Blender Basics for Beginner Animators - 3D Animation Class - Ep. 1

In this 3D animation class, I'll show you how to animate in Blender. This class is perfect for you, even if you've never opened a 3D software before, even if you've never animated anything. We're gonna take everything slow and step by step, and I'll show you in detail how and why everything is done. In this first lesson, we are going to have a look at how to navigate in 3D space, because that can be a little bit tricky if you've never done it before. We're also gonna create an object and then mo

ve it around, rotate and scale it. In later lessons, this will lead up to the famous bouncing ball exercise, which is a perfect exercise for beginners because it touches on so many important principles of animation. If you already have some experience in Blender, for example, if you've done modeling before, you might be able to skip this video, but if you've never really done anything in Blender, then this is the video for you. When you open blender for the very first time, it will greet you wit

h this quick setup screen, and you don't really have to change anything here. It's just a quick way for you to change the language. I would recommend keeping the interface in English though, because most tutorials are in English. Shortcuts means the keyboard shortcuts that you can use to quickly get to certain functions, and once again, I would recommend leaving them with the default, because these will be the shortcuts that are used in most tutorials. You can change how blender looks and um, ye

ah, maybe it's more fun to work with a blender that has some color accents, but for now I'm gonna keep it with the standard dark theme. And if you're done with the quick setup, you can hit next. And this is the splash screen that you will usually see when opening blender. They have some default files here, but I just want to click right next to the splash screen to reveal the file underneath that is already open. And this is the very iconic scene with just the cube in the middle, a camera to the

left and this, this is a lamp shining, some light onto the scene. One of the most important things you have to learn for any 3d software is how to navigate around in this 3d world that we are seeing here in this viewport part of the software. For blender and pretty much any other 3d animation software it's recommended to use a mouse with a mouse wheel. So if you are using a laptop and you just have a track pad right now, you should get an external mouse because that middle mouse button has a lo

t of functions that we need. Some laptops also don't have this number key section on the keyboard. So you might also have to get an external keyboard. You can click on the mouse wheel, click, not scroll to drag the view and make this orbiting move around a focus point in your 3d scene. You can scroll the mouse wheel to zoom out and in. And you can hold shift and then click the mouse wheel to pan around in the scene like this. With the left click, you can select objects. Right now, the cube is se

lected, but we can select the camera just by clicking on it with the left mouse button. That is a strong indication that we at the moment are in the so-called object mode. And indeed, you can see that the object mode is activated. Up here. It says object mode. And there, you can also switch to a bunch of other modes that will be important at other points in your journey into blender. For now, we're gonna stay in object mode. And one other thing that makes selecting objects like this possible is

because in this toolbar to the left, we have this select box tool activated. Sometimes you might switch into other tools here in the toolbar and then no longer be able to select objects like this. So if that happens and you're wondering why you can't select objects, that might be because the select box tool is not active or that for some reason you left object mode. Right now we have the camera selected, but if I click the mouse wheel to orbit, you can see that it is still orbiting around the cu

be. If I want the view to focus on another object, I can do that by clicking on an object, making sure that it is selected and click the period or comma key on your NumPad. Now you can see the focus jumped over to the center point of the camera, and I'm now orbiting around this point. If any of these NumPad key combinations don't work for you, make sure that you have clicked on the Num key on your keyboard to activate that section of your keyboard to switch it to the numbers. Of course, we can a

lso get the focus back to the cube by selecting it and hitting NumPad period or comma again. And now we are back to orbiting around the cube. Some very important keys on the number pad are the numbers one, three, and seven. With one, you can make the view snap to a front view. With three, you can see a project from the side. With seven you can see it from the top and with zero you can switch into the perspective of the camera. This is very important when animating, because this is what you're an

imating towards. When you render and export your scene in the end, this is the perspective that your animation will be seen from. To exit these preset perspectives, all you have to do is just orbit again with the middle mouse button and you can move around freely in the scene once again. When working in blender, you will very likely mix moving around freely with the orbiting middle mouse button to one of the preset perspectives to check your work from certain angles. And you will probably always

have an eye on how things look through the camera. It's very important that you make yourself familiar with these different perspectives and use the mouse wheel to have a look around in your scene. With the select box tool active, we are going to select the cube and hit delete on the keyboard to delete it. What we now see a little bit more clearly is this 3d cursor here in the middle of the scene. And I can move that 3d cursor with the cursor tool from this toolbar to the left. Just click on th

at. And now when you click in the scene, you can set the cursor to a different position. This cursor position is important for a bunch of operations that you can do in blender. Most importantly, when you create an object, this is the place where the object will appear. Because we are currently using this cursor tool. If we right click in our scene, we get options that are relevant to the cursor tool. The one that I'm specifically interested in right now is the snap option. We can cause the curso

r to snap back into its original position in the middle of the scene by selecting snap and cursor to world origin. You can see that the cursor jumped from over here, back to this center point in the middle of the scene. This is the place where I want to create an object. I can create a new object at the cursor position by pressing shift a and then selecting an object. Or you could have a look at the toolbar up here. There is the add option. And there we have the same options. We are going to add

a mesh, specifically, a UV sphere. If we click on this there, we have the ball in the middle of our scene. Now let's have a look at some of the properties of this ball by going to the very side of the view port here and click on this, this little arrow right here to expand the property panel. Here in the property panel, we can see the coordinates of the object, specifically the coordinates of the center point. The center point is marked with this little yellow dot and it is right in the middle

of the sphere, exactly where the 3d cursor is. Everything that happens in blender happens in this coordinate system. You can see up here, there's a little indication of the different axes that we have. We have a X, Y and Z axis. And you can see the same colors here, the red and the green line, this is where the axes meet exactly in the middle of the scene. This is where the coordinate system is 0, 0, 0. And we can confirm that by looking at the item properties right here for location, it has 0,

0, 0 as the coordinates of where our ball is in the scene. When we hover over the different coordinate properties, you can see from the mouse cursor that we can just click and direct those. And. There we have the ball moving along the X axis while the coordinates in this area change. We can click into the properties to set them by typing on the keyboard. We can set them all back to 0, 0, 0, and there the ball is back in the middle of the coordinate system at the world origin 0, 0, 0 point. The m

ore common way to move objects around in blender is using keyboard shortcuts. First, we need to make sure that in the tool bar we have the select box tool active. Otherwise we cannot move objects around using the keyboard shortcuts. The shortcut to transform the location of an object is G. And now you can see that we're kind of freely moving this ball around. Very often, this is not what you want because you don't really see how far in any of the axis we are moving this object. More often you on

ly want to move the object along a single axis and you can do that by hitting G and then the name of the axis. For example, if I hit Z, I'm now moving the ball only along the Z axis. This is what happens when I hit G and then X. It's moving back and forward in this case, from the perspective of how we are currently seeing the scene. And if I hit G and Y it's going along this axis only, and you can see that everything we are doing also happens in the coordinates in this property panel. We can und

o, of course, with control Z. I've done this a couple times now in this tutorial to reset my position. You can rotate an object by hitting R on your keyboard. Again, this kind of free form rotation is not very useful. Most likely you're going to use R and then one of the axis, for example R and Z, to have the rotation only go along a certain axis. This is our R and Y and here is R and X. You can just, while you are rotating, hit the key for one of the axis to switch on the fly. The keyboard sho

rtcut S is of course, for scaling the object. Once again, you can use Z, Y, and X to restrict that motion to one axis only. Aside from that, you'll also have these useful tools in the toolbar, here. We have the move tool that makes the axis visible. You can just click on one of those axes to move the object along that axis. And if you click in the middle, right in the middle here, it behaves like it would if you just hit the keyboard shortcut G. There's also a rotation tool where you can click o

n one of these access, or click here on the outside to get this freeform rotation and a scale tool, when you click on the ring, you scale evenly in all directions. Let's hit Ctrl + Z to undo all of that and make sure that everything is on the zero zero position. I can see that in the panel here. The rotation is not set to zero yet. I can just click on that angle and type in zero to make sure that everything is reset to its default position. And that's it for this lesson. In the next video, we ar

e going to set the stage. We create a ground plane that our bouncing ball can bounce off from, and we're going to set the camera position. These are the wonderful people that support me on Patreon. If you like my tutorials and you want me to make more of them and more live streams, then please consider supporting me as well. Click here to watch the next lesson, given that it's already published and here you can subscribe to never miss a video about animation. Thank you so much for watching.