There are many ways
to manipulate objects
in Blender 3D.
And I'd like to show you the most useful ones
which is not to be found in any menu per se.
What everybody who uses Blender does is, they have one hand on their mouse and one on their keyboard,
so you use your keyboard
to trigger manipulation event.
What I can do is look around, and all my keyboard keep watching this area below here,
so you'll see when I type on my keyboard, I will type the letter G
to grab the cube and move it around.
And I can hit ESC
to stop moving it around.
Now,
this is, maybe, a little bit hard to remember.
So, my top tip is,
look at the Object Tools on the left. This is a menu with buttons that do pretty much the same thing
as what you can with your keyboard.
I can hit Translate
and instantly, the cube is attached to my mouse.
I like to move it around.
The reason I don't want to use these is because
I have to move my mouse all the way over there all the time.
If I want to move this cube to the left,
I get stuck
on the edge of my screen,
which isn't nice.
Same with Scaling. If I hit Scale,
very easy to make my cube smaller.
But I can't make it bigger because I can't move out of my screen,
so the position of these isn't too handy.
What we can do, however, is,
go there and hover our mouse over the button.ar
And it will tell you the shortcut for Scaling is the letter S.
Can see it in the little tool tip
that comes up.
So I can go anywhere in the 3D view,
hit the letter S,
and instantly, the cube is attached to my cursor,
and I can move it around.
You do have to remember to have your cursor in the 3D View.
If I have it, for instance, over the Properties panel, and I hit S,
nothing at all happens.
This is basically
how you want to manipulate things in Blender 3D.
Just have your mouse wherever you want,
hits R for rotate,
S for scale,
and G
to grab your object and move it around.
To find all of these,
can look in the Object Tools on the left.
There are even more that you may not use as often.
Look in the Object menu at the bottom of a 3D View, this has a very long list
with sublist even,
with all the functions you need to manipulate your Objects.
So now we can look around a bit,
and
we can move our cube around as well.
Maybe you want to add a second cube, or a third cube. There is a Duplicate Objects function,
which is very useful.
It's also a Shft D, that's the shortcut.
So we can do Shft D, and instantly, the cube is attached to my mouse.
I like to move it somewhere else.
And
click to confirm.
So I can do Shft D
to add
whole bunch of cubes.
This is really the way that a lot of people do it,
Nice and he's got a little tooth there
as well.
So we have a smiley face
made of cubes.
You don't always just want a cube, of course. So the other way to add more objects to your screen
is through the Add menu at the top
here.
Here we have all sorts of things that you can add. For instance, new Cameras and Lamp.
In case you want to light your scene and render animation.
But the one that we use most of all
is the Meshes.
A Mesh is the generic name
for a shape in Blender 3D.
Because it consists of
sort of the weave of points
connected by edges and surfaces.
We have a bunch of default ones.
For example, let's add a new shape, a UV sphere.
Now, there is a chance that you're trying to do this,
and it appears in a spot where you don't expect.
The chances are, that is where you have put this thing by clicking on the other mouse button.
Because, with one mouse button you select,
by default, that's the right mouse button,
by clicking on the left mouse button,
you move
this little 3D Cursor,
that's what we call it,
to that position.
When you just starting out in Blender, it doesn't look quite useful,
but it really really is.
You can do things relative to that point in space.
The other thing that happens is, if I've put it here,
add a new monkey,
that monkey appears
where the 3D cursor is.
And we can click
on the left mouse button. In my case,
right Mouse button, because I changed
to move the 3D Cursor to a new position.
That is
adding new object,
and duplicating old one.
Now, we've made a bit of a mess of this Blender 3D file.
Let's say
I want to clean it up.
And by doing so, I'll show you what I talked about
in the previous lesson, which is the relevance of your View.
For instance,
I have this cube.
I'm just looking for some random angle.
I want to move
these two
exactly where that cube is.
I will clean up a bit of the cubes around
by hitting Delete,
Select and delete,
so we have a bit of a clear view.
This cube,
move it to that cube,
and I'll do it by eye, just by looking at it.
So
I grab it,
move it to where the other one is,
and it looks like it's pretty close to where the other one is.
Except,
if I look from another angle,
you can see,
it is not with the other cubers at all.
It did look that way from this angle roughly.
But from here, it doesn't. That is because,
you always move a cube in the plane
of your view or perpendicular to the plane.
That's little bit complicated, but there is a trick to work around it,
as long as you want to work at little bit consistently.
If I want to move this cube to the other one, what you want to do is,
go to the front view,
which is numpad 1,
so everything is flat.
If it isn't flat,
you probably looking in Perspective mode, like I am now,
which you can
switch to
with numpad 5.
I hit 5 again,
and everything becomes flat.
I can now move it
to the other cube.
It looks pretty good.
But it still isn't,
if you're looking around. But I moved it correctly from the front.
Now I go to the side view with numpad 3,
and move it again.
And after doing this, you can see, there in exactly the right position.
This is the big trick to keep in mind whenever you want to move something to a specific location.
If you do it,
first, I'll do it again with one of these. From the front view,
move it
to another cube.
Then to the side view,
move again,
and
it should always work.
It's not always front and side that really work that provide you with a clear view.
You can also lose side and top or top and front
and behind.
All you have to do is,
from a specific straight view,
and from another one,
at 90 degrees angle from the original.
Then you can perfectly control where your objects go.
There are some ways in which we can get
slightly more advanced control over the manipulation of our objects.
What you want to look at
is the left corner of the screen. If I scale this cube,
you can see here, in the left corner, the value of how much we are scaling it.
This updates live as I move the mouse,
so we can see the number.
But if I have a specific number in mind, what I can also do whilst I'm still moving this mouse around
around and I'm still manipulating it,
if I wanted to be twice as big as it was,
type the number 2 on my keyboard,
and already it is locked in place.
My mouse movement no longer matters,
because I typed in the value. I can now also change it to 2.5
if I want,
and keep typing numbers behind it.
If I change my mind I can backspace
until it reattaches to here.
Type 2
and hit "enter",
and I kill my original object
to twice its original size.
Another thing we can do
whilst I'm scaling is,
I can type the letter of the axis
I want to scale in. So right now, I'm scaling in all axis,
in X, Y and Z.
But if I want to make a bar,
I can hit X,
and I'm scaling only in the X axis.
Now I can still type the value, so I can make it twice as big in the X factor alone.
And I can change my mind as well.
In the manipulation, I can type Y, and now
switch to the Y axis.
I can make it 20 as well by typing 0.
Or Backspace
to go all the way back.
I've still look to the global Y,
can hit Y again
to get rid of that one
and get all axis.
This way,
I can make it very simple to change
the shape of my cube.
This is very very basic.
So we can change it all by hand.
The other thing you want to keep in mind is, on the right here, in the Properties panel, you may have noticed,
all these values are changing.
This is the location of the object I have selected.
That is this one,
it's Rotation and it scales.
The scale is a factor.
This one has a scale of 2.
I can also change it here
by dragging on the input,
or I can enter the number
I want to have.
Now that you can,
in a very simple way, move around cubes, and change their shape.
I would recommend, you go to the internet,
and look up the Blender
"10 cube challenge".
This is a really really nice little competition. I don't think it's still running, but it's been done in the past.
Basically what it does is challenge you
to make something interesting out of just 10 cubes.
There's a lot of images online that will show you some inspiration.
And it's really nice practice to get to grips with Blender Interface.