Tutorial 1: The Interface

First off, let me say that this is the first tutorial that I have done,
and it will be a work in progress. The aim of these tutorials will be to
get the user to a familiar working understanding of the program.

The Blender program is a powerful 3d application, and best of all it is free. You can download the program at Blender.org, and while you are there you can find galleries of work done in Blender.

The most common complaint heard about Blender is the interface. It is true that the interface is not something that you will normally find for a graphics program, but do not let that turn you away. The interface is designed to allow a fast, economical workflow. Once you are used to it, you will wonder why more programs are not designed like it.

Without further ado, lets get down to business.

This is what you see when you start blender up for the first time. I have numbered the items for an easy way to see what I'm describing.

1. This is a cube, which is a primitve, seen from the front view.
2. This is a lamp. You need at least one of these to light your scene.
3. This is a camera. When you render your scene, what you see in the camera is what you will render
4. The 3D workspace. Where you work your models.
5. The file menu.
6. The panel area. This is where most of your tweak work is done.

Ok, now that we have the general layout, we can start to figure this beast out :).

The primitive is the building blocks of your models. There are a few different flavors that you can use. They are:

• plane - just an ordinary flat plane
• cube - a box
• circle - a hollow circle
• uvsphere - a ball
• icosphere - a ball made of triangles
• cylinder - a tube with the ends closed
• tube - just a hollow tube
• cone - a cylinder with one end reduced to a point
• grid - a plane that is divided up.
• monkey - who knows, but if you want to use it, its there :)

The lamp is what lights your models. Lighting is probably the most overlooked aspect of 3D modeling. There are a few different types of lamps

.

• lamp - just a plain old lamp.
• area - directional light source
• spot - same as above, but like a spotlight. in other words, a cone
• sun - the light source has parralell rays, instead of coming from a point source
• hemi - hemispherical light source. you can place this lamp anywhere, and it will still shine on objects.

The camera is pretty straight forward. what you see in the camera is what you get. you can set the properties of the camera i.e. the focal length

The 3d workspace is where you will manipulate your models.

With the file menu you can set up your file paths, user preferences and so on.

The panel area is where you set the properties of the objects that you are working on.

Next Tutorial - Your First Model