((Eh. 6. 4 interested people, three of which already know how to use Blender. Same thing.))
Intro: The InterfaceTerminology:
Verts - Vertices. An infinitely small point.
Edge - Connects 2 verts.
Face - Defined by 3 or more verts.
Tri - A face of 3 verts. Other programs frequently prefer tris. Blender can work with larger faces, but, near as I can tell, treats them as groups of tris.
Quad - A face of 4 verts. Other programs frequently prefer quads.
<Ctrl+S> - How I'll represent a command. This one is my personal favorite.
3D cursor - Generally a nuisance. Left clicking anywhere moves it. It is hard to click it exactly where you want it, since you're using a 2D representation of 3D space. New objects are spawned at the 3D cursor.
When Blender starts up, it has a small window with your recent projects. Click outside of it and it'll go away. You'll then be presented with this screen:
1) is a cube. It has a yellow outline because it is selected.
2) is a camera. It is used when rendering a scene (with
<F12>). It can be moved much like any object, or set to the current view with
<Ctrl+Numpad0> while the camera is selected.
3) is a light source. You will generally want more than one when rendering a scene.
I'll only be talking about the 3D view window in this intro. This is the window you'll spend most of your time in.
1) Each window can be changed to a different window with an icon in one of the corners. You can do most of what you need with 3D View, Timeline for animations, UV/Image Editor for adding textures, and properties. The default settings have the properties window already open on the right side. It is important. The Timeline, (not pictured; it's below the picture), isn't something that you'll need every time you open Blender. We'll take care of that later.
2) Tools is a useful sub-tab. It gets more options during editing. It sometimes lets you change commands (Eg, if you Separate an edge, adding a vert on its halfway point, this tab will let you separate it into more verts.)
3) The origin of an object is represented by a small orange dot in the middle, when it's selected. It's fairly easy to accidentally get the origin completely outside of an object, which makes it start behaving oddly with certain tools. Reset it with this.
4) Set an object's shading to smooth or flat. Observe it in action:
5) The 3D view has pull-out tabs on either side. The left starts pulled out (it's where the tools sub-tab is). I mostly only use the right one to see the exact coordinates of the selection or to reset the 3D cursor.
To reset the 3D cursor, fill these with 0s.
Commands take effect in the window your cursor is in.
Camera controlsClicking the mouse wheel moves the camera. Hold shift will let you pan.
The numpad is quite useful. The corner keys of 1, 3, and 7 directly move the view to front, side, or top. Control reverses these, to back, other side, or bottom.
The side keys of 2, 4, 6, and 8 move the view in 15 degree increments. These aren't as useful.
The central key, 5, toggles between perspective and orthogonal views.
0 is used for the camera. Alone, it moves the view to the camera. With control, the selected camera is moved to your current view. (Move the view slightly after moving the camera to remove the border.)
Mouse controlsRight clicking is for selecting and interacting with objects (unless you're box selecting. That uses the left button, because awesomeface.png).
Left clicking is used for moving the 3D cursor. I have yet to find a use for moving the 3D cursor in this way. You can change the LBM to be used for selections under File > User Preferences, under the Input tab.
Window manipulationMove the mouse to the line between the 3D view window and the timeline window until it becomes a double arrow. Right click it. You'll be given the option to split or join the areas.
For now, click join, and merge them into one large 3D view (if you merge them into a giant timeline, use the lower left icon to change back into the 3D view).
Now move the cursor to the top of the 3D view until you get the double-arrow again. This time click split. You now have a line stuck to the cursor. Clicking the mouse wheel will switch it between horizontal and vertical. Clicking the LMB will duplicate the current window. Split it vertically, then split one half horizontally. Use the numpad camera controls over each window, to get different views of the cube. You should be left with something roughly like this:
You may find it helpful to have different views of the same object like this, particularly if you have a second monitor.
That's it for this time. I'll explain how to actually do something in a few days. If you want clarification on anything, please speak up.