The Blender Interface and Workflow

Blender is free, open-source software for modelling, sculpting, texturing, rendering, animation and more. This track assumes the 3D Modeling Fundamentals concepts and uses Blender 4.x conventions; menus move occasionally between versions.

Navigation

Laptop without a numpad? Enable "Emulate Numpad" and "Emulate 3 Button Mouse" in Preferences → Input.

Modes and essential shortcuts

Editors and workspaces

Every area of the screen can be any editor: 3D Viewport, Outliner (scene hierarchy), Properties (modifiers, materials, render settings), Shader Editor, UV Editor, Timeline. Workspace tabs (Layout, Modeling, Sculpting, UV Editing, Shading) arrange editors for each task.

Good habits

• Set units first: Scene Properties → Units (metric, millimetres for printing).
• Name objects in the Outliner and organise them into collections.
• Save often; enable File → Save Versions, and keep incremental files (mug_v01.blend, mug_v02.blend).
• Learn one shortcut a day; speed comes from shortcuts.

Exercise

Set up a scene in millimetres, add a cube, scale it to 40 × 40 × 10 mm using the sidebar, bevel its edges, and organise three objects into named collections. Navigate using only shortcuts.

Check yourself

• How do you constrain a move to the X axis?
• Which shortcut searches any command?
• Why set scene units before modelling?