Blender For AmigaOS 4.1

Simple Boing Ball Tutorial

The tutorial will cover manipulating a simple object, selecting faces, navigating the user interface, and saving images. The resulting image can be seen to the right a "boing ball" with a shadow, including an alpha channel.

In conclusion we will discuss how the image / object might be improved.

When the blender screen / window opens you will see the window divided into two sections, with a larger "3D view" area above a "buttons" area. Also a row of menu items etc at the top of the window, this is actually the bottom of a user preferences control panel, which can be dragged down with the mouse to reveal it.

Before we go on, perhaps a few notes about navigating in the blender window. Each subwindow of the gains the focus when the mouse is over it. When it has the focus the keyboard events etc effect that area only. Move the mouse ove the 3D view area, and try out the numeric keypad. 7 gives top view, 1 front view, 3 side view, press shift to view from below, back or right; 4,6,8,2 rotate the viewpoint, press shift to move it etc. 0 sets the display to the camera view point. Also using the middle mouse button you can drag the 3D display arround, rotating the view point, press shift at the same time to drag the view sideways. The mouse wheel will zoom the view in and out.

So, on with the tutorial, press KeyPad 7, to return to the top view, you will see that the current scene has three objects, a cube, a light, and a camera. We want to keep the light and camers but we don't want the cube, so select the cube object by right clicking on it with the mouse. Right clicking is the general way of selecting things, this might be counterintuitive to an amiga user at first as we are used to it giving us a menu. To delete the cube simply press the delete button. You will get a small confirmtion "window" under the mouse, left click to confirm or move the mouse away to cancel. (You can move it a short distance, and still have the chance to move it back and confirm...).

Now we are going to add our object, we are going to use a primitive called 'UVSphere'. You can either press the space bar to get the popup menu under the mouse or click on 'add' in the menus at the top of the screen. Use the mouse or the arrow keys on the keyboard to bring up the 'Mesh' submenu and select UVSphere, by left clicking or pressing enter.

This will bring up a small requester or dialog that with some parameters to define the object characteristics. Our boing ball is going to have 6 rows of evenly spaced checks, but a 6 row UVsphere will be a bit "angular" so we are going to "double up". So enter the folowing Segments 24, Rings 12 and leave the Radius at 1.00. There are three ways to change the values in the number gadgets, left clicking on either side of the central number will raise and lower the number by a default increment, left clicking directly on the numbers digits will switch into keyboard entry mode, and you can type the number in with the keyboard, or left click and drag with the mouse and the number can be set that way. Once you have entered the desired values, left click okay with the mouse or hit return on the keyboard.

Now move to the buttons area at the bottom of the window. You will see a row of 6 small icon like buttons at the towards top left of this area, as you place the mouse over them you will see a tooltip popup with info on what they do, this is true of most buttons and menus and can be very helpful. Click on the 5th button, "Edit (F9)", the one with 4 dots joined by four lines in a square. (below left) Then use the middle mouse button to zoom the 3Dview in so that the sphere is large enough to manipulate, take care that the mouse pointer is over the 3DView when you do this, otherwise you will move the buttons instead. (below right)

Now press 'Keypad 1', top put the 3Dview into "front" view, and press the TAB key, this puts us into 'Edit Mode', pressing again will toggle back into 'Object Mode'. 'Edit Mode' allows us to change the models mesh and other characteristics associated with the mesh. In the shot to the left you can see that all the verteces and edges are coloured yellow and the faces have a pinkish colour, this indicates that they are selected. A useful key here is 'A'. Pressing 'A' toggles between all selected and all unselected. Pressing 'A' also works similarly in other modes, for example 'Object Mode' where it will toggle the slection of all objects in a scene.

In this case we aren't going to change the structure of the the sphere, just the colours of its faces. Were currently in 'Vertex select mode' and we need to be in 'Face select mode'. To change the selection mode we use the group of 4 buttons on the right of the 3Dview header (note that the 3dview 'header' is at the bottom of the view in this case). Click on the button with the small triangle with a dot in it. Also while your there, click on the button next to it (small cube like icon) this disables drawing of verteces, edges and faces on the rear of the object, and will make selecting out faces easier as we won't accidentally select a face at the back of the sphere. When you enter 'Face select mode' you will see the faces displayed with a dot at the center, this dot will turn orange when the face is selected. To select a face you need to right click on it. But to make it easy were going to reorientate the view. To do this click the middle mouse button over the 3Dview area and drag, you will see the 3Dview display "rotate". Drag it so that it positions like the snapshot to the left.

If you remember we chose values for our UVSphere that were twice the intended number of "checks", so we are now going to select faces in groups of 4. Select 4 faces as shown left by clicking on them with the right mouse button. We are going to apply new material to these selected faces, and give it a red colour. In the leftmost tab of the buttons panel you should see a small button with a label Material to the right of it. Left click on it to bring up a popup menu which lists the materials in use for this mesh. We want to add a new one so left click on ADD NEW. We want to change the colour of this material, the fastest way it to left click on the 'grey square' just below the material popup button, this will bring up one of blenders colour editors, you'll see a large sqaure gadget with graded colours, in this case from red to grey / black, left click in this and drag to the top right corner to make the colour pure red. Alternatively we could switch to the mataerials editing buttons, to get there click on the button small "sphere" logo in the buttons window header. You can see it selected in the next screenshot. The buttons display then changes to a set of tabs that controls the properties of the current material. The first tab in this section displays a preview of the current material, rendered onto one of several objects, the default is a sphere, others include a plane, a cube, and even a monkey! The tab we are interested in is the third tab, this controls the various colours used by the material.