OK, as I said before, isn’t really week one, more like one hundred and fifty-one, but I’m just planning on being structured and following a path, even if I manage to skip along the first few stones quite quickly.
In any case, getting up and running using Donuts as a subject is pretty simple. So, let’s get started!
Blender Guru’s Donut Tutorial!
Part One ✅
OK, even though this is the second or third time I must have restarted down this path and re-watched these videos, there are always things you miss (perhaps that’s something to do with the fact that I use a Chrome extension to speed up playback to 2.5x or 3x its normal speed - and yes, Andrew is still perfectly intelligible when sped up like that), but I really like the fact that he talks about the Pareto principle here.
This video covers the basics of familiarising yourself with the UI, which is obviously essential, because Blender can be overwhelming at first (although 2.8 is nowhere near as bad as 2.7 on that score). It’s essential for productivity that you familiarise yourself with some hotkeys:
- G - grab (move something) - snap to an axis by pressing x, y or z
- S - scale
- The middle mouse button (or wheel on your mouse) - to orbit
- Shift - to pan
- the Gizmo
- scrollwheel to zoom in/out
- shift-D to dupe
- . (period key - full stop for English people) to focus on the selected object; or hit the tilde key (`) and choose selected
- x - to delete (poor Default Cube! 😞)
- shift-a to add some new mesh
- F3 - search for a function (very useful!)
He finishes by turning a monkey’s head on fire. If you’re wondering what that looks like in Blender, it looks like this 👇🏻
Part Two, Level 1 ✅
Hot keys:
- Tab - essential for switching between Object and Edit mode.
- O - proportional editing
- right-click - in Object, click on an object, right-click and shade smooth
Modifiers: Subdivision surface - an essential modifier and one you’ll use a lot! You access the modifiers by clicking on the spanner icon. Modifiers make your render times faster, make mesh easier to manipulate and are really f**king powerful!
Part Three, Level 1 ✅
Hot keys:
- Numpad 1 - front-on view
- Numpad 3 - side-on view (right)
- Numpad 7 - top down view
- ` key and holding down middle mouse button (or wheel) and dragging left or right or up or down
- x-ray mode (alt-z)
- p (with mesh selected) - separate objects by material or loose parts
- ctrl+l - press this combo after selecting one vertex and it will select all connected vertices
- n - show/hide the property menu
The Outliner - helps you to organise your objects in your scene.
“Mesh on top of mesh is worse than Hitler!”, apparently. 😄
Modifier: Solidify - he uses this for thickening up the icing
Andrew also covers re-ordering modifiers so they’re applied to your objects in a specific order.