So let me start here after the splash screen by answering very quickly three questions
that you may have when first encountering Blender.
Now the first is what is this 3D scene that we're looking at?
Potentially we're expecting just a blank scene but it looks like we've gotten started with
this cube already.
So basically this is just a fundamental scene so it just gives you something to work with
and maybe build from here.
We've got three different types of objects in this scene.
We've got this mesh object which is currently selected which we can see means that we have
this orange outlining to it.
And then we've also got this camera object on the left hand side which allows us to see
or at least render our scene.
And then we've also got this lamp object on the right hand side which is going to illuminate
our object in our scene.
Now if you don't want them in the scene you can actually delete them, it's not really
a big problem, it's only going to take a few seconds to add them back in.
But usually this just gives us a slightly faster running start as it were.
If you want to change the default file in any way you can actually just come up to the
file menu and then save that as the startup file which is this option down here.
So feel free to delete everything and then have that as a startup file if you'd prefer.
The next question you may have is why you can't select anything with the left mouse
button when you try and maybe interact with these other objects in the scene.
In fact the only thing that really seems to happen is you get this little target crosshair
thing appear at the location of where you click.
So what's that all about?
Well this is called the 3D cursor and without going into it in too much detail right now
this basically can be used as a kind of universal pivot point.
It's also the location at where new objects get added and while painting it can be used
as a clone source.
And there's also certain modeling operations that need a 3D point to control the way that
they're going to behave as well and so the 3D cursor is used with those.
So that's all I wanted to touch on it about it in a moment but we will be seeing more
about it as we go.
Incidentally I'll just show you one last thing which is a little snap menu which is shift
and S together and we get our snap menu there and you can see we get these cursor options
there.
And I'm just going to put cursor to the center and just to put it back.
Then the other half the question as to how exactly do we select anything then.
In Blender selecting is done by default with the right mouse button.
So this can take a little time to get the hang of but can happen surprisingly quickly
if you can give it a chance.
If you want to switch it though we can launch the main gateway into our interactions with
Blender which is the user preferences which can also be found on the file menu and we
can see user preferences here or we can launch it with the hotkey control alt and U. So let's
just do that let's just click there and then if we take a look under the input tab we can
see that we've got select with and we can see by default it's set to right so you can
switch that to left if you'd rather.
The third and final question that somebody might have when encountering Blender is the
fact that they've actually already seen somebody else using Blender and when they get it for
themselves it looks completely differently.
So that's probably because they've been using a different theme or just to customize their
own theme and that brings us back to the user preferences.
So let's just launch that with the control alt and U this time and just before we jump
away from the input tab I just wanted to point out that's part of the thing with Blender
is how customizable it really is.
So even with all these fundamental aspects of such as what you're actually selecting
with that we just covered with the left and right you can see down here with the 3D view
for example here's all the various hotkeys that we can change if we wanted to or we could
add our own and there is a very very long list here and you're obviously not expected
to know all these necessarily because Blender is a pretty big program.
So let's just scroll right back up to the top and we'll jump over to the themes and
this is where the presets are if you prefer a flat theme we've got some things like that
for you if you prefer more of a darker theme there's perhaps this and then there's some
other themes which show you know you've got your gradient in the 3D view there in fact
that then allows you to customize all the various different aspects of it so we can
see our 3D views gradient so if we come down to the 3D view this is all the 3D view related
theme parts that can be changed so if we just scroll down a little bit further we can see
gradient here and the gradient low and high so we can just change whatever our gradient low color
is there so something like that and that's just a very very simple change so feel free to just
go crazy or as subtle as you like on any aspect of the interface really I'm just going to reset
it back to the default theme just so that hopefully I'm in a line with as many people as possible
as we go through what we're going to learn so that's it for the user preferences just for the
moment and we'll take a look at some other aspects of blender