So, this is Blender. It can do 3D modeling, texturing, lighting, shading, and rendering. And I’m going to show you how to do all of those things whilst you make your very own doughut. And I know this looks complex and challenging, but I promise you it is achievable for even a complete beginner that has never opened Blender such as yourself. And I know this because millions of beginners have already made their doughnut because this is the fifth version of this tutorial. I remake it for every major Blender release. This one for Blender 5.0. And speaking of which, if you have already made a donut from a previous version, rather than make another one, I’ve actually just released a course designed for postdonut beginners. So, if you’re interested in that, you can click the link below. For everybody else, you need to download Blender. So, if you haven’t already, click the link below. That’ll take you to blender.org and then just hit the big download button. Now, if you’re on Windows, that’ll download an executable, which you should install. If you’re on a Mac, it’s an application
[00:01:01] you drag to your applications folder. And also, if you’re at school or you’re on a work computer that won’t let you install anything, you can still use Blender. If you download the portable zip version of Blender, then just unzip it. You can run Blender from the folder. Pretty cool. Anyway, however you got Blender, open it, and you should see this. Then just click anywhere off the splash screen to close it. And you’re in Blender. Hey, welcome. So this big section, this big gray area here, this is your 3D viewport. And it’s where you’ll spend probably 98% of your time because it’s the it’s the 3D world. Whether you’re making a character, you’re building an environment, it all happens right here. Um, so the first thing you need to learn is how to move around in this space. And you can orbit by middle mouse pushing. So your scroll wheel, if you just push it in until it clicks, that’s your middle mouse button. And then if you just drag that around,
[00:02:00] you can orbit. If you don’t have a middle mouse button, a lot of people don’t. They’re on like a laptop with a trackpad or something. You guys will struggle. It’s definitely easier if you have a mouse. Uh but in a pinch, top right hand corner, you just mouse over this little circle and then just click and drag on that. Um that’ll do the same thing. Or the third alternative way to do it, edit preferences and then underneath input emulate threeb button mouse and then if you hold down alt and then leftclick drag um that will do the same thing. I don’t want that. By the way, whilst I am here, a value that you will want to change if you’re on a 4K monitor, you will probably have noticed that like Blender looks like this where like everything is really super tiny and you have to squint to see it. So, underneath interface, I change my resolution scale to at least a 1.5. Um, usually like 1.8. Um, but for tutorials, I go even higher so you can really see everything, but it’s obviously much easier to use when you can see things clearly. Okay, so middle mouse drag, that’s how you orbit around. You can see
[00:03:00] we’re focusing on our cube at the moment, though. So, how do we move to somewhere else? You do that by shift middle mouse drag, and that will pan you somewhere else. You can also over here on the the side there, click that little hand. That will do the same thing. But yeah, shift middle mouse drag or middle mouse drag to orbit. And what about zoom? You can probably guess, you might have already done it by mistake, but just zooming by scrolling in and out on your wheel. Or again, you can go to the little magnifying glass there. Just click on that and do that. Or alternatively, control middle mouse and then that will also move you in as well. So, I’ve thrown a lot of keyboard shortcuts at you already. Middle mouse for this, shift, middle mouse to pan, um, scroll. If you don’t want to have to remember all the hotkeys, cuz I’m going to throw a lot more at you. If you don’t want to have to write them down yourself, I have done it for you. So, I put together a Google doc with all of the most common hotkeys and short key shortcuts that you might need to use.
[00:04:00] Um, and it’s free. So, just click the link below and you can, um, print it out, you can stick it on your wall. Um, a lot of people do that and it’s u big time saver. Okay, now it’s really common to like get lost like one way is to like end up upside down like this and then you’re like which way is up? How do I, you know, if you just over here these little um these little this gizmo thing, these these colored circle things with lines, those are your axes. So if you just click on one of those, that’ll reorient yourself. So the Z, that’s the top axis. And then you just you’re back, right? you know which way is up because it’s it’s it’s that way, right? Which way that one is pointing. Another way, like if you got like really off into the weeds, like you were over here, and then you’re like, “How do I how do I get back to where I was?” Um, if you’ve got an object selected and you just want to focus on like just fly to it, um, and this is a really common hotkey. You use it all the time. Uh, it’s numpad period, and that’ll just fly you to that. If you don’t have a numpad, like even a lot of
[00:05:01] keyboards today, they don’t sell them with numpads anymore, I guess, cuz people aren’t accountants. They don’t need to quickly type in numbers. But I love them cuz it’s really useful for Blender. Um, if you don’t have one, [laughter] um, you can also use the tilda key, which is that little key underneath your escape key. So, if you hold that down and then just drag over where it says view selected and then release, that’ll do the exact same thing. So, that is how you can quickly change focus to the selected object. Um, and yeah, as I said, you do this all the time. Um, but yeah, I’m going to be using numpad period from now on. Okay, so we’re making a donut. We do not need our cube here. So, let’s delete it. You can just hit delete on your keyboard. Um, or what I like to do is hit X, which is the alternative way. And, um, it’s just easier cuz my finger is like right there. I know it’s another hotkey to remember, but you delete stuff a lot as well, and it’s helpful to not have to find that key. So, X, and then delete.
[00:06:01] And now I want to add a new object. And I can do that by going to add at the top of the screen there. Or alternatively, the hotkey, another one to throw at you, shift A, and that’ll just put it wherever your cursor is. And it’s the exact same list. But this list here is, I mean, it’s extensive. There’s stuff in here that I have never used in my 21 years of using Blender. speaker. Never ever used it. Don’t know what it’s for. Um, most of the time what you’re looking for is underneath mesh. So, these are your primitive mesh objects. And generally, when you’re making something, you pick one of these that most resembles or is closest to what it is you’re making. Like, if you’re making a mailbox, you might start with a cube. You’re making a a lamp post, you might start with a cylinder. We’re starting. Well, we’re trying to make a donut. So, we need to start with a Taurus, which is basically a donut. Look at that. So, that’s cool. It’s a wimpy looking donut though, right? It’s very, very flimsy. We want to make it look uh more thicker,
[00:07:02] right? So, in the bottom left hand corner, there’s a little box that says add Taurus. And this has additional options for us. Now, if you accidentally clicked off after you added the Taurus, that box is gone. Um, you can momentarily bring it back by hitting F9, but that’s only if you haven’t changed something. So, essentially, yeah, it it’s called the last used function in Blender. So, immediately after you do an action in Blender, sometimes you see in the bottom lefthand corner additional options which you can tweak and change things if you need. So, if you don’t see it, it just means you’ve done something else and it’s gone. Um, but yeah, you can bring it back uh momentarily by hitting F9 sometimes, but I usually just like redo it. Um, anyways, so first thing I want to change is uh the size of this thing. So, it is 1 m, which is like 3 ft for the Americans. It’s a big donut. Um, probably shouldn’t be that big. It should be about 10% of that. So, 0.1, which is 10 cm, roughly about that. And then if I zoom in by scrolling
[00:08:01] forward, I just need to change my minor radius until it looks somewhat like a donut. So I want to just uh orbit up right and around. So I’m just middle mouse moving so I can see the inside. Then I’ll just scroll in like so until Yeah. And I’m just going to change this value until it looks like uh like a donut. Now you can see as I move this like it’s going really quick and I can’t get it on the right value. So, when you’re clicking and dragging on a value in Blender, if you hold down shift, that will use smaller increments. [clears throat] Um, and that’s another one you use all the time. Um, because it’s, uh, yeah, sometimes you need small values and it’s helpful to get smaller increments like that. So, that’s pretty good. I might go with that. Yeah, about a 057. Okay. And then the other thing you can change here is like the resolution of the donut. Um, you know, you can go like really PlayStation one graphics maybe.
[00:09:00] Um, I’m going to keep it at 48, but I’m going to increase the other one to about Yeah, let’s go 18 like that. Um, 16, 18. Yeah, we’ll go 18. Um, and that’s just a little bit more resolution, and it’s just going to help us a little bit later on when we start to shape um the donut. Okay. But once I’ve got that, I can just click off. And now those options are gone. We’ve committed. That’s it. That is the starting point of our donut. Now, the next thing you’re probably wondering is it still kind of looks like PlayStation One graphics, Andrew. Um, and that’s because it has flat shading. So, basically, there’s two states for a mesh. Um, there’s smooth shading or there is flat shading, and it defaults to flat. If you want to change it to smooth, you just rightclick the object and then go shade smooth like that. And there we go. It’s fixed. So it basically shades smooth without getting too technical. Anytime there is like two faces, it just kind of smooths out that point like fakery. So it’s not actually
[00:10:02] adding any additional computation times which is important. Um but it’s appearing to the eye to be smooth. Okay. So um in previous doughnut versions we would uh start making the icing. And although that’s fun to make like dribbling icing, um it can be a little complicated. a lot of users uh ran into their first uh roadblocks at that that time. So instead, we’re going to do something a little bit easier to start with um and more practical, and that’s to make a coffee mug. So, we need to add in a new object, which if you can remember from before, it’s the add menu at the top there, or the hotkey as I like to use, shift A. And then underneath mesh, you’re looking for something that most resembles the object you’re trying to create. No prizes for guessing, the cylinder. Okay. So, it comes in very very big. It’s uh completely engulfing our donut. So, again, in the bottom lefthand corner. Uh click that little add cylinder. And then I’m going to change the radius first of all just to bring this back. You can
[00:11:01] like do this after the fact like resize something. Um but it just helps to, you know, at this point see it all together. Um I think I’m going to make it around holding down shift and just kind of drag it back and forth. Yeah, about.13 or exactly.13. Uh and then the depth. This is just the height of it. And again, you can change this later on, but just want to see it roughly the right size. The big one that’s important is the vertices. And we’re actually going to make this look more low res. Now, why would we make it look more low res? Um cuz now it’s obviously very jagged. The reason for this is that very soon we’re going to be adding in something called a subsurf modifier, which adds over the top of our existing mesh. it adds more geometry like it doubles the geometry and it kind of smooths it out. So actually if you start too high like this then you’re adding like doubling that geometry and doubling it again and then you can quickly end up with something that’s too computationally heavy. So when you’re working and you know you’re going to be
[00:12:01] doing something subdiv sometimes it helps to start like chunkier low res. Um anyway just just trust me and set it to uh 14 like that. Okay great. So, we’ve got another object and they are completely overlapping. So, how do we separate things? Um, some of you might already know this. You can guess right left hand side there, there’s a tool that looks like it would be able to move something. It’s the move tool. So, this is one way to move things. You activate that and you get this little gizmo. And look, I can move it and I can separate them. Um, so this is moving things along the axes. Um, you can also uh just drag on that uh click and drag on that little white circle there. And then that’s like freehand uh drag around. I will say most Blender users don’t actually use and move things this way because it’s a lot of effort every time you want to move something to like go to the sidebar, activate the tool, you know, click it, move it. It’s like most people don’t do
[00:13:00] that. Instead, they remember the hotkey and the hotkey to move in Blender. And you’ll be using this a lot. So again, this is on my keyboard shortcut. Um, it’s it’s all in there. But the hotkey is G. G for grab. Now, you will notice very quickly that when you tap G, the moment you tap it, you are already in the move state. So, it’s now attached to my cursor even though I didn’t click. Okay. So, and here’s the other thing. My cursor could be on the other side of the screen. Doesn’t have to be anywhere near the object. And then the moment you tap G, it’s now anchored to that cursor. Um, and even more I I think it’s cool when you go to the other side of the screen, it actually your cursor appears on the other side. So it’s just like an infinitely repeating um thing there. [clears throat] But at first this is like hard to wrap your head around because Blender does this for a lot of things like not just moving something but also rotating something. The moment I tap R, which is how to rotate something, or S. Okay, that’s I thought
[00:14:00] I might as well just teach you all three at the same time. So, G to move something, G for grab, R to rotate, or S to scale something. But you’ll see in each of those states, the moment you hit the key, no matter where your cursor is, it’s uh it’s in that state. And that’s actually a good thing because as I said, the number of times you need to move things and rotate and scale things in 3D, if you had to every single time change the tool, then move your cursor over to it, click it, activate it, that’s a lot of extra steps. So, it’s actually really cool to have this like just one tap key and it’s already activated. Um, [clears throat] anyways. Okay. So, but uh whilst I’m in uh the move state by tapping G, um I can also uh lock it to a specific axis just like um with with those arrows that you saw before. So, just when it’s in that move state, you tap the the axis you want to move it on. So, that’s the X axis. The Y brings it back and forwards and the Z is um up and down. Okay. And that’s correct. Blender is Z up, Y backwards
[00:15:02] and forwards. Different 3D applications have different things. There’s no like standard. But yeah, that’s how Blenders is. And by the way, if you forget which letter is which axis, you can actually see them up there in that little circle there. So again, X, Y, and uh and Z. Anyways, I want to move this actually just a little bit further back right there. So I want my my donut to be the uh front and center, and I want this to be at the back there. But then, how do I change my view? So I’m no longer just pivoting on my donut. I want to shift my focus to that selected object. It’s number pad period or again holding down that tilda key under your escape button and then hitting uh view selected is the same thing. Okay. So let’s make this look like a coffee mug. So we have to edit this object. And uh to edit an object we have to change what mode we are in. So in the top leftand corner of the screen there’s a little drop down which if you click we can change it into
[00:16:00] edit mode. Okay. So when you’re in edit mode you can see the state has changed. The object that was selected now has a bunch of points and lines on it. Um and you’ll also notice whilst you’re in edit mode, you can’t actually select any object. And it’s it’s worth pointing out this because this is a really common thing. A lot of beginners, they they say, “I I don’t know what happened, but I couldn’t select anything in Blender.” And usually it’s just they’re in the wrong state. They’re in edit mode. They forgot. And then they tried to like come over here and then click something and they’re like, “Why is it not selecting?” Okay, so you have to be in object mode if you want to select an object. And if you want to edit something, you have to be in edit mode. Um, but going to this dropown and doing this time and again would uh again be annoying. So, Blender, of course, has a hotkey for it, and that is tab. So, tab will just cycle you in and out of object and edit mode, just those two states. Um, which is great
[00:17:00] because you need to use this all the time. So, you usually come in, do some editing, uh, go back into object mode, select something else, edit that one, go back to this. Um, so that’s, uh, yeah, good one to remember. Tab. All right. So, in edit mode, when I’m in this state here, these little points here, these are called vertices. These are the points that make up the um yeah, the shape of the mesh, obviously. Um and then you’ve got um edges. And uh you can actually select um by changing the selection type from vertices, which is the default, to edges, clicking that little button. And then I can click on the edges or select faces. Okay? Like this. And again, Blender has hotkeys for everything. So, if you want to just know the hotkey, it’s one to do verticy select, two to do edge select, and then three to do face select. Again, make sure you get my keyboard shortcut shortcut guide cuz it’s uh it’s a lot to remember. So, I want to select the top
[00:18:00] of this uh cup here. It’s got a lid on it that I don’t want. So, se in face select mode. Selecting that face, I’m going to hit X. Now, it’s going to ask me what part do you want to delete? Um, which might sound redundant, but there is quite a lot of times in Blender you want to delete, even though you’ve selected a bunch of faces, you want to delete the entire vertices of those faces. So, we have to confirm. We want to delete just the faces from this list. And there we go. So, we’ve now got a cup with a hole in it. Great. But this cup will not do. It is too paper thin. We could cut our finger on that edge there. So, we need to add some thickness to this cup. And while we could do this in edit mode, like you could select everything and extrude it in and whatnot, um, we don’t need to because there is actually a function we can do to add thickness to anything without needing to go into edit mode. And that is underneath your modifier stack here. So, if you click this little wrench, this little activate modifiers. Let’s
[00:19:00] just drag this out. And if you click add modifier at the top there, you can see you’ve got a number of different options. Um, and the one that we’re looking for is solidify. So, this is underneath the generate and just in case this changes for a future version of Blender, you can also go to search at the top there and you could just type in um solidify from the list. Okay, so now now that we’ve got that, you can see we’ve got a bunch of options and you’ll notice that our mesh now has some thickness to it. And I can change this thickness here. Now watch what happens as I enter into edit mode. You will notice as I select these faces here, I can’t select this thick this inside part of the uh of the cup there. And that’s an important point because modifiers are not actually adjusting the real mesh. So the real mesh still exists here. Um if I disable this from the viewport by clicking this little um monitor button there, you’ll see that my mesh has not changed. This is just applying this effect after the fact. So, it’s
[00:20:01] basically in object mode. It’s taking whatever mesh that you give it, which is this, and then it’s adding thickness to every face essentially. Um, so the reason this is um so useful is that this is a non-destructive workflow. So, I could at any point I could be doing a bunch of changes to my my mug here. I could, you know, we’ll get to all that later on. We could change the size and things and then later on I can go m you know what, I don’t I think that’s a little bit too thick. I’m going to change that and I can come back to that and very quickly um adjust it. So non-destructive and it’s obviously very helpful um for a lot of things. [snorts] Okay. So I’ve given it some thickness, but I also want to round um this corner here. That’s way too jagged. Just like before I said I we want to um we’re going to add in an extra layer on top which adds more geometry. And that is called your uh add modify generate subdivision surface. So yeah, all the way down there. You use it all the time,
[00:21:00] but it’s like buried in there. Okay, so subdivision surface. So this appears to have like screwed up the mesh. It’s like, wo, what actually happened there? Let’s just increase the uh levels viewport. So this is just increasing the number of times that it um doubles the geometry. So you can see this is what we start with, right? This is the the start. This is one level. Then this is two levels. And then this is three levels. And every time you do it, it’s doubling the geometry. Um, and but you can see it’s giving us the effect we want. It’s smoothing out that edge there. But because of the way that it works, like basically if you look at uh let’s go back to this. Um, we’ve got this this hard corner here, right? It’s just like a 90° corner. So let me get in a little bit closer here so you can kind of see it. Um, yeah, it’s like a 90° perfectly like that. So, when you add in a subdivision surface, it’s basically saying, okay, so there’s a point here, there is a point all the way over here, and there is a point that’s going to go
[00:22:00] all like it’s it’s so far it’s off the screen, but it’s all the way down there. So, what I need to do is I need to average out those points. So, take the middle point of those three. So, essentially from here to somewhere around here. And I’m going to add in a point like here, right? And then if you do another level, like level two, it then places a point here. And then another point here. And then if you do another level, it places another point here, another point here, another point here. And because there’s two sides to this um uh mug, there’s like another one happening on that side, right? So we’ve now just got this like really super like ovalshaped edge like this. Okay? Which is why when I turn it on, we get this effect there. So what we first of all need to do in edit mode with our uh mug here. Um so I am in I doesn’t matter what mode I’m actually in here. Um but what I need to do is essentially tighten an edge where that that uh that smoothing is happening. So
[00:23:01] it’s no longer happening from all the way here to smooth it all the way down to there. I want to happen it like just to about there. So I need to add in more geometry onto this mesh here. So to do that uh we need to add a loop cut. That is how you add in another level of uh another edge. So ct controllr will add in this loop cut. I believe you can also find it from the mesh like somewhere in here. [clears throat] Yeah, there you go. Uh edge loop cut and slide if you wanted to look it in there. But it’s yeahr. That’s another one you use all the time. >> [snorts] >> So, when I’m in when I hit CtrlR, it’s it’s saying where do you want to place the cut in this mesh? Um, and I could place it, you know, anywhere anywhere between uh a face essentially. So, I’m going to place it along this middle. So, you do a single click and then it’s saying where do you want to place that vertically on this uh th this this row of of faces essentially. Um, so you can
[00:24:01] see as I bring it towards the top there, it’s tightening that edge there. Okay. And that’s exactly what I want. I want that edge to be much tighter than it was um before. Um so that edge is now looking good. But now what about this one at the bottom there? This one’s looking even worse. We got a lot to fix here. Um but first I need to do another loop cut. So CtrlR and then again single click to confirm I want it on that that uh row of faces. And then I’m just sliding it along until it’s you know roughly about there at the bottom of my mug. Okay. And then you can see it’s like this whole area here, this this face here, it’s become like a like it’s turned it into a star. And not to get too complicated, but basically a subsurf modifier, it has to has to know what to do. And generally, if there’s like faces that are made up of four vertices, this is getting complicated. I can tell it knows what to do. It makes it like nice and smooth. But the moment you have a face that is made up of more than four
[00:25:01] vertices, it’s called an engon. and it doesn’t really know what to do with it. I mean, it does, but you don’t know what it’s going to do. Um, and it just can make things look a little ugly. Endone is kind of like a dirty word in in 3D space. It’s like, h, you never want to have an engon. They are actually useful and they, you know, do have a purpose, but generally generally speaking, they’re good to uh avoid if you don’t know what you’re doing. So, anyway, I should tell you what I’m doing. The the way to fix this is I need to add another loop that kind of just goes around here, right? that. So that way I’ve only got from there to there and then I can have my ugly star or whatever happening underneath my coffee mug. So I need to uh add a loop cut, but I can’t add a loop cut on just a single face. Instead, what I need to do is um it’s called inset to take a single face and then just like add in a loop around that face. And you do that by hitting I. So I and then just like it’s already active. Again, this is the the way why I spent a
[00:26:01] while to explain it. The moment you activate a tool, you’re already in that selection state. So, I hit I and wherever my cursor is, it’s now going like, where do you want to put this inset? Okay. So, I’m just moving it back and forth until I get it. You know, how tight do I want this edge to look? Something like that, maybe. I mean, it’s it’s underneath the coffee mug. doesn’t really matter that much, but um yeah, something something like that. And there we go. So, you can see this looks a lot nicer. [snorts] And again, because we are in a non-destructive workflow, I’ve still got my solidify modifier at the top here, right? I could change the thickness of this. I can make this a really chunky looking coffee mug or a really thin one. Um and that is the benefit of a non-destructive workflow. And then I can also change how how high- res do I want my coffee mug to look. Um, and this is the way to work in 3D. This
[00:27:00] is the best way to do it because, you know, if a client wants you to change something or whatnot, keeping in a flexible um workflow is uh definitely a good place to be. Okay, so we have created the start of a coffee mug and we have also created um a donut. Good time to save. Good time to save. So, file, save as, or shift controls and then save as. So, the way I like to save things, and you might want to copy this, is to um you come up with a name, you know, underscore, whatever. Um, and then you put a number after it, and then you can actually see I’ve already saved my file. Um, I don’t want to override my existing save in case I need to go back to it for whatever reason. So, I just want to add a number to it. And in other softwares, you know, you have to come here and you have to type in the number, right? Not Blender. Blender has a hotkey for everything. If you hit plus or minus on your numpad or on the little uh field
[00:28:00] here, oh, you can’t even see it. I’m right over the top of it right there. This little field, these little plus and minus, it’ll automatically add a number to the end of your um file. Um so that’s yeah, really useful. So, I’m just going to add uh a two there, and I’m going to hit save. All right. So, if you’re watching this in the split version of the tutorial, um you can click here to watch part two. Or if you’re watching the combined single long video at the end, you can just keep on watching. BC go.