machinimatrix

Abstract:The tutorial shows how to install blender. It explains the various options for the application data locations. And it shows, how you can customize blender to find your personal scripts location folder.

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Welcome to our tutorial series about blender, an amazing tool for 3D content creation. blender is highly customizable and flexible, and if you want to master this tool, you need to learn about it first. Once you understand, how to use it efficiently, you can get very productive with it.

So let us begin now and here with the installation of blender. We will use windows-xp, for this demonstration. If you are running on another operating system, installation details will be a bit different. Nevertheless, you should follow this tutorial up to the end, since some tips here will apply to all versions of blender.

We also assume, you have already down-loaded the blender installation file from the blender site. So lets execute the installer now. Installation is really no problem at all. You can simply hit the return key all the time, since the default settings for blender will work in most cases.

Here i will show you a slightly more advanced installation process. I assume, you use a separate installation directory for your 3D-artwork. In our case, i will install blender at my personal file space. You can use any location you want, you only need to take care, that you got about 30 Mega-Bytes of space on your hard disk.

After you have specified your destination folder, the installer will ask you, where you want to place your user data files. You have 3 different options.

1. If you are installing on a computer, which is shared by many users, the first option is what you want. In that case, blender will place all user data into individual user application folders.
2. If you are installing on your personal computer, the second option is good for you. But take care, now blender places all user data right into the installation directory. So if you ever want to reinstall blender, your personal data will be gone.
3. If you are working on a company computer, and your company supports the HOME variable, then use the third option. In that case, all user data will be placed at a folder, inside your HOME directory.

For simplicity, we will choose the secnd option now. And in a few seconds i will show you a nice trick, how you can customize blender, to find your personal data, where you want it to be.

So, lets finish the installation now. After blender has installed and checked itself, you can jump start into it and get your first impressions.

One big advantage of blender is the possibility to be expandable with customization scrips. Many scripts are already bundled with blender, but there are much more scripts available. And many of them have been created to make your life much easier. Even as a newcomer, you will most probably need to install your own script collection. And here is a safe way to go.

First, we are going to create a scripts directory on our file system. I will place it right into my 3d-tools directory. I have downloaded a couple of scripts and will place them now into the just created directory.
the scripts here are import and export scripts for second-life sculpted prims. These scripts have been created by Domino Ma-Rama, and we will go into the usage details in a separate tutorial about creating sculpted prims with blender.

Ok! Now i start blender.

• In the upper left corner, you see the information icon. This is a hidden window. You can access it, by placing the cursor on the window border, then left mouse click and drag the window down. The user preferences appear.
• Go to the right side and click the button: “File Path”. A set of input fields appear.
• Locate the field labeled with: “python scripts”, and click on the associated folder icon. a file selector box appears.
• Now navigate to your scripts folder.
• Then select the folder by clicking on: “select script path”. Now blender immediately finds and recognizes all scripts, which we have placed into our personal folder. Let us navigate to some places, where you can now see, how nice the scripts integrate into the blender interface.
• ok, now move the user preferences window back out of sight.
• One final task is still to be done. If you exit blender now, it will silently forget about your custom data. So we have to tell blender, to keep the information for us.
• go to, file, save default settings. Now blender will remember your personal folder whenever you start it again.

Now you can jump start into blender art work creation. If you like to get more information about how to create sculpted prims with blender, we invite you to also watch our other video tutorials. You can find the newest videos on the machinimatrix website.

have fun, and see you later!