Navigating and Creating a Scene in Blender

When opening Blender and creating a new scene for the first time there are a number of tabs, options, and UI elements to become familiar with. During the first two to three hours of exploring blender, there were several keyboard shortcuts that were really helpful to know. As a result, we’ve documented the following shortcuts and organized them by the context they would be used in.

Inputs for Navigation around Viewpoint

These shortcuts work when making changes to a mesh or when moving an object around in the scene. Generally assume that the following shortcuts will work in both Object and Edit view modes.

Rotate Screen: Hold down the middle mouse button and move the mouse in desired direction.

Pan Screen: Hold shift + middle mouse button to pan the screen when moving the mouse.

Zoom: Move the wheel of the middle mouse button forward and background to increase or decrease the proximity towards the selected object.

Snap to View: Each numeric value (0 through to 9 keys) on the Numpad will set the camera to a preset fixed position.

• For example, pressing 7 on the Numpad will set the camera to be directly overtop of the selected object.

Snap View to Selected: Press the Period key (.) on the numpad

Inputs for Movement of Objects

The following shortcuts assume that the object has been selected and is the active object prior to being pressed:

Grab: g

Grab mode is great for adding organic changes in the model and is a free floating placement tool that can be modified for more control.

• Axis can be used to ensure precision
  • G + middle mouse button: Snap to z Axis
  • G + z: Snap to z Axis
  • G + x: Snap to x Axis
  • G + y: Snap to x Axis
• Holding shift while modifying an object will decrease the amount of distance traveled by the object when moving the mouse to give increase precision when placing objects.

Scale: s

• Axis can be used to ensure precision
  • s + middle mouse button: Snap to z Axis
  • s + z: Snap to z Axis
  • s + x: Snap to x Axis
  • s + y: Snap to x Axis
• s + ctrl: Increase by a single unit of current grid
• Holding shift while modifying an object will lower the amount of scale applied to allow for smaller changes in scale.

Rotate: r

• Axis can be used to ensure precision
  • r + middle mouse button: Snap to z Axis
  • r + z: Snap to z Axis
  • r + x: Snap to x Axis
  • r + y: Snap to x Axis
• Holding shift while modifying an object will slow the rotation for more precise control.

Rotation Point

Yellow point when selecting an object is the rotation point, or center of mass indicator

• Helpful to reset to object to ensure that rotation is easy
• Right Click → Set Origin → Origin to Geometry

Reset Rotation

Alt + R : Reset rotation to ensure axis alignment isn’t all whack when trying to adjust the position of a leaning or tilting object already in the scene

Inputs for Modeling

The following shortcuts assume that the object has been selected and is the active object prior to being pressed:

Open Add menu: shift + a

Helpful shortcut for bringing up the Add menu

Scale by Grid Unit

Press s for scale tool, then press a numberic key on the numpad to increase the scale by that amount.

• For example, pressing s, then pressing 8 on the numpad will expand the scale of the selected object to be as large as 8 units of the current scene’s grid

Switch Model View (Object / Edit)

Tab switches from Layout to Model view When in Edit mode:

• p: Seperate selected object into separate object

Vertices / Edges / Faces

Pressing the 1, 2, and 3 buttons on the keyboard will change to the corresponding view:

• 1: Vertices
• 2: Edges
• 3: Faces

Bevel Model

Press ctrl + b to enter into Bevel mode

• Pressing V while in Bevel mode tells Blender to bevel on the selected vertex
• The middle button scroll wheel on the mouse can be used to increase the number of points, folds, and edges to be applied before perfoming the bevel action on the object.

Knife Tool: k

• Set points over model
• Pressing z will cut through entire selected object rather then the face
• Pressing Enter is needed to complete the action

Show / Hide

Pressing Alt + H will toggle hide/show for selected object and unselected objects

Duplicate: shift + d

• Pressing right click will allow you to snap it back to the original position

X-Ray: alt + z

ALT + Z turns on X-ray, then click drag for selection and it will grab everything rather only the visible parts of an object based by view

Fill In: f

• May not immediately complete the whole, will vary based on geometry

Loop Cut: ctrl + r

• Blender Manual Reference
• Select the number of cuts to make, then after making this selection the position of the cut becomes selectable
  • Precision cut mode occurs first
    • Mouse wheel to increase/decrease the number of cuts
  • After number of cuts is determined, then the placement of those cuts is required.
  • Pressing Enter after placing the lines where cuts are desired
• ctrl + r: Increase # of Loop Cuts with Scroll → Scale →
• ctrl and + will expand the current selection on an object while ctrl and - will decrease the selection
• Scale on Edges allows for the movement of multiple lines

Select Multiple Objects

• Shift + Alt + Click to select multiple
• Ctrl + Click on face to select every face in the loop
  • Blender Manual Reference
  • Can be tricky to achieve when we attempted to do this initially.
    • If the selection just won’t happen then there is likely a topology issue occurring. The mesh may look fine to the eye, but to confirm the topology isn’t duplicated try doing Merge by distance (M → By Distance). This often helps to show how many verts/faces/etc there are and loop selection can succeed after this.
      • For the source of this info, we found this Reddit thread helpful:
        • https://www.reddit.com/r/blenderhelp/comments/14dk289/loop_select_not_working/
  • Also recommend grabbing individual vertices and moving them around to make sure things are connected as expected.

Extrude tool: alt + e

• Other options are avaible, allowing the expandion to be more finely controlled
• Along Normals option can help when extruding is happening along unexpected axis
• alt + e when Extrude tool is engaged to open menu
  • Select Extrude Along Normals
    • Allows for the extrude to occur along the objects oriented axis rather then applying the viewport axis to all selected objects

Extrude Region Reference:

• https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/meshes/tools/extrude_region.html
  • Shortcut is E, helps with expanding surfaces

Insert tool: i

• Adds geometry onto face that is selected

Subdivide

Subdivide has a UI element that will appear, which can allow for multiple subdivisions via slider rather then multiple inputs

Proportional Editing Hotkey: o

• Anything in the circle will be impacted by selection

Texturing

The Shading tab at top of UI toolbar in Blender is where a majority of texturing controls are located.

There is also a Node editor at the bottom allows control of the material applied to the object.

Node Overview and Configuration

Array Node

Array allows for the creation of an additional object, adds it along an edge

• Increasing Count will add more duplicates

Selecting Nodes in the Outliner

• shift + left click to select multiple
• Show and hide commands also work, just press h to hide the currently selected elements.

Solidify Node

Solidify in the AddModifier view of a selected object will let you widen the mesh, thickening it essentialls

Decimator

• Takes geometry and attempts to reduce or add meshes

Principled BSDF

This is the default material applied when creating a new material in Blender.

• Metallic property adds metal properties to the object when rendering its surface

  • This is usually 0 or 1, but can be between values for semi-metallic or reflective surfaces.

• However, Specular (with 0 set for Roughness) will become a fully reflective glass surface when rendered

• ctrl + l for linking materials to multiple objects

  • Allows for one material to control several objects material properties
  • Select the objects you wish to update first then make the very last selection be the object with the material that is desired.

Slots

The Slot dropdown menu at the bottom of the user interface allows several materials to be assigned to an object

• However, these new textures wont be applied to the object at first.
  • Go into Edit mode and select the parts of the object that you want to apply the next texture to → then select assign in the slot dropdown
  • Helpful hintL: ctrl + + expands selection outwards from current selection

Image Texture

Image Texture is a node that is connected to Base Color of the Principled BSDF

• Allows for the map to be added in, likely not highly visible in the final render

Color Ramp

Color Ramp node is essentially the gradiant option, and it works pretty muth like the most drawing software’s gradient tools. Multiple points can be added and new colors can be selected with each new point that is added.

Lighting & Compositing

Area Light

• Power controls how much light pools into the scene
• Can scale and reposition for wider exposure of light and to control the direction of the light

Create Isocam

• Addon for enforcing isometric view lock for camera placement

Point Light

• Can exist outside scene with direction pointed into the scene
• Similar controls, power for light strength and allows for color selection

Free Select Light

Shift + T : while selected on a light to grab and point freely

• Great for setting spot lights

Shade Smooth for Reducing Faces Visibility on Objects

Shade Smooth → then go to triangle side menu on right side of Blender’s user interface, and set Auto Smooth to true.

• This is an alternative way to smooth low-poly models and give more of a painterly quality to the scene.

Render Image of Current Scene

• F12 to render quick photo of the scene from current camera position

• Can add filters to rendered photo to add pop or emphasze the painterly quality of the smooth shading if used

Lighting and Compositing Tips & Observations

Switching back into camera view helps a lot with ensuring lighting is being applied as expected. Lots of futz’n about in the scene to get everything looking pretty when setting up lights.

Dark scene without a lot of light requires more samples to render details accurately, but well lit scenes can get by without so many samples