Set up Blender and prerequisites - Blender Tutorial

- [Instructor] Before we begin this course, there are a few things we need to do. Namely, download and install Blender and configure it. Now, if you've never downloaded Blender, it's really easy. Just go to blender.org/download and click on the Download, and that'll create an install file for you. Now depending on when you watch this course, this number might be different. It might say 2.91, 95, et cetera. In general, the locations of everything will be about the same and the names of all the buttons and commands will be about the same. Though, when there are big enough version updates, we'll make sure to update this course so that we can stay fresh. If for some reason the proper file didn't download, you can also go ahead and manually pick which version of Blender you want to get, depending on your operating system. Now, if you want to learn a little bit more about Blender before diving into this course, then I recommend you search for my Blender Essential Training course. Depending on what version we're at, you'll see a different number. For example, this says 2.83 and there's a 2.91 coming out pretty soon. Just go ahead and search for Blender Essential Training and this'll give you a nice rundown of how Blender works. Now that you've gone ahead and installed Blender, you might see the splash screen for the very first time. If you've had Blender installed before, you might see something that says Load.2.83 et cetera Settings. Let's go ahead and configure Blender for this course. Now for our purposes, we're going to be using the Blender shortcuts. Although if you've come from Maya, you could also use the industry compatible shortcuts. Mind you though, all of the options that I'm going to be saying are going to use the Blender shortcuts. You could still follow along just by going through the menu. Now, if you lose that splash screen, you can always come up here and go to Splash Screen. And I want to talk about selecting. We're going to be using select by left. Traditionally, Blender used select by right, but for our purposes we're going to use the new default of left. Finally, the spacebar is actually going to be search for our purposes. Blender search is really handy with a spacebar. It's really quick to get to and I recommend you adopt it. Plus, it's also a more of an industry standard. Now, if for some reason you don't see any of that, you can also go to Edit Preferences and this will show a bunch of extra things that we can modify. Let's go up to Interface. If you want, you can make your resolution scale a lot bigger, making Blender fonts and menu items way thicker. You can change this to whatever value you'd like. Under Themes, you can pick different color themes, but we'll be using the default Blender Dark. There are a lot great preferences in here, but let's just focus on a few more important ones. Under Input, you can emulate a num pad. A num pad is really helpful in Blender. It allows you to navigate the viewport very quickly. If you don't have a num pad, it will replace your one through zero keys, above your letter keys, making it possible to navigate the view port quickly. Next, under Keymap, you can go ahead and change the buttons that we talked about earlier, such as spacebar or selecting. All right, just a couple more. Under System, you can go ahead and enable your graphics card, depending on what kind you have. You can adjust how many Undos you have, though I recommend leaving it by default. And if you come down to Save and Load, make sure Auto Save and Auto Run Python Scripts are both on. Auto Save will run every two minutes and really save your butt whenever Blender crashes, and Auto Run Python Scripts will allow the rig that we're creating to run automatically. Okay, that should do it. Now. Let's get into animating a character inside of Blender.