Blender

If you haven't used 3-D software before, the GUI may look complex and difficult at first, but you'll get used to it. When you first start up Blender, you'll see a large grid in the center of the screen—that's the 3-D window. Down on the bottom is the buttons area. Finally, at the top is the options area, where you choose which scene to edit, font paths, etc. If you are running on a small display (800x600 or less), you may not be able to see most of the top window. In this case, click on the edge of the top window and drag it down until you can see it. For now, you need only be concerned with the 3-D window and the buttons window.

Basic keystrokes/mouse movements

Figure 1. Initial Blender Screen

All of the Blender widgets and menus are rendered through Mesa; this means you can zoom in and pan around almost anything. For example, in the buttons window (down at the bottom), you can hold Ctrl-MiddleMouseButton and drag around to zoom in or out. Notice that when you zoom, the buttons, including the fonts, are scaled. To pan, use the middle mouse button and drag around. This works everywhere—even in the button bars on each window.

The black cross with a red and white striped circle around the center is called the 3-D cursor. Whenever you add an object, it will be placed at the location of the 3-D cursor. To move the 3-D cursor, just left-click on the spot where you want it.

The black triangle with the little yellow ball (a few units down from the center) is the camera. Right-click on it to select, then press g to move it around. When you decide on a location for the camera, click the left mouse button.

The Blender windowing system is somewhat similar to HTML frames. Each window can be infinitely split (though a practical limit does exist—if you can't see the windows any more, you've gone too far) by moving the mouse into the window to be split, then clicking with the middle mouse button on the window pane perpendicular to the direction of split. If you want to split a window horizontally, click on either the left or right vertical pane. Then when “Split?” comes up, click on it. To join two split windows, right-click on the pane you want to remove, then click on “Join?” when it comes up.

Two main editing modes are included: normal and edit. You can toggle between the two using the tab key. When you add an object, Blender automatically switches to edit mode (for most objects, anyway). For example, let's say we add a Mesh cube. When the cube appears on the screen, it is in edit mode. If you right-click on one of its vertices (the purple dot means it is not selected, the yellow dot means it is), you can then press g to move the vertex around. If you press b, which stands for “Border Select”, you can draw a rectangle over the selected vertices.

The Toolbox is brought up using the space bar and enables you to add objects. Note that you can also use the Add primitive function (shift-A), which brings up the Toolbox and the Add submenu. Most of the hot keys are placed here. If you need to get out of the Toolbox window, either press esc (the standard for Blender windows) or move the mouse away from the window.

Figure 2. Building a Blender Scene

To build your first scene, follow these steps:

Figure 3. Blender Designed Scene by Bart Veldhuizen