You'll need to have Blender downloaded first though. The site to find it at is: http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/ Try to get version 2.45, it's the most bug-free version. Here is the first one:
Lesson One: What are all those little thingies?
Okay, so you've just opened up Blender 2.45, and as one tutorial put it, it looks "like the console of an alien spaceship." Well, do not despair; you will soon be familiar with what a lot of those doohickies do. There are a couple of useful things you can learn right off the bat just by looking at the screen in front of you...Now don't touch anything or you'll mess up this tutorial.
1. There should be a little box in the center of a grid with a purple outline around it. The box is actually a cube and you're staring straight at one side. The purple outline around the box indicates that the box is the object which you have selected. If an object is deselected, you can tell because there won't be a purple outline around it.
2. There is also a fat black dot surrounded by a ring surrounded by a dashed ring. This is a light source for your scene, but it will only light your scene in the Blender program, not in Uru. You have to do something special to your objects (objects are things like the cube) so that the light will affect them in Uru, but we'll figure that one out later.
3. There is also a little pyramid, the bottom of which is pointing at your cube. This pyramid is the camera. Want to know what the camera sees? Well, up at the top of your screen you'll see this little bar that has the menu options "File Add Timeline Game Render Help." Well, click on "Render" and choose "Render Current Frame." There's the cube, all lit up by the light source.
4. In the center of the cube, you'll also notice the green arrow pointing upwards and the red arrow pointing right. And although it's hard to see, that blue dot in the very center of the cube, where the green and red arrows intersect, is actually another arrow which is blue. It is pointing straight out towards you. These arrows are the X, Y, and Z arrows like you'd find in an ordinary three dimensional graph. The arrows are color coded, so that Red = X, Green = Y, and Blue = Z. It even rhymes: RGB = XYZ. These arrows are awfully useful, especially when you're rotating one of your objects around to get it in the right orientation. At the bottom left of the grid window, you can also see a little set of arrows which parallel the directions in which the big arrows point. Handily the little arrows are labeled X, Y, or Z. Of course you can only see the Y and X arrows right now, since the Z arrow is coming straight out of the screen towards you.
5. Finally, look in the very center of the cube and you'll see a candy cane striped ring and a black cross hairs. This little thingy is called the 3D cursor. It's good for two things: placing objects, and moving the center of your POV. We'll see how to do these very useful things in the next few tutorials.
And the second:
Lesson Two: Wonderful Windows and Nice Navigation
I would do a quick reread of Lesson 1 to refamiliarize yourself with it before beginning this tutorial; it'll help cement the knowledge in your brain.
In your own Blender window, you can't see much of the User Preferences window (blue) right now, because it's hiding up at the top of the screen and you can only see its dark blue header. If you want to see the whole User Preferences window, put your mouse where the upper yellow arrow is pointing on my screenshot, at the edge along where the red 3D View window ends and the dark blue header begins. There should be a black double arrow. When you see the arrow, you can click and drag down to pull the blue User Preferences window down and into full view.
So, in the header bars, see where I added those big purple arrows that point at the little box which all of the windows have? That little box is what you use to pick out what window you want to see. Go ahead and click on that little box and take a look at the list that pops up. Oooh... Look, you can see the 3D View window, the Buttons window, and the User Preferences window in the list. Try an experiment: In all three boxes, click the User Preferences window option and make all the windows into User Preferences windows. Neato, huh? Now change the windows back to their normal state. We'll be using the other types of windows later for making fog, doing texturing, and making other special Uru stuff like link-in points and swim regions, although for now we only need the three window types we already have.
Okay, that's enough with the windows for now. Let's figure out how to get the view we want to see in the 3D View window (red). This is a really important subject, since you'll be spending tons of your time in Blender orienting yourself and your objects and checking out how things look from different perspectives. To get you started in trying out what sorts of navigation you can do, just look at the dark red header for the 3D View window and click "View." In that menu, go to the option "View Navigation." Here you can find all the basic navigation options that you'll need. You could do all your navigation just using this menu. Unfortunately, that method is pretty inconvenient and doesn't give you the fine control you'll want later on. Did you play with the "Camera Fly Mode" option? Cool, huh?
Now for the convenient way to navigate. So, do you have a 1 button mouse, a two button mouse, a three button mouse, or two button mouse with a wheel? Note: I personally have a two button mouse with a wheel, and I'm not sure how the other mice will work; I looked in the Wikipedia book "Blender: from Noob to Pro" for the following information--so let me know if something doesn't work for your mouse type. And I have absolutely no idea what to do with a one button mouse.
Anyway, let's try doing a "free form rotation." It's called free form because you don't lock one of the axes (the X, Y, or Z axes) when you rotate--for example, you don't lock the Z axis so that you only rotate around in the XY plane and not in the Z plane. In free form rotation you can rotate around in every which way, with no axis locked. Click and hold down the middle mouse button and drag it around in order to rotate your view about. Or, if you don't have a middle mouse button, or you use your middle mouse button for something other than navigation, you can try this tip from "Blender: from Noob to Pro": "If you have your own setting for the middle mouse button in mouse configuration, you must reset this to use the middle mouse button as a real middle mouse button (no Doubleclick or something else). Otherwise you must use the alternate Alt + left mouse button for the same effect." With any luck you should now be able to see the cube from any angle you want.
Ah, but suppose you want to pan your view of the cube from the left side of your screen to the right side or from the bottom of the screen to the top? Well, if you have a middle mouse button or mouse wheel, hold down the shift button and then the middle button or wheel and drag your mouse around to move your view. There's also a keyboard alternative, but it's not nearly as convenient. First make sure Num Lock is on. Now hold down the ctrl button and then in the number pad press 8, 4, 2, or 6 to pan in various directions. (Just a tip for future reference--if the number pad keys aren't doing what they're supposed to do, it's probably because Num Lock isn't on.) There's also a nice way to get something centered on your screen with the 3D cursor, that candy cane striped ring with the black cross hairs. Go ahead and click anywhere on the screen with the left mouse button. See, you can put the 3D cursor wherever you want it. Now press the "c" key, "c" for center. Ooh, you can center your screen at the 3D cursor. Nice feature, eh? I know I'm telling you a lot of ways to do the same thing, and you don't need to know them all. Just pick out the one that feels most convenient and that works for your mouse configuration.
Lastly, there's zooming. If you have a scroll wheel, you can scroll in and out with it. You can also use ctrl + the middle mouse button to zoom in and out, or on the number pad, press the + or - buttons. It's as simple as that.
For a more detailed look at scrolling, panning, and zooming, check out: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/The_3D_Viewport_Window
And if you want to restore a nice head on view (a "perfect view") of the cube, then on the number pad, press 1, 7, or 3 to get the front, top, and right side views, or the press ctrl 1, ctrl 7, or ctrl 3 buttons to view the back, bottom, and left side views. These are pretty handy when (for example) you're trying to exactly place an object like a tree, wall, or rock, and you need to see if the bottom of the object is actually going into the ground or if it's embedded into the side of something else. You'll quickly see what I mean when you begin modeling a scene. Just trust me for now, the perfect views will be very useful.
Okay, this should hopefully provide everything you need to know in order to navigate around and view your scene from whatever perspective you want.
Thanks for the help!
