Getting Started with Blender

blender

Installing Blender

You can install Blender from several different sources, even on the gaming platform Steam! I'm going to go into how to do it on Mac OS below and link to the official documentation for the other operating systems.

Blender's documentation is actually pretty good and thorough. I link to it throughout below.

First thing first, make sure your machine can actually run the program. System requirements are available online, but I pasted them below for convienence.

Minimum

64-bit dual core 2Ghz CPU with SSE2 support
4 GB RAM
1280×768 display
Mouse, trackpad or pen+tablet
Graphics card with 1 GB RAM, OpenGL 3.3
Less than 10 year old

Recommended

64-bit quad core CPU
16 GB RAM
Full HD display
Three button mouse or pen+tablet
Graphics card with 4 GB RAM

Optimal

64-bit eight core CPU
32 GB RAM
Full HD displays
Three button mouse and pen+tablet
Graphics card with +12 GB RAM

NVIDIA: GeForce 400 and newer, Quadro Tesla GPU architecture and newer, including RTX-based cards, with NVIDIA drivers (list of all GeForce and Quadro GPUs)

AMD: GCN 1st gen and newer. Since Blender 2.91, Terascale 2 architecture is fully deprecated, try using 2.90 (albeit not supported, it might still work) [list of all AMD GPUs]

Intel: Haswell architecture and newer. [list of all Intel GPUs]

Mac OS

For Mac, you'll need Version 10.13 or newer with supported hardware. Official Installation documentation for Mac OS is available here.

If you use homebrew and homebrew cask, you can easily install and maintain Blender through brew. This is how I installed it.

brew install --cask blender

Otherwise you can just download the DMG from the official downloads page. Then just double click that, and drag Blender.app to your Applications folder.

Preferences & Settings

You can open Blender Preferences a few ways. You can use the mouse and just navigate to Edit > Preferences. The quicker way hit F3, this brings up the search window. This is how you can find pretty much every option or feature of the program, especially if you can't remember where it is. So hit F3 the type pref in the search and click on Edit > Preferences as seen in the screenshot below. Command + , works on Mac OS too.

blender prefs

So first thing I do is click on System then change Undo Steps to a higher value. I use 128 at the moment, but the more memory (RAM) your machine has, the more you can safely raise this.

Next, under File Paths in the sidebar, I set my Render Cache to go to a secondary harddrive; personally don't want that on my main hard drive. You can also set a default image editor here if you'd like.

blender curve

Another setting, which is purely stylistic, under Themes > Node Editor, set Noodle Curving to a value you like. I use 5. This will produce:

blender curve2

Lastly, let's configure auto saving, so we don't lose our work. Set Save Versions to 0. This basically disables the temporary file save system they use and will trigger auto saving once you save your Blender file, keeping computer clear of a lot of temporary directories and files and junk. Under Save & Load, expand Blend Files then Auto Save. Check Auto Save Temporary Files and set the Timer to something reasonable. You can see the settings I use below:

blender curve2

That's it for changing settings. We'll be back later for Add-ons though.

Basics

Let's get started with actually using the program. I've compiled a list of the commands I most use below (and I'm a relative beginner/intermediate user). I won't overwhelm you with all of them.

Mouse Commands

You're going to want a three button mouse with the scrollwheel being the third button ideally.

Wheel Scroll - Zoom In / Out
Wheel Scroll Click - Pressing the Scroll Wheel down will let you 'drag' the view of the stage around

Keyboard Commands

I'm using Command here, but that's just Control on non Mac systems.

Command + Shift + Z – Redo A lot of people don't know this command, it works in almost every program too. Just thought I'd include it just becuase.

Function Keys F1 – Help F2 – Rename the currently selected object F3 – Operator Search - My favorite button. F4 – File Context menu F5-F8 – Reserved for user actions F9 – Adjust the last operation F11 – Show render window F12 – Render the current frame

Animation I – Insert a keyframe. Alt-I – Clear the keyframe. Shift-Alt-I – Clear all keyframes (removing all F-curves).

https://www.katsbits.com/codex/blender-basics/

Addons/Plugins

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/editors/preferences/addons.html

Resources

Official Blender Tutorials

Getting Started with Blender

Installing Blender

Mac OS

Linux

Windows

Steam