Welcome to Basic Object Transformation! Wow, that
sounds like a mouthful, don't worry it's relatively straight forward!
So let's go ahead and make something! So we're going to
learn here how to scale or resize, Blender calls
it resizing; Rotate and move or translate
objects. We'll also be learning how to constrain
those particular operations as well.
Speaking of operations, we're going to introduce you to the Operator Panel.
This is something that confuses people, especially when
you've not used Blender before, because it's kind of a phantom. It
disappears when you need it again, and I'll explain why and
what is happening. Understand the 3D Manipulator Widget.
We've already seen it, it's that white ball in the middle of the screen, with the multi-colored arrows coming
out of it. I'll explain more about that for you. And we're also
going to add objects to our scene, so we're going to be building with primitives.
So let's hop straight on over into Blender!
OK, so we're over in a Default blend file here,
and I would suggest, for the moment, that you watch what I'm doing and where I'm clicking,
so you can get a good grasp of all of the items. We've got
a lot to go through in this lecture, and I wouldn't
want you to miss anything as we go through. So we've got our
cube in the middle of our scene here, and we need to do something with it.
We need to make it smaller, we need to move it to another position, we need to put it
at a different angle. Now, we have some options
up on the top-left, on the Tool Shelf, for transforming.
That's great! We're doing transformation, that sounds great! So we've got Translate, Rotate,
and Scale. Those are the three most common things that you'll be doing
with objects, so we can Translate. What does Translate mean? It means
move. And we can right click to cancel the move,
or we could have left clicked to apply the move. Now you'll notice as you hover over
these, it actually tells us what the shortcut key is.
It also tells us a bit more details, so Translate, it actually has
in brackets there "(Move) selected items". Rotate the shortcut
is R, so that's great! Translate, Rotate,
and Scale is S. So Scale is S and Rotate is R. That's
great, but Translate is G, so I think about that as Grabbing
your object. Grabbing it and moving it about your scene, so that's also
very powerful. So I can go here and I can hit the G key
and start moving things about. Now, remember that the keys that you press,
your cursor has to be over the appropriate window. Now the G key
might do something different, over another window, so
make sure your actual cursor is over the window before you start
pressing it, pressing the G key the R key or any other shortcut
key. So if we press the R key, we can move it about,
and the S key, we can scale it up and down.
Notice it doesn't go to nothingness, it actually flips inside out and comes
out the other way as well. Now that can cause you problems later on,
so if you want to scale up, make sure you don't push through yourself
and end up a negative. If I can draw your eyes to where the 3D Editor
Bar used to be, we can see that it says Scale X -2.4
etc., etc. and that is
what is happening there. So that's going the wrong way, let's go back this way and scale it upwards.
There you go! So I've scaled it upwards by roughly 3. Now in
the Operator panel, if you've been paying attention, in the lower-left
here, you might have caught that the Operator panel was changing,
depending on what I'd just done. So if I go ahead, I've resized it
here so it's big... Oh, by the way, if you adjust the size
of this and make it too small, you end up with another little plus icon,
within the Tool Shelf itself and that will bring up the Operator
panel. Once we're in the Operator panel, this is something that
confuses a lot of people. The moment you do something else, the
previous operation you've just done, whether it be moving, scaling, rotating,
or even undoing or selecting another item,
that will break the Operator panel. So if I go ahead and start
moving the Camera, for instance... So I'm going to ue the 3D Manipulator
Widget to move this and left click on...
Ah look at that, we can actually move things up and down in the Z
direction, that's very powerful. But the moment I've done that, I've lost the ability
of the Transform, in this case the Scale that we'd done to the
cube. There's no going back! That's important! Once you've moved
on there is no going back to the Operator panel. So let's say
I had resized that to that amount; we've got an option here and
look, we've got a way of constraining. So the Vector is the change, so if
I resized it in the X direction I can change
that. Ah look at that! We can make different shapes, very very powerful!
We can also have that constrained while we're scaling.
If I hit S and Scale and decide that I want to
constrain it on one of the axis, I can press X,
and there we go, we're making it longer and shorter in the X axis. I can press Y
here, make it longer and shorter in the Y axis, and the same with Z. So Z
is up, in this case, and we can see it's going up and back down again,
making it thinner. Now, when you're doing movements like this,
sometimes it moves too much, so let's hit S
again and go Z, so we're locking it to the Z axis. And
say that's just moving far too much, what we can do at this point is
just hold the Shift key down and that enables us to move
much more slowly and have greater control.
That Shift key, by the way, works if we go over to let's say the Operator
panel here. We've got a slider here, we can click on Z and slide it up and
down, and we can also hold down Shift and slide it up and down
much slower or we can just type a number in there,
which is very very powerful. In fact, we can not only type a number in there,
but I can type 1 + 5 + 7.2
or something like that in there, and it will add those up for us.
We can actually type equations into there, which is brilliant! You sometimes have
to know how to give Blender equations, but if it's just simple multiplation or
division, you can type it straight into any of these number fields that we can see.
So we've already mentioned the 3D Manipulator Widget.
On the Header Bar itself, for the 3D Editor
Header, you can turn the 3D Widget off and on.
You can also change what it does. So at the moment it sets to the arrow,
which means Translate. OK, and then we can
Rotate and we can Scale and
we can select either one. And if we've got it on Rotate,
we can left click on that and rotate it around. Now I
will use a mixture of the 3D Manipulator
Widget or I will use the keyboard shortcuts, that's my
general use. So I'm just going to scale that back down now, so it's a bit smaller.
And something that we've learned previously, I'm going to hit the Numpad for
stop and just zoom in on that selected object, so we can
see what we're working on. Now the final thing, of course, is
adding some additional objects to our scene. OK, how do we do that?
Well we're going to look for something called Add, and if we go down to the
3D Editor Header, we can see there's an Add menu. If we hover over
it, it gives us a bit more information, and we can see that it's a shortcut Shift and A.
And Shift and A will bring up this menu but underneath
your cursor in the 3D Editor. So I'm going to go Shift and A,
and we've got plenty of things that we can add. At the moment,
I just want you to focus on Mesh. So let's
say we want to add a, I don't know, a Cone or a Cylinder,
we can go ahead and select one. Well where has it appeared? Well
it looks like it's appeared down there, but because that's now the selected object, I
can press the Numpad full stop and focuse on it.
Now, that particular object, that we've just created, has
appeared where the 3D Cursor was. So if the 3D Cursor had been
moved at any point, it would appear there. Now if you
have a look at the Operator panel, we will see that we've got some control
over that primitive, that basic shape that we've just added to
our scene. This control only exists for this
moment in time. If we do anything else or start doing anything
else in our scene, we would lose the ability to change these
items down here. So we can see that the number of vertices... Let's just see what that does!
Let's move it to the left and right. OK, it changes how...
Oh, at it's smallest point, 3, we've got ourselves a pyramid.
OK, and then as we increase it the base gets more and more circular.
OK that's powerful! What else can we do? Oh, we can make it not a complete cone, so it looks
like we've got a Radius of 1 across the bottom, and a Radius of
2 at the top. I'm presuming that's made that larger. Yes!
There we go! How cool is that? A Depth! Well what does the Depth do?
I encourage you guys to play with this! You know, at this early stage you're not
going to break anything. Play with it, see what you get from it, and we
won't go into details about what the rest of this means at this moment
in time, that's something for another lecture. But you can see that you've got lots
of control. If we go ahead and straight away add another object,
let's add a UV Sphere. And we've got options here
that we can change, but of course, once we've actually done
that, there is no going back! So if I decide to use the 3D
Manipulator Widget, on its Moving function, and
left click on that arrow and move it out of the way, I can't now go back and
change any of the settings I had had on that particular
UV Sphere. It's now stuck like that! If I wanted to change the number of
segments or rings that it has, I would have to create a new object.
Hey guys! So this is the end of
section challenge! It's going to be a bit of a bigger challenge than the ones you've
had so far, but don't worry, it's nice and straightforward.
I'd like you to add into your scene a cube,
a cylinder, and a cone.
Now, place these on top of one another, have fun with this. They don't have to be
exactly butted up against one another. You can put them
inside one another, if you'd like. Just play with it, make some funky shapes.
If you guys want to add something else, other than a cube, a cylinder, or a cone
by all means make a toy castle out of cubes
that you've squished together, and the towers and the turrets can
be made out of cylinders. You can have lots of fun, as if these were little wooden blocks
that children play with. It's amazing what you can come up with!
And I'd like you to then create 4 3D Editor
windows. So using the knowledge that you gained earlier
on in the course, I'd like you to create the 4 3D Editor windows and
change them to a certain view type. I'd like a Perspective,
it doesn't matter where it's looking. I'd like an Orthographic projection.
I would like a Front view and a Top view.
Now in tradition, usually the Front and Top views
would be an Orthographic projection but it doesn't matter. But if you
want to make them traditional, I suppose, make the Front and top Orthographic
as well. Remember to take a screenshot
and share it with us! I love seeing your work, and I'm looking forward
to seeing what you guys come up with, just by using these basic building
blocks! So pause the video and give that a go!
OK, so I'm going to stick rigidly to the challenge that
I set here. So I'm going to create a new Blender file, so I can get
rid of everything that's going on there. So I've got a cube,
a cylinder, and a cone! OK, and I'm going to stack them top of one another!
So I've got the cube there, so I need to add. So Add!
It's going to be a Mesh and
Cylander. OK, so that's inside the other one just there.
I think I'm going to use the 3D Manipulator Widget and just pull it up.
OK. Now, I can align my
view. Of course, I can look at it from the side, in Orthographic
view. There we go, I can get a better control of how to align things up there. It's not
going to be perfect but it doesn't have to be at this stage, so don't worry about that.
OK, so what was the other one? A cone! So let's add.
I'm going to use those keyboard shortcuts this time, and Mesh
and Cone. OK brilliant! And that is also is appearing
on the... Oh, you know what we could do! I'm going to undo the ADD,
of that cylinder. I'm going to go ahead and click on the...
Oh, I haven't undone that! Oh, there we go! So I'm going to click on the surface
of my sphere ,
...cube
...and from that... Oh, that's not quite lined up unfortunately!
Let's look at it from the top. OK that's good! So if I
click there, that's roughly in the middle. That might be good enough! Let's go ahead and
Add a Cylinder. Now I'm going to click again
on the top, roughly in the middle, and add a
Cone! Oh cool! OK, they're in one another,
so the origin was the middle of that. That's good,
I'm getting this. Let's move this up and move this one up,
and we've got ourselves somewhat, it looks like a tower or a lighthouse.
In fact, I'm going to do some scaling here. Let's scale this one
in and then move it back down again. And again, looking at it from the side
it helps align things up. Remember you can do that.
I'm liking that! I'm going to make my square base just a little bigger,
or cube base a little bigger, I'm just going to scale it up. There
we go! That's all sitting on there really nicely! So I'm going to hide my Tool
Shelf, so it's nice and neat, and I'm going to split the window in
two. And then, going to spit each one of these windows
there, and I'm going to hide the Toolbar so it's
nice and clean. There we go there! There, there, and
there! OK, all the header bars, and now we just need to
change the scene. So one of them needs to be Perspective. Done!
And then, one of them needs to be the Front, and one of them
the side or the Top. I can't remember my own challenge! Yes, it's
the Top! So there we go! We've got ourselves... Oh, I've moved the 3D
View. We've got ourselves 4 different views of a cone,
a cylinder, and a cube, stacked on top of one another.
How did you guys get on? Did you make something from this? Did you make a castle?
Did you make a lighthouse? Did you make a house out of something like this?
Make sure you've shared with us, so we can see how you're getting on.
I love seeing what you guys come up with,
and I will see you guys in the next lecture!