Welcome to Selecting
and Taking Action! In this video you'll understand what the
Right Mouse Button does. You'll understand what the Left
Mouse Button does. Why this is different from other
3D programs or probably most programs that you've used
on a computer before. We'll go through the differences there and
why it happens like that. I'll show you how to change it as well,
but I would recommend not changing it for
the one reason that, I will be giving you instructions during
the course and you'll have to reverse them in your head, which can be difficult
to follow, if you do decide to change it and I wouldn't recommend doing so.
So let's hop on over into Blender and explore the Left and Right
Mouse Buttons.
OK, so we're over
in a Default Blend file, so we've got the standard cube in the scene.
Now, what I'm going to do here is, I'm just going to expand
these two windows on the right-hand side here, and also
just bring this one down as well. This area on the top-
right is called the outliner, and we can see
that we have three objects in our scene. So we've got the scene
here and underneath it we've got some parameters with how it renders in the
world, and then, we have three objects in our scene,
a Camera, a Cube, and a Lamp. And we can
select them from this Outliner as well. Notice
that the Cube currently has a orange border around
it and it does in the outliner as well.
If we go ahead and select the Camera, in this case, I
can use the Left Mouse Button. It's only selecting in the 3D Viewport
that it's the Right Mouse Button. So now I can see that
the Camera's selected, and it has been highlighted orange. When I want to
select more than one thing, I will hold down Shift whilst I'm selecting.
So now I can select the Cube, and I can go ahead and select the Lamp
and now all three objects are selected. You can see that two are
darker orange and one is a lighter orange, and that
is called the Active Item. So this is the Active Object,
the other ones are just selected. Now, that does give us some
control, it means we can do things to multiple objects at once.
Now, when you're first using Blender it is
very tempting to use the Left Mouse Button to select, [Laughs] like you do
in pretty much every other program. It takes a while to get used to
and I would suggest leaving it as that setting, because
otherwise it can get a bit difficult later on, and I'll show you why
now. So the Left Mouse Button moves what we call the
3D Cursor. So you can see I'm left clicking over the screen here,
and this 3D Cursor, this kind of target, this reticle here,
is just moving about, it's not doing anything else and I'll explain more
about that in a few moments. So with the Right Mouse Button,
if I go ahead and select my Cube or my Lamp or my Camera, it doesn't matter
which, and with the Right Mouse Button start moving it around,
once I've started moving I can let go of the Right Mouse Button. And you can
see, I'm just moving around randomly in space. Now,
if I want to put that somewhere, I can left click
and it will stay in that new location. So the
Right Mouse Button is Selection and
probably doing an action as well, and the Left Mouse Button
is to apply the action. Now that is really powerful because
that means it separates it, moving something, with applying
that move. So if I move that around again, but this time right click,
I can reset what I was doing and give it a go. Oh, I've moved the wrong
thing! Ah! Now, if you want to move it back to it's previously
location and you didn't know what the previous location was, we're probably all
used to, by now, systems having an Undo function.
Now you can get to the Undo function down on Object, and we
can see it's right at the bottom here. We've got Undo, so on the Mac it's
Command Z and on the PC it'd be Control and Z, just like it is on most
systems and then we've got Redo. Now Redo's slightly different, it's
Shift Command Z or Shift Control Z, and then, we've got an
Undo History as well. So if I look at the Undo History, we can see if we've got the original starter
here, and we've got a series of things that I've done and you can see that
we can drop back to any point in that history. Now that history,
by default, is pretty short, and we
want to make sure we've got enough undo points. If you need to undo lots
and lots and lots and lots, you should've probably saved in between doing your work.
So let's go and up the level of undo and make sure it's as high
as it can possibly be. So I'd like you to go to the File
and then go down to User Preferences. And once we have a look at the
User Preferences, we need to find the Undo levels and
that is over on the Edit tab.
And we can see here we've got a Global Undo, and we've
got 32 Steps. Well yes that conserves
memory, the number of steps is smaller, but what we can
also do here is just turn that all the way up to 256.
So if you've got a system with limited memory, you may actually
struggle with large Undo Steps, because obviously it's certainly not
at this beginning stage when we're just playing with basic objects, but later on,
you may struggler with more complicated scenes, having
such high steps. But in this case, I'm going to whack mine all the way up to 256,
and that gives me a very big buffer to go up. I'm going to leave
the Memory Limit at 0, because that means it doesn't have a limit.
Of course, you can increase the level of steps to 256,
and then, say I want a Memory Limit of 128 megs or something
along those lines. So that's entirely up to you but I'm not going to change it, I'm going to leave
it at 0. I'm going to now Save User Settings,
to make sure that applies to every other Blend file that I work on,
and I'm just going to close the User Properties down again.
Now, if you want to go ahead
and change the Left and Right Mouse Buttons,
again I don't suggest you do for several reasons. The primary one actually,
is if I am doing work and I'm giving you specific instructions,
you're going to have to transpose left and right in your head,
as well as the other combination of action and
applying that action will no longer exist. But under the User Preferences,
under Input, you can go to the Select With and change
Left to Right. Now, I know I've said this before about the User Preferences, but do be careful
in here. Remember you can always reset it, but you can also
make Blender quite odd, so do make sure
that you make a note of the things you change, if you're going to test
them. In fact, if you are going to test them, turn them on but
do not save, see if it works. If it doesn't work,
you can always come in and turn it back off again, or the next time you use Blender,
it will go back to its default settings or the settings you've currently stored.
So I'm not going to change that around, I like using the Right Mouse Button for my selection
and you will too, you will get used to it over time, don't worry about that.
Now this 3D Cursor itself can be
a bit of a pain to control. Now there are a couple of ways of putting it
back in the center, if you wanted it in the center. Oviously when I'm clicking here it's
kind of randomly appearing in space. It is rather clever if I go
and click on this cube, it will actu...left click on that cube,
it will actually place the 3D Cursor on the face of that cube, and we will
go more into vertices, edges, and faces later on. But now
it's actually on the surface of that cube, on that particular face facing us.
So we may want to put that back in the middle.
Well we can do a View and go to
Align View, and we can Center
the Cursor and View All. Now that can be quite
useful, but not as useful as just moving the cursor,
it depends on what you're trying to do. So we can see there that Shift and C will do that,
so let's give that a go! Shift and C, excellent! So we
see it's moved the Viewpoint, which may be undesirable, um, but we
can now see everything as well. So we've zoomed in all the way over here, let's see.
Ah, this is a great example! See that, I've just
run out of zoom. I'm moving the scroll wheel like ra, crazy,
and I've run out of zoom. And this is a common question I get asked all the time,
I'm so glad it's happened to me right now. See if that does happen,
you need to kind of reset your zoom level. So in order to do that,
we can go View and then just View Selected.
That's the easiest way out of this, that's the way I
work with it. And then you can see there, the number pad full stop will get you there. So if I hit
number pad full stop, we then focus on the selected item.
Now, let's go ahead and go Shift and C, and we can see,
we zoom back out, we can see the entire scene and this cursor
is centered. The other way of centering the cursor is to
use the Shift key with S. Shift and S
will give us, it's the Snapping menu, and it gives us an
option where to snap to. And here we have some options
for the cursor. So we've got Cursor to Selected, Cursor
to Center, Cursor to Grid, and Cursor to Active. So if I
go Cursor to Active, it will move the cursor to the
active object. You know what I was saying earlier? If we select more than one
item... Oh, that's not a great selection order, let's do it that way around.
Now the Lamp is the active icon. If I go Shift
S and Cursor to Active, it
will move to the active object. In fact, it moves to where this little orange
spot is, which is called the Origin, on every particular
object. The other options there, we've got Cursor
to Grid, so it's going to align it with the grid. If we were to look
down on our model, in Perspective, we can see that it's gone
to the closest possible grid, the whole number it can go
to. So if we go 1, 2, 3, it's gone to the 4th one along
in the X direction, which is this red arrow here.
What else have we got under there? Shift and S, Cursor to Center!
OK, so Cursor to Center will move it to the
center of the scene, where X, Y, and the blue line that you can't see,
Z, equals 0, and that is very powerful! You'll
want to properly generate a lot of objects at the center of your scene.
Now one final thing, the
what is it, Cursor to Selected! Now this is a
kind of an odd one, because when you've got more than one object selected,
it's going to put it in the middle of them all. So now
we try that, it should end up where the 3D Manipulator Widget, this
little white ball with multi-colored arrows coming out of it.
If we go Shift and S and move the cursor to selected, we see that it's
gone to the average position of the objects that we
have selected, and that is very powerful as well, because that
is how you can place something directly in the middle of two particular
objects.
And that is essentially the purpose of the 3D Cursor, at least
in the early stages. We're going to use the 3D Cursor to tell Blender
where we want to place objects, and that is very
powerful, having the ability to just move it around anywhere that we
want.
So another useful thing to know is where things are in the menu, and I try
and give you guys the menu options, so you can
physically see where they're situated. Most of them are logically placed,
but the 3D Cursor, the movement of it is...
This is one of these things that's doesnt quite, it's not quite intuitive, because
it's not an object yet. It's part of the Snapping
menu, which is underneath the Objects menu. So if we go to Objects
on the 3D Editor Header Bar, and then, go to Snap which is
just about a third of the way up, a quarter of the way up there and then we get the
same options we had before. And of course, you can see that the shortcut
keys there is Shift and S, and that's where this menu comes from.
Brilliant! So now that we've gone over here, I have a small
challenge for you.
OK, so your challenge is to practice selecting objects,
select multiple objects, select individual objects, get the hang
and the knak of doing that. Try right clicking
and moving those objects as well, see how that pans out. Now your not going to have
much control at the moment, but don't worry that's not the point. At the moment, we're just
trying to get you in the hang of using the Right Mouse Button to actually
select and then to move them as well.
Try moving around the 3D Cursor. Remember that's the Left Mouse
Button. Get used to the Right Mouse Button selection. That's
kind of the real crux of this particular lesson,
and remember the Left Mouse Button to apply the action.
So if you do move something with the Right Mouse Button, if you click the Right Mouse Button
again, practice that, that cancels the operation. Or if you
move it and you like the new location, hit the Left Mouse Button
to apply the action. So pause the video now and give that a go!
OK guys, welcome back!
Let's go through the challenge and see if we can do all of these things!
OK, so we're back over in Blender, and I've opened
up a default blend file, by going File and New,
so we've got everything back to how it is standard, if you were just opening
up Blender by yourself. Now that I've done that, we just need to practice
a few things. Practice selecting multiple objects was the first part of the
challenge, so I'm going to go ahead and click on the Camera.
Excellent! I'm also going to click on the Lamp. Brilliant!
And we can see it's highlighting that lighter orange color. Now,
when we select anything, we can also select things in the Outliner
itself, so we've got the Camera, the Cube, and the Lamp in the Outliner
over on the right-hand side here. And
and we can right click. No, we don't right click
over there, we left click over this side! So it can be a little bit confusing
remembering what to right click on and what to left click on. It's
essentially in the 3D View, you'll be right clicking to select things.
Now, we can select multiple things at the same time, by holding
down Shift and then right clicking on the various objects.
And we can see that all three have been selected, with the last one,
to be selected, being a lighter orange color. And that means it's the
Active Object. OK, remember the Active Object, because that's the thing
that things are going to apply to, are going to happen to if you start doing
any operations. Now, interestingly when you've got
everything selected, a lot of packages, when you then go to, let's
say, move them it will move them all at once
regardless of whether you've clicked on an individual item here or
in an empty space. Blender, however, is not quite like that. If I go
and right click on the Cube, after selecting everything, and try to move it, it
will move just the Cube. OK, so I can right click again
to reset that. If I want to move them all together,
I'll have to right click in an empty space and move them that way.
Of course, there are several other ways that you can move things. I can left click on this
manipulator widget here and move it along the various axis,
that I want to move it along. That's absolutely fine, there's lots of ways of doing
something so don't worry about that! So moving the 3D Cursor.
Well to move the 3D Cursor, you just left click. Now
interestingly, when you left click on a particular object, it will actually
snap the 3D Cursor to the face of that object. So if I go
ahead, this cube here, if I go and left click on that top
face there, when we zoom in we see that it's actually snapped bang
on the top face. Now it's not going to the middle of that top face or anything along those lines,
we'll learn how to do that later, but suffice it to say, it's easy to
put things together, if you can control the 3D Cursor like that. So we just left
click everywhere. Now it's going to take you a while to get
your head around the left click, right click, thing. It does make sense, it is
incredibly powerful, however, it will probably take you a couple of weeks
of using Blender, before you've stopped left clicking to select things,
because it's so habitual with every other bit of software. So do
get used to, over the coming lectures, etc., get used to the
Right Mouse Button for the selection and starting an
action like moving something about, and then, left clicking to apply
that action. OK guys, you've done great!
Well done! And I will see you in the next lecture!