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Introduction

Do you have a product idea you want to create, or even send to a 3D printer like Ponoko the Makerbot? Do you love concept design, character art, or just visualizing your ideas in 3D space? In this Lifehacker Nightschool Series we’re going to take a look at how you can do all of that by learning the basics of 3D modeling.

In this series, we will explore the basics to get you off the ground and help you on your way to being able to 3D model just about anything all the while understanding the why as well as the how of what makes these tools work. Here are the topics we’re going to cover:

• Software – What software to use, why, and how much it costs.
• Interface/Toolbars – Now that we have the software, let’s look at the interface and start learning how to navigate through 3D space and understand how all the tool bars are set up.
• Viewports/Construction Planes – After understanding the camera, it is critical to understand how the viewports work, which views do what and what construction planes do and why they are important.
• Object Selection/Object Transposition – Once you have an object in your scene, one of the single most important abilities is selecting it. Without selecting your model, it is very hard to do anything to it. After it is selected, you might want to move it around, scale it, rotate it, etc. so we will talk about transposing your object.
• Bringing It All Together – After all is said and done, I will talk over a sped up video of me modeling a simple scene using the tools we’ve learned and some we haven’t and show you how easy it is to use the tools all together to create whatever you want.