1. Introducing Blender

2. Why Blender? It’s free It’s powerful It’s small
A large and growing community of Blender users

3. How to learn Blender? Learn the interface first Read user’s guide
Read user’s guide
Video tutorials
Lots of tutorials at

4. Overview Interface Windows Views Objects Camera Lighting Rendering
Animation

5. Things to Have Three button mouse (with middle scroll)
Keyboard with a number pad
Fast CPU
for rendering final movie
Good graphics card
when building models
None of these are required, but life is better with them

6. Basic Interface
Menus
A Cube
Camera
Window Type
Light
Settings
Layers

7. Before Anything Else... Saving/Opening Files is not intuitive
Make sure you save often!
backups
blender meltdowns
Make sure you press ‘Enter’!
Blender files can be large

8. Splitting the Screen Often, it’s a good idea to split the screen
Allows multiple views of the same object
Right-click on a window divider to:
split screen
join screens back together
Caution: the screen that’s split depends on where the mouse came from!

10. Different Views Can view from the:
Front – NumPad1
Side – NumPad3
Top – NumPad7
Camera – NumPad 0
Can be in orthographic or perspective mode!
NumPad 5 toggles
Recommendation: stay in orthographic!
Can also use the ‘view’ menu

11. Different Views Ability to zoom in/out: Ability to ‘look around’
Use middle mouse scroller
NumPad +/- works as well
Ability to ‘look around’
drag with middle mouse button
takes you out of x/y/z axis
may want to reset view when done
Shift-middle-drag translates screen
Different Shading modes
Wireframe/Shaded (use ‘z’ key)
Apply lighting model (use SHIFT-z)

12. Object and Edit Mode
Object mode: the operations affect the selected object
Editor mode: the operations affect the selected vertices, lines, or triangles.

13. Modes of an Object Can be selected or non- selected
right-click on object to select it
If selected, changes affect this object!
Copy object with CTRL-D or ALT-D

14. Editing an Object
A selected object can be in edit mode or non-edit mode
TAB toggles between these modes
Can still use the menus
Vertices can be selected or not selected (yellow are selected)
Object can be deleted by selecting it, then pressing ‘x’ key

15. Adding Objects to the Scene
Everything starts with the space bar!
From this menu, you can:
Add meshes (spheres, cubes, cones, etc)
Add lights
Transform objects (rotate/scale/translate)
Edit objects (change vertex coordinates)
Several other common options

16. Importing Models Blender has its own 3D model format
You can import other 3D models into Blender
E.g. .3ds, .obj, etc.
Blender 3D model repository: 
Another web site of 3D Blender models: 

17. Basic Transformations
Standard Operations:
rotate – ‘r’ key
scale – ‘s’ key
grab (translate) – ‘g’ key
skew – press ‘s’ key, then middle mouse drag
Click mouse when finished

18. Camera in computer graphics
Computer graphics uses the pinhole camera model
This results in perfectly sharp images
No depth of field or motion blur
Real cameras use lenses with variable aperture sizes
This causes depth-of-field: out-of-focus objects appear blurry

19. Depth of field
Depth of view is an important part of the storytelling process
Direct viewer’s eyes to a certain area of the scene
Depth of view can be faked in CG, but needs extra work

20. Motion Blur
Camera in computer graphics does not generate motion blur either
Again, it can be faked in CG but performance may suffer

21. Lighting Overview Light types Volumetric lighting Light Texturing
Lamp
Spot
Sun
Volumetric lighting
Light Texturing
Radiosity

22. Basic Lighting All scenes must have at least one light source
Add a light using spacebar
Basic Light Types
Lamp
Spot
Sun

23. World Settings Make sure Shading button is pressed
Then select World button
Can adjust
Background Color
Fog (based off of background color)
Stars

24. Rendering your Work Press F12 or render button
Press F11 to return to scene editor
Remember, rendering size depends on your initial settings

25. Initial Settings
This is the directory your rendered animation will be stored in
Type in name of file to generate
Leave the rest alone

26. (good for quick previews)
Initial Settings
Enable Shadows
Render the image
Enable Raytracing
Enable Radiosity
Full-scene Anti-aliasing
Percent of full render
(good for quick previews)
Motion blur
(powerful, but
very expensive)

27. Animation Animation is based off of keyframes Basic idea:
Lock model into place in one frame
Increase the frame number
Lock model again
Let Blender interpolate movement
Use the ‘i’ key to do this
Usually, you have to tweak by editing the splines by hand

28. Start rendering the animation
Initial Settings
Start rendering the animation
Used for plugins
Play the animation (once it’s rendered)
Starting and Ending
frame numbers

29. Initial Settings Pixels wide/high Aspect ratio File format
Frames per second
(SVideo = 30, Movies = 24)
Note: Once done, you may want to save these as the default by using CTRL-U

30. Words of Advice
Making simple movies isn’t hard, but it takes a long time
Start early, or you won’t finish!
Golden Rule of blender “Keep one hand on the keyboard and one hand on your mouse”

31. Readings Blender interface