The Blender Bitesize Course - A complete guide

The splash screen is the little box that comes up whenever you open up blender. Its most useful feature is the ability to instantly open up your more recent projects.

The default layout is what you get when you first open blender. We go through how the layout works and the panel system that blender uses to offer full customisation.

Blender has different panels for different features, and so also has different layouts other than the default. each layout has its own design and purpose, such as the animation and compositing layouts.

Blender is a fully customisable system, and it starts with the panels. Each panel has a drop down menu in its corner where you can change to different panels whenever you need to use other blender functions.

In this lecture, learn how to create your own layout in blender and also how to save that layout if you want to use it for other projects.

The user preferences panel can be opened up in its own window and can be used to change the core settings of blender such as the colour scheme, use of GPU or CPU, or the addition of add on's.

Blender can further change its appearance through different colour schemes. In this lecture we will see how to create our own colour scheme with the help of the user preferences panel.

Blender has a view pre made colour schemes that you can use if you don't like blenders default colour scheme but don't want to manually create your own one then blender allows you to use one of its own colour sets.

By going to the system subsection in the user preferences we can change the DPI value which put simply is the font size of any text in the blender interface. Increasing this value makes the text larger and easier to see.

In this lecture we will save a project for the first time and take a look at blenders unique in house file directory that is used instead of the traditional layouts of windows and mac.

Now that we have some saved files, lets load up a saved file be either opening up the directory or using the open recent option.

3D modelling is a constant progression of work. Saving copies of your work can allow you to return to previous versions of your project in case you decide that you want to make major changes.

Learn how you can save as many different colour themes as you like and use them across all of your projects.

For some people the blender interface can be cumbersome with too much on the screen. Collapsing menu bars can reduce the clutter on the screen and make blender more presentable. 

The blender grid is the reference point for both the center of the blender world and the size of objects created. We can change the size of the blender grid to suit the needs of our project. 

If you are unhappy with the way that you have customised your blender experience, you can also revert blender back to its original setup by loading factory settings. Keep in mind that you will still need to save the start up file AFTER loading the factory settings to keep those settings.

Blender has a rendering engine that allows it to render images and animations. As a result we have the option of choosing between either the CPU or GPU to render our images. What one works best will depend on your computers set up.

This first challenge of the course is a test of how well you can use the blender interface and panels.

Origin is a coordinate in the blender world that is used as the point of reference when changing the location, rotation and scale of an object.

Blender users a layer system where you can place different objects and scenes on different layers within a single project so that you can create more without existing objects creating clutter in the 3D viewport.

While an object can only be on a single layer, it is in fact possible for multiple layers to be made visible at the same time therefore making the objects within those layers visible as well.

If you are conducting your work primarily in a single panel such as the 3D viewport, then you have the ability to temporarily maximise the panel to take up the full screen allowing you to work more effectively in that panel.

Our second challenge continues with the theme of controlling the blender interface.

Blender is very much hotkey intensive and you can save a lot of time by learning the hotkey system which allows you to perform almost any blender related task at the push of a button.

The pivot point is the coordinate that blender uses to manipulate location, rotation and scale. The origin is the default example of the pivot point used for an object but this lecture will demonstrate other ways of using the pivot point.

By standard in blender we can see every single face on an object as each face has its own level of shading to make it easily distinguishable from the others. However while this is great for editing it is not ideal for the final creation. We can use smooth shading to create a more organic effect of light hitting the object and disguise the positioning of individual faces.

In the same way that we can manipulate the location, rotation and scale of an entire object in object mode we can also manipulate geometry in this way as way. Note that the type of geometry you are using may have restrictions. For example you cannot rotate and scale vertices.

In this lecture we will be covering what geometry is and the three forms of geometry that make up a 3D object. These are the vertices which are single coordinates. Edges are lines joining two separate vertices. And faces which are three or more vertices connected together to make a flat plane.

In this lecture we will be using edit mode for the first time and learn how to select the geometry of an object by switching between vertex mode, edge mode and face mode. Each mode selects its own type of geometry.

Multiple selection is where we activate more than one selection method for use at the same time. We can do this by holding down the shift key when selecting the methods that we want to use. Blender allows us to use any one, two or three of these methods but at least one must always be selected.

Loops are sections of connected geometry that often reach around the entire circumfurance of an object.

Loops are sections of connected geometry that often reach around the entire circumfurance of an object.

Loops are sections of connected geometry that often reach around the entire circumfurance of an object.

For this challenge we will be modifying the blender layout so that it is more in line with layout that is often used for autodesk 3ds max.

Having too many objects in our scene can make it difficult to edit single objects due to clutter in the scene. We can hide objects from view to reduce this clutter.

Other objects are not the only things that can make editing more difficult, the selected itself can make it difficult to select geometry in certain players without fiddling about with dodgy camera views. By turning of the limit selection to visible button we will be able to select any geometry on our object without moving the camera.

There are three ways in which we can create duplicates of objects, these being appended duplication, linked duplication and array modifier. Appended duplicates are copies of the original that become independent objects of their own.

There are three ways in which we can create duplicates of objects, these being appended duplication, linked duplication and array modifier. Linked duplicates are copies of the original object that will always share the same shape of the original even when one has been edited.

Two or more separate objects can be made into a single object via joining. This is of particular use when creating an object with individual parts such as a car.