the rangang from the film Jay and Silent Bob Strikes Back random piece of trivia so let's get a better look at it and to that we need to orbit which you can do by on your mouse there your scroll wheel that is called your middle Mouse button if you push that in and then drag around that is now orbiting now for my laptop users you've just panicked cuz you realize you don't have a mouse how are you going to orbit around first of all probably good
idea to get a Mouse for 3D work it will come in handy um but in a pinch you can get by without it just by up here in the top right hand corner this little gray Circle anywhere in the gray section if you just left click drag on that that will do the exact same thing or if you want you can go to edit preferences and then underneath input there's emulate three button Mouse and that means that if you hold down alt and then left click drag that will do the exact same thing also whilst
you are in user preferences you might want to go to interface face and you've got resolution scale if you're on a 4k monitor you might find that your menus and buttons are really small and you kind of have to like squint in to see it so personally I like to keep my 4k monitor around about 1.5 but since this is a tutorial I make it nice and big so you can see what I'm doing okay so that's orbiting around with the middle Mouse button if we want to zoom in we can do that just by
scrolling in and out we could also do it by going up to the magnifying glass tool there and then just left click dragging and then moving the uh mouse back and forth that does the same thing or you could hold down control and then middle Mouse button and that will do a smooth Zoom as well okay so one thing you might notice looking at this is that it's not very pretty right it's just kind of got this flat Bland gray lighting over everything and that's because this state right now is called viewport shading and it's
kind of a lightweight optimized way to view the scene just as you're building it but if you want to create a final pretty image that's called r ring and you can actually switch into rendered mode by going up here into the top right hand corner you can see we're currently in the viewport shading mode if we go to across you should see render View mode so if we click that your computer might stall for a quick second whilst it loads it in but you can see it's now different we have directional light we have shadow
cast across the monkey so it's now currently being lit by this lamp up here so if I wanted to uh you know zoom in on that lamp lamp there and just kind of like move it around you can see it's kind of hard to focus on like it's always exactly not in the right View and that's because we are centered on our monkey right now we need to change the focus we need to pan to something else so we could do that one of two ways one if you're on a laptop you could use a
little move tool there that will do that or everyone else shift middle Mouse click drag that will do the same thing so middle Mouse is for orbiting shift middle Mouse is for pan to change your view to something else okay so I want to move my light because it's uh it's too Moody I want to be able to see the monkey's face there so to move an object you could do it one of two ways one you could go over to the left hand corner here and you've got the move tool when you click that
you can see that the selected object the lamp has this uh this Gizmo it's called with these axes on it and if I just clicked and dragged on any of those arrows there you can see I can move it along any of those axes I could also just click on that uh white circle there and that will just freehand drag it um depending on my view but it's kind of tedious every time you want to move something you have to like go to that tool and then find the arrows and yada yada so actually most
people in blender prefer to use the hot keys so we just keep it in the default selection State here and instead remember the hot key which is G for grab now I've just tapped the key and you'll notice as I move my cursor that it's now attached to my cursor it's not my cursor isn't even actually close to it in fact my cursor could be on the other side of the screen and I could tap G and it will move it and at first this is kind of awkward you're like why is it working this
way but once you get used to it you realize it's actually handy because you don't have to spend all this time like navigating your cursor to something just so that you can move it your cursor could be over here and then just tap it and you're moving it so whilst you're in this move state if you want to cancel a movement you can do it one of two ways you could just hit Escape or you could rightclick then if you want to confirm a movement like say I want to move my lamp here and I
like the movement I could just do a single left click so again if I want to cancel something just right click if I want to confirm the movement left click but let's say I wanted to move it along an axis like you know I like these arrows here and I want to be able to move it on just a specific axis well I can do that whilst I'm in that grab State as well so after I have hit the g key to grab it I can then tap the letter of the axes that I want
to move it on so if you don't know in the real world and in the 3D software there are three axis cuz there's three dimensions there's the x axis which I can move it by hitting the X key the y axis to move it back and forth along the Y AIS with the y key or the Zed axis to move it up and down on the Zed axis so you can remember those uh those letters the X Y and Zed or the method that I actually prefer to use is whilst you're in that g state
if you just hold down the middle Mouse button and then pull out you can see you get this like Gray Line that pulls out from the center and then if you just drag out and move around it will snap it to the nearest axis which again is maybe an odd way to work but it's actually really handy because it means you don't have to think of the the letter and locate it on your keyboard I can just tap G to move it and then middle Mouse drag out and then just find that exact axis that
I'm looking for and so it's very fast to just quickly move the lamp exactly where I want it by the way if you're finding it hard to remember all of the keyboard shortcuts that I've mentioned I've actually put together a PDF a cheat sheet of blender's most common hotkeys and you can download that by clicking the link in the description so you could print it out or you could just have it on a separate monitor while you work also if you are from another 3D software package you might notice that blenders hotkeys are different than
what you are used to so if you actually go to preferences just for those people that are from other softwares if you change the key map to Industry compatible you'll find that these shortcuts are probably more in line with what you remember from other software I'll also put a link to a cheat sheet that is just for the industry compatible keymaps that somebody else put together I've got nothing to do with it but I'll put that link there so you can check it out as well for the rest of this tutorial series I'm going to
use blender's hotkeys just keep that in mind now let's say as I am moving around here I'm like oh this looks really good I've got some nice REM lighting across the monkeyy face I want to take a photo I want to take a nice pretty image of this and post it on socials for clout right well I could take a screenshot shot of it but that would be silly cuz it's got all these lines all over it's all noisy right we don't like it the way you take a photo a pretty image in letter is
to do a render so you could do that one or two ways by going up to render and hitting render image or remembering the hot key which says next to it F12 so when you do that a little window will pop up it will use your CPU or GPU depending on which renderer you've got active and it will render out a pretty image and from here you could go image and then save as and that'll save it as PNG or whatever wherever you want to save it but you might notice looking at this that this
is actually a different view than what we have here right so here I've got a nice view of the monkey's face but up there was a different View and the reason for that is when you do a render it's not rendering from The View that you're looking at currently it's always going to render from the point of view of the camera so this is our camera over here and it's looking from this angle and we can actually look through the camera by just clicking the little camera icon there or by remembering the hotkey which is
number pad Z zero so how do we move the camera well blender is a little awkward maybe a little different to other software packages but you're supposed to like hit G to move it and then like middle Mouse to zoom in and out and then if you want to like move it along an axis I guess g and then X you could do that but actually what a lot of users prefer especially those from other software packages is if you've got your camera selected which by the way I haven't mentioned this but up here this
is your outliner it's kind of an inventory of every item that you've got in your scene okay so with the camera there selected if I hit n n is to bring up the properties n for properties for whatever reason um and then go to view there's a little box there that just says lock to camera to view so now with that active if I just use the same keyboard shortcuts as before middle Mouse button to orbit around shift middle Mouse to drag it you can see that the camera is moving with it so essentially the
view I can set it up exactly as I want then hit n again and then I can disable that and then now as I pull out you can see the camera will stay exactly where it was and I could do a lovely pretty render but this is too simple if we post this on the internet people are bound to make fun of us imagine that well we could give it some color right so with our monkey head selected we can go over to here to the properties so this properties section is where you might spend
the other I don't know another eight five to 8% I don't know getting too exact there you might spend another 5% of your time in this section but it's where all of the properties for things are in blender so for example you've got uh like the render properties like the size of the image that you're saving something as is defined there and some of these properties will stay here um no matter what is selected but others are selection dependent so you can see actually if I click the camera there you can see I get a
little camera tab at the bottom there but if I select my monkey you'll see the camera tab disappears but instead I have some other ones that appear so one that we might want to change is underneath material and this will enable us to add a material change the color to something else essentially so underneath here where it's got new I'm just going to hit new and then you've got a bunch of options very conf o i subsurface again don't worry about it we'll get to all of that later on the one that defines the color
is is the base color so if I do a single left click on that white box there I can then change this color to whatever I want I could uh make it an odd creepy skin toned monkey head right like that and do a random okay so hey all right it's better but still it's too simple I think people will think we haven't put enough effort into this uh Masterpiece so let's add another object let's give the monkey a hack so if we want to add another object how do we do it well we could
go to the add menu like I mentioned before or the hotkey shift a so what sort of hat do we want to add we could do a boxy hat uh let's do a party hat with a cone so once we've added that object you can see it's just plopped it straight in the center intersecting our monkey so we need to move it can move it and we could grab it with the G key so it's now moving it just on our cursor there I don't want to move it just freehand though cuz I like the
position but I just want to move it up so I'm going to hit Zed to move it along the Zed axis right I like it there so once I like the placement I'm just going to do a single left click okay great but too big oh so see need to learn another tool which is scale so we could go to the scale tool there and then we get this familiar um little axes there but again most people prefer to remember the hotkey which for scale is just s so s to scale so resizing that okay
that's pretty good let's move it down again so G and Zed okay all right but yeah let's say we want to make it a little taller okay so we could scale it along just the Z axis so s and then Zed whoops s z there we go and it's now making it a tall party hat scale it down there we go ha look at that be a very Bland party if it's gray though so let's give it another material an exciting color a vibrant uh aqua color why not give that a render by hitting F12
okay camera is in the wrong position so let's go to camera view mode with number pad zero I'm going to select my camera and rather than dabbling with that little thing I had before I'm going to hit G and then middle Mouse just tap it once as I said it's a little awkward blend is um the way it handles with the camera but anyway just uh move that out and then uh I got to rotate it done all right so I'm going to rotate so with the camera selected tap r then middle Mouse and it's
now kind of like free hand rotating around so I'll just uh move it up slightly there we go okay this is this is just a full around session so don't worry if you're making mistakes we'll get to actual practical building stuff in the next part I'm just trying to find ways to throw in these like fundamental tools rotate right the monkey's head is just he needs to look dead on at the camera and currently he's off ah what an excuse to use the rotate tool so you could enable the rotate tool right The Familiar axes
there you could click and rotate it around like that again most people prefer to remember the hotkey which is R to rotate right so it's now just freehand rotating on my cursor remember the uh the axis as I mentioned before can be used for any mode so uh the x axis will rotate it back and forth the Y AIS tilt it or Zed there we go to turn it towards the camera just a little bit right and there you go F12 and we've done it let's save it let's upload it to Art station and then
just wait for the recruiters essentially all right let's start a new scene so that we can get ready for part two where we're going to actually start building our donut and learning some of the more core features of blender so click here and I will see you in part two
