SyB3R - Synthetic Benchmark for 3D Reconstruction
Blender Primer

Introduction to Blender

A complete description of Blender is beyond the scope of this documentation. For an in depth introduction to Blender, the Blender 3D: Noob to Pro wikibook covers almost every aspect and the internet is full of tutorials on how to achieve specific effects. Nontheless a quick "cheat sheet" like introduction is given here.

UI

Scene Graph

In Blender all entities such as lights and meshes are encapsulated by objects. If an object with a mesh or curve is selected, the Tab-key switches between the Object Mode, in which objects can be selected and rearranged, and the edit mode, in which the selected mesh or curve can be edited.

Objects have an orientation and location and can build hierarchies. For example, an object containing the mesh of a lamp can be parent to an object containing a light. Whenever the parent is moved or rotated, the child inherits this transformation. Objects can also be "Empty", as in not contain a mesh, light, curve, camera, or similar. These are useful for building the aforementioned hierarchies.

Objects can form Groups, which are templates that can be instantiated. Changing the elements of a group affects all instances.

Cycles and Materials

Important Hotkeys

The full list can be inspected (and changed) in the User Preferences under "Input". The following are arguably the most important ones.

Short Cut Action
Middle Click Rotate View
Shift+Middle Click Translate View
Mouse Wheel Zoom View
Ctrl+Middle Click Zoom View
Numpad 7 View from Top
Numpad 1 View from Front
Numpad 3 View from Side
Numpad 0 View from Active Camera
Numpad 5 Toggle Orthographic/Perspective View
Numpad 8 4 6 2 Rotate View
(Shift+)Right Click Select
b Box Select
c Circle Select (Mouse Wheel for size)
g Move selection (right click for abort, left click for commit)
r Rotate selection (right click for abort, left click for commit)
s Scale selection (right click for abort, left click for commit)
Tab Toggle edit/object mode
H Hide selection
Alt+H Unhide everything
I Insert Keyframe
Ctrl+P Parent Selection to Active
Ctrl+G Make Group out of Selection
Shift+A Add stuff (in Edit Mode restricted to meshes)
Space Search for Operation
Ctrl+W Save
F12 Render (Esc for abort)