An Intro To Blender

Do the tutorial on creating a winter scene: Snowman Tutorial

Things to note/learn:

• How to create/modify simple 3D meshes
• How to duplicate
• The idea of "materials" for the appearance of the objects In torque this is achieve simply by using a texture.
• The idea of "textures", i.e. something that gets glued over the shape. In this case it was the green wrapper on the trees.
• The idea of camera (and moving it around) (note, hit numpad 0 to see what the camera sees)
• The idea of the sun and spots and the effect of shadows

Unfortunately, we can not just save an object like the textured tree in some format that we can directly put into torque. Torque needs more information (including a collision box) and a has a specific way of dealing with textures.

Blender commands I find useful

numpad:

7 (top view), 1 (front view), 3 (side view)
2 (rotate around Z-axis) and 8 (rotate other way)
4 (rotate around X or Y-axis) and 6 (rotate other way)
0 (camera view, i.e. see what the camera sees)

To pan the window: SHIFT+MMB or SHIFT+ALT+LMB

To rotate the window: MMB or ALT+LMB

To select object vertices: be in object mode, then:

1. "b" and drag box
2. hit "b" twice and go into circle mode, num pad + and - adjust circle
3. CTRL+LMB is the lasso tool
4. RMB (and SHIFT+RMB to add) does single item selecting

Note: While selecting objects, the icons on the right side of the window bottom let you choose vertex, edge, or face, as does hitting CTRL+TAB

To move, rotate, scale a selected object: "g" "r" "s"

To change selection mode for edge/vertex/face: CTRL+TAB

To snap to grid: hold down CTRL while moving the mouse

To duplicate a selected object: SHFT+d

To split window in half vertically: Right click on a horizontal border of the window, choose "split area"

To merge meshes: select the meshes you wish to merge, then hit CTRL+j

To toggle wireframe mode: "z"

To get to boolean tools: "w"