Blender 2.5 Interface: The 3D View

I notice from the quiz results that there’s actually a lot of demand for some OpenSCAD tutorials, so don’t worry, those are on the way! However, there’s also some thirst for Blender knowledge, and I was already working on this one, I intend to press on with the Monday Blender 2.5 stuff for a bit. (This Friday I’ll put up a quickstart for OpenSCAD as well!)

So then, here’s Blender’s new interface as of the 2.5 recode:

The middle panel is your 3D view, and it’s most of what matters here. Here are the basic navigation controls for simply looking at what is in the 3D view. (We’ll get to actually making things in a second.)

On your number pad:
7, 1, and 3 are top, left and front views, respectively.
5 toggles perspective in the view.  (Things further away will look smaller in perspective mode, not always what you want for mechanical design.)

A mouse with a scroll wheel is highly recommended for Blender, as it gives you the following features:  Middle-click and drag to rotate the view.  There’s an invisible point in the center of the screen around which your view of the scene rotates. This point is not marked by anything (That little red-and-white ring is actually the 3D Cursor, about which we’ll learn more later), so it’s a good idea to occasionally twist the view a bit with middle-drag, which you’ll usually do a fair bit when modeling.  You can also use the scroll wheel to zoom the view, so if you roll the wheel back, you’ll zoom out, rolling forward, in.

One odd property of Blender: right click to select.  This is a bit odd, and you can change it, but it’ll make other tutorials wrong so I tend to recommend getting used to it.  Highlighting defaults to an orange outline, so it should be obvious when you select anything in the scene.  Another tremendously useful feature is the period key on your number pad to center the view.  When you are rotating the view with middle-drag, you will rotate around the last place you selected with the period key.

The 3D view has six modes. If you click on the mode icon on the lower left of the view, you’ll see this list:

However, if you’re only going to be doing design for 3D printing, you won’t need all of them, and at first you’ll only need the Object Mode and Edit Mode, and the Blender developers have made the tab key the shortcut for jumping between them.

Once in Edit Mode, you’ll have the ability to select the individual vertices of the mesh.  All the above tips still work, which is why the six modes above are all part of the same 3D View framework: this way, your basic navigation tools will always be the same.  (This is a recurring theme in Blender: if something works as a way to do something somewhere, chances are good that it will do the same thing or something similar in other views.)

You can now select and shift-select to select multiple vertices.  There are shortcuts for moving, scaling, and rotating vertices or groups of vertices:

g key to “grab” or drag vertices
s key to scale vertices
r key to rotate

While you are doing any of the above, you can either left click to accept or hit the escape key to abort your changes.  You also may hit additional keys to refine these motions: x, y, and z to restrict to an axis, or hold ctrl to move in discrete steps.

Blender is a complex tool to do a complex job, and the subset of Blender associated with solid modeling is still pretty large.  Hopefully though, this guide of the 3D view is enough to get a sense of the key weirdnesses to Blender’s interface design so that you can get on with modeling.

Other Blender guides:
BlenderCookie Getting Started Guides
Blender: Noob to Pro Wikibook