Basics of Blender

[sfunk]

Important Basics
(if you see a letter inside quotes (example "p") means you press p on the keyboard)
Select objects or faces,vertices,edges- right mouse click
Rotate World-Hold down scroll wheel on mouse and move mouse around
Move world(left,right,up,down)- Shift+left mouse click
Grab/move object- press "g"
Rotate Object-press "r"
Stop function you are doing and have move back to original- right click
Scale object size- press "s"
use increments of grid while transforming object- "ctrl" key
Select/deselect all-press "a"
Extrude object-press "e"
Delete-press "x"
Add objects- Shift+"a"
Duplicate-Shift+"d"

Modeling:
Selecting desired mesh: to start off, you’ll more than likely want to use more than just the default cube given to you when you open the program, so just right click the cube and hit “x” or “delete” on your keyboard and hit “enter”. Now to get a new mesh to work with, hit “shift+a” which will bring up a drop list wherever your mouse is located(make sure to have your mouse inside the viewport A.K.A. the area where your objects are seen). If you don’t like this method of getting new mesh, just go to the top menu bar where “file is normally located on every program. Right beside that should be a tab that says “add”. You can select the desired mesh from that drop menu as well.
Editing mesh part 1: now to edit the mesh that you have chosen, right click the object in your viewport and hit “tab”. This will bring you into edit mode which the whole object will become highlighted. An alternative method to get between edit mode and object mode (object mode being the mode you start in) is going towards the bottom left corner of your screen and looking at the second tool bar from the bottom, it will say object mode, click it and choose desired mode.
Editing mesh part 2: once you have your mesh and are in edit mode, you can now manipulate your objects in three main ways. Either by vertices, edges, or faces. This can be switched by looking at the same tool bar where mode select is toggled and going over to where it says “Global”. To the right of that is the first choice of vertices control, the next is edge select and the third being face. What these mean if you have the vertices control highlighted, if you where to right click on any vertices on your object in the view port, it would become highlighted, which then can be manipulated by using “s” “r” “e” or any other manipulator key(s=scale, r=rotate, e=extrude) so edge select and face select follow suit and done the same way as the vertices was.
Editing mesh part 3: if you are wondering about how to move a highlighted object on a certain axis, well look right here. Once you have the object highlighted and choose the specific manipulation you want such as scale or rotate, just press x, y, or z which all correspond to their own axis.(z=blue line, x=red line, y=green line).



Texturing:
Step one: Remember this is what I found to work best for me, I’m sure you could do it another way, if not, this is a good start. Start off by highlighting the desired object to be textured and go into “edit mode” as in if you were going to modify the object. Select the faces you want to be textured (or if you want the full object just press “a” to highlight the entire object.
Step two: Once you have the desired area highlighted, if it is a round object you may want to go back and create seems(which is done by normally right clicking the edges where you think it will be ideal to split the object apart to texture then press “ctrl+E” then select mark seam in the drop down menu it gives.make sure to press these keys while the mouse is in the viewport.) Now highlight everything again.
Step three: Now once you have the desired highlighted and marked seems which should show in red, when can go into UV editing. To get to this, go to the top tool bar on the screen and right between where it says “help” and “default” should be a little box with three white boxes inside of it, click on this, then choose UV editing.
Step four: once in the UV editing, click the new button in the bottom toolbar on the left side of the screen, then select “ok” when the little box pops up. Now click the UV tab and select “unwrap” you can either export the UV or texture the object in blender. Since I never exported the UV (which I heard gives better results)but never felt like doing, I’ll just say how I do it.
Step five: Now what I do is click the “image” tab and open an image I want to use to texture with. I then move the unwrapped UV to fit on the image as if you were in edit mode. This tells the UV to grab the image from that image you have opened, so if you have everything in the correct space, you are now ready for the next step.
Step Six: Go to where you got to the UV editing mode and select Default from that menu. If you want to see what that UV unwrap we just did affected, go to right of where you select between object and edit mode, there should be a box that has a little sphere on it, click that and choose textured and you will see the texture on your object. However, you are still not done.
Step Seven: Now go to the tool bar that fills up the right side of the screen and look in the little horizontal tabs until you find “material” it’s a little red sphere. Click the new button then click on the tab exactly right of where you found the material tab which should look like a little checkered board that says “texture” when the mouse hovers over it.
Step Eight: This is where the important stuff happens, Click new and then right below that pops up type, select “image or movie”. Now scroll down until you find the image panel, open the exact same picture you used to texture the object. Now go to “image mapping” panel and it will say “extension” and repeat right beside that, change repeat to “extend”. Lastly go to the “Mapping” panel and it will say coordinates with a drop menu by it, from that drop menu select UV. And now you can convert the model however you heart desires.