Name: Blender Tutorial for Complete Beginners - Part 1
Uploaded: 2025-03-14T01:56:43.000Z
Duration: 17 min 57 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Open source 3D software that can be used to make animations, visual effects, game assets, or practically anything 3D.

And best of all, it's 100% free and it always will be.

If you've never used it before but you want to learn it, well, then you're in the right place.

This is a tutorial for complete beginners.

I've been using Blender for 20 years, so I'm going to show you how to use all of its core features.

And by the end, you'll finish with not only the confidence to start your own projects, but with your very own donut animation.

And I know this looks complex, but I promise you it's achievable for a complete beginner.

And I say that with confidence because many already have.

This is actually the fourth version of this tutorial.

I made the first donut tutorial back in 2016 and I've been remaking it every few years to keep up with Blender's development.

In that time, millions of people just like yourself have gone from having never used 3D to successfully making their own donuts.

One artist even snuck his into a little film called Everything Everywhere All at Once.

So, if you're ready to take your first steps in 3D, hit the subscribe button and let's begin.

First, go to blender.org forward slash download or just click the link in the description.

Then, obviously, you've got to hit the big download button.

Once downloaded, on Windows, double click it and then just go through the install steps.

But if you're on a Mac, just drag it into the applications folder.

Then, just find the Blender shortcut and open it.

Then, once it's open, just click anywhere off the splash screen to close it and welcome to the wonderful world of 3D.

If you go clicking around, you might find lots of buttons and some of them with very scary names and it can all get very overwhelming very quickly.

The thing you need to know is Blender can do a lot of things, which means it has a lot of tools.

But you don't need to know every tool in order to do what you want to do.

If you're familiar with the 80-20 rule, there's really only 20% of Blender's features that you end up using 80% of the time.

And that's what I'm planning to teach you in this tutorial series.

We'll start making the donut in the next video.

In this one, we're just going to look at the interface and I'm going to show you some of the basic navigation.

So, for starters, this view, this window right here is your 3D viewport and it's where you'll spend probably 90% of your time because it is the 3D world.

So, you can see that we have three objects here.

We've got a camera, we've got a cube, and we've got a lamp.

And when we click on it, you can see it's selected because it has the yellow outline.

So, let's delete the default cube, of course, and replace it with something else.

So, we could do that by going up to the Add menu up here or by remembering the hotkey which is Shift-A.

So, usually the one you're looking for is underneath Mesh.

So, these are called your primitives and it's what you use to start something when you're looking to make an object.

Like if you're going to make a chair, you might start with a cylinder as the chair leg and then build out from there.

But the one I'm sure you're all very curious, you want to click it, it's the monkey.

Well, fun fact, every 3D software has its own little random complex object because it's useful to test things like shaders or complexities of scenes.

So, 3ds Max has the Utah teapot, Houdini has the toy and I think pig's head.

And it's actually called the Suzanne monkey head, which you can see in the top left there, named after the orangutan from the film Jay and Silent Bob Strikes Back.

And to that, we need to orbit, which you can do by on your mouse there, your scroll wheel.

If you push that in and then drag around, that is now orbiting.

Now, for my laptop users, you've just panicked because you realize you don't have a mouse.

First of all, probably good idea to get a mouse for 3D work.

But in a pinch, you can get by without it just by up here in the top right-hand corner.

This little gray circle, anywhere in the gray section, if you just left-click drag on that, that will do the exact same thing.

Or if you want, you can go to edit preferences and then underneath input, there's emulate three-button mouse.

And that means that if you hold down alt and then left-click drag, that will do the exact same thing.

Also, whilst you are in user preferences, you might want to go to interface and you've got resolution scale.

If you're on a 4K monitor, you might find that your menus and buttons are really small and you kind of have to like squint in to see it.

So personally, I like to keep my 4K monitor around about 1.5.

But since this is a tutorial, I'll make it nice and big so you can see what I'm doing.

Okay, so that's orbiting around with the middle mouse button.

If we want to zoom in, we can do that just by scrolling in and out.

We could also do it by going up to the magnifying glass tool there and then just left-click dragging and then moving the mouse back and forth.

Or you could hold down control and then middle mouse button and that will do a smooth zoom as well.

Okay, so one thing you might notice looking at this is that it's not very pretty, right?

It's just kind of got this flat, bland, gray lighting over everything.

And that's because this state right now is called viewport shading.

And it's kind of a lightweight, optimized way to view the scene just as you're building it.

But if you want to create a final pretty image, that's called rendering.

And you can actually switch into rendered mode by going up here into the top right-hand corner.

You can see we're currently in the viewport shading mode.

If we go to across, you should see rendered view mode.

So if we click that, your computer might stall for a quick second whilst it loads it in.

So it's now currently being lit by this lamp up here.

So if I wanted to zoom in on that lamp there and just kind of move it around, you can see it's kind of hard to focus on.

It's always exactly not in the right view.

And that's because we are centered on our monkey right now.

One, if you're on a laptop, you could use the little move tool there.

Or, everyone else, shift, middle mouse click, drag.

Shift, middle mouse is for pan to change your view to something else.

Okay, so I want to move my light because it's too moody.

I want to be able to see the monkey's face there.

So to move an object, you could do it one of two ways.

One, you could go over to the left-hand corner here, and you've got the move tool.

When you click that, you can see that the selected object, the lamp, has this gizmo, it's called, with these axes on it.

And if I just clicked and dragged on any of those arrows there, you can see I can move it along any of those axes.

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Blender Tutorial for Complete Beginners - Part 1

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