Original subtitles

Okay.

So now that we have the program installed, we do unfortunately need to talk a little bit about settings

before we dive in.

I'll try to be as quick as I can here, and hopefully this will be the driest part of the course.

So if you take a look here at my screen, you'll no doubt notice that yours does not look exactly the

same.

That's okay.

This is just because I had blender installed on this machine previously and somewhere buried in some

deep folder somewhere it remembers my settings.

After we do this first time set up, you'll get this screen every time you open blender.

But for the first time you'll get something that looks like not that this and I apologize for not having

a live version of this, but I had to install it onto another computer to get this screen to pop up

again.

So we have to work with the screenshot, but it's really simple and it shouldn't be a problem.

Okay, this is the quick setup screen.

Now, if you had a previous version of Blender installed onto the same machine as of the 3.0 update,

you can come down here where it says load 2.93 settings and click that and it will load all of your

preferences from the previous version.

Presuming you wish to keep them the same.

But for the purposes of this course, I am assuming that this is your first time ever downloading or

using blender.

So we're just going to do the quick setup from scratch for language.

We're going to leave it at English for shortcuts.

You want to keep them on Blender?

I know Blender has enabled support for people that are switching from another program like Mya so they

don't have to learn new keyboards, which, believe me, can be really difficult.

I don't believe that Mya has any support for quickly enabling blender shortcuts.

And in fact, last time I tried to manually set up blender style shortcuts and Mya, I was unable to

because they do not allow certain functions to be read, to be bound to different keys.

And the default, which is another good thing about open source software like Blender, is that it tends

to be a lot more configurable than company supported software.

However, the tradeoff for that is often that open source software is slightly less user friendly.

But as I mentioned in the last video, Blender had a major update a few years ago and now it is much

more user friendly than it used to be.

But I digress.

I am assuming that someone taking this course is not coming from another 3D modeling program but is

doing this for the first time.

So we're going to keep the default blender shortcuts.

Next up is select with now this is referring to when you want to select something whether you use the

left or right mouse button, which seems probably a little strange, like why would you want to select

with the right mouse button but actually used to be the default in blender back in maybe the 2.42.5

days.

I don't really know why they went with that at the time and to change it, it wasn't something that

popped up all nice on the opening screen like this.

You sort of had to navigate down several submenus to find it.

But, you know, maybe you learn to use Blender a long time ago and we're used to the right click select.

So if that's the case, they would still have that option here for you.

But luckily, Blender now defaults to select with the left click.

So we're just going to leave it here at left.

Okay.

So the next setting is what function do we want to have bound to the spacebar on our keyboard.

Now it defaults to play, which is geared toward an animation set up, but I actually find it more useful

to bind it, to search, because oftentimes you'll need to use a really specific operation that Blender

has.

But maybe it's not one you use over and over, so you'll forget what menu it's under.

Or and this has happened to me quite a number of times.

You'll need to use an operation.

And you did know where it was located, but you updated Blender to a new version and they moved some

of the menus and things around.

In this case, it is extremely helpful to be able to just hit the spacebar and search for the function

you need.

So here where it says spacebar, go ahead and make sure that you click search theme.

Now this is really up to you.

It's purely cosmetic.

All it will do is change the color of things like the background, the menus and outlines.

I personally use blender minimal dark because I find I spend many hours a day staring at the screen

using blender, and I find that the brighter themes make my eyes start to hurt more quickly, plus darker

programs because they are emitting less light from your monitor.

Use less power or so I've been told.

So you can play around with these, pick your theme and don't stress too much.

You can change it later if you want.

So once you have all that set up, you're going to click down here.

It says Save New Settings.

So there's just a couple more things that we need to go over regarding settings and preferences before

we can really get started.

So the first thing I want to discuss is the mouse and keyboard setup now.

In order to use Blender or really any other 3D software, you do need to have a three button mouse.

And just to clarify what I mean by that.

A three button mouse is a mouse that has the left click, the right click, and the middle mouse scroll

wheel.

The middle scroll wheel is really important, and navigating around in 3D space really hinges on your

ability to use this button.

So if you don't have a three button mouse, you get one.

There are about $15 on Amazon.

It doesn't have to be fancy.

It just has to have this metal scroll wheel.

If for whatever reason, you absolutely cannot use a three button mouse blender still has your back.

If you go under edit preferences and enter input here, there's an option that says Emulate three button

mouse.

Enabling this will allow you to use the same functions that the scroll wheel provides by holding alt

and using the left mouse click.

This might be an option for you if you're using something like a trackpad.

You can.

You can still simulate that.

I actually first learned Blender on a 2011 MacBook Pro using only my trackpad because that was all I

had.

But I really don't recommend it because it's just much more difficult to use with the trackpad and laptops

in general just aren't powerful enough to run programs like this at a high level.

You can get by in the beginning for sure on a laptop, and if you are just kind of trying this out to

see if you like it and are you have the laptop, you will be totally fine in the beginning.

But there comes a point pretty early on really where you will hit a performance wall and it will be

trying to model something that is too complex for the machine and you'll get frame drops and lags that

really make the program unusable, but cross that bridge if and when you come to it.

So in the next bit of settings I want to discuss is the Numpad and the Numpad here is pretty critical

in Blender as we're going to see more in future videos.

But if your keyboard doesn't have one and all you have is these numbers across the top of the letters

here, that's still okay.

Just make sure that in that same input preferences window, you're going to want to click Emulate Numpad

here at the top.

This will remind all those functions that are normally on the numpad to that top row of number keys.

You'll notice that any numpad is already on for me because my keyboard does not have a numpad.

Any of these key binds can be changed by navigating to the key map tab under the preferences window,

selecting the category, and simply changing the binding there.

You can also search for the function by name or by the key that it is currently bound to and change

it that way.

We're not going to be changing any of these.

We're just going to leave them all at the defaults.

I just wanted to show you where you could do that if you needed to.

The last thing I wanted to discuss are add ons.

Add ons are essentially plug ins for Blender that can extend the program's functionality.

Blender comes with a whole slew of add ons that are installed into the program, but not enabled by

default.

You can find these add ons by from this window going, opening that preferences window again, which

is edit preferences and coming over here to the side and clicking add ons.

So all of these add ons are the ones that come with Blender to enable any of these add ons.

All you have to do is click the checkmark next to it and to disable on click.

Obviously, a lot of these are enabled by default, such as these import export options.

For example, this import export format is there by default, and this allows you to export your models

into this file format, which is standard for sharing across other programs such as Unreal Engine Unity,

that sort of thing.

Any of these add ons that are enabled to begin with, I would leave on because if you disable something

by default down the line, maybe you're trying to, for example, export and fix and the menu option

just won't be there.

And when you Google it, you probably won't find very many answers because nobody has really had this

problem because it's on by default.

But in addition to the ones that are on by default, there's a few that I highly recommend you enable.

The first is mesh loop tools, and the second just down below it is node node wrangler.

We're going to cover more with these do in future videos for you now.

For now, just make sure that these checkboxes are enabled.

The last one that we're probably going to use in this course is usually text tools, but this one does

not come packaged with Blender.

We're going to have to download it, but it's going to be really simple.

We won't be using it right away, but we will eventually and we'll we're going to want some more tools

when we come to the texture portion of the course.

And this is a good way to demonstrate just how to add plugins that are not included with Blender, as

I mentioned in the previous video.

Blender is open source, which means, among other things, that anyone is able to write plugins for

it.

The code is not proprietary, so no company controls what plugins are written for it.

There are a lot of really great plugins available online that extend blender functionality in some pretty

substantial ways.

That being said, of course, because it's totally open there, there's no real support or helpdesk

of any kind.

Should you have an issue with one of these outside plugins?

And as always, be careful of what you download off of the internet, make sure the source is legitimate,

etc. So in order to get this text tools add on, we're going to open a browser and we're just going

to Google Blender text tools.

And the first thing that's going to show up should be this GitHub page.

And we're going to go in here.

And what GitHub is, if you've never seen it before, is basically it's just an online location where

people can upload source code for applications and plugins such as this one.

You don't need to log in or sign up or anything to access this file, so don't worry about that.

So when you click inside, you'll see this page and you can scroll all the way down to the.

Bottom and there's a little read me file which just explains a little bit more about the functionality

of of text tools.

So read that if you'd like.

But for now, let's go back up.

And we're going to go on the side here where it says releases.

Underneath that, there's a link that says techs tools, a 1.4.4.

Now, depending on when you were watching this, this version may be different, but that's okay.

Just click whatever version says latest.

So it'll bring you to this page.

And this is just basically a list of everything that's been updated since the last version of text tools.

So scroll down to the bottom here where it says assets.

And we're just going to download this zip file in a second to download.

And once it's downloaded, we want to go to the file location.

For me, because I'm using Google Chrome, I can just right click and hit show in folder.

I can see I've already downloaded it before.

So I was testing this out.

So once you have found the file, we are actually not going to unzip this.

Now it's up to you whether or not you want to make a designated spot to keep your blender plug.

And you can certainly leave it in the downloads folder if you wish, because once Blender has a copy

of these files, we won't need this zip file anymore.

You could delete it and the plug in would still work.

However, if you ever need to reinstall Blender for whatever reason, you would need to locate these

original files again and redownload them if they were deleted.

Which wouldn't necessarily be a problem.

But there is just no guarantee that the author of the plugin won't have taken them down, which would

leave you without access to those plug ins.

And plus, it's just faster if you have them already.

So I believe as of Blender 3.0, you do not have to reinstall add ons when you update, but I could

be misremembering that either way.

I think it's just good practice to keep this zip file somewhere where you can easily find it again should

something go wrong.

So for my setup I went into the blender install location, which for me.

Let's see.

Program files, Blender Foundation.

This is where you'll have any and all versions as well as settings and some other supplementary files

for Blender.

Now I added this new folder outside of the Blender version folder and I called it add ons.

This is basically just a repository of backups of all the plug ins and things that I have downloaded.

You can obviously put this folder wherever you wish, just as long as you know where it is.

So back in Blender, all you have to do to get any downloaded add on working is in the same preferences

window we were just in.

Go to add ons.

And up at the top there's this install button.

Click that and it's going to bring up this file browser.

So now we just need to navigate to where that zip folder is and.

And if you have it up here in your file browser still.

I quickly navigate back to it.

You can just click on this right click copy.

And then in the location bar on the blender file browser.

Click Control.

We paste and enter and it will bring you right there.

So now all we have to do is just select the add on the zip file and hit install.

You'll get a little message down here saying that's been successfully installed.

And now what we want to do is just scroll and just make sure that it's enabled.

Check that box if it's not already ticked.

Now, like I said, we won't be using this right away, but we're going to be using it in a future video.

And I just wanted to show you how to add additional add ons into Blender.

So.

Now that we have the program up and running, we have all of our preferences set.

We're ready to jump in and in the next video, we're going to be doing that.