Cheat Sheet #1

Essential Hotkeys and Controls

Blender is a heavily hot keyed program. While this will seem daunting at first, I promise you that before long, all of these will become second nature to you (it actually takes effort to mentally recall the hotkey for most things in blender, as your muscle memory takes care of it for you.)

If you ever forget anything, press F3 - and search for the command you want to do:

Camera and view Control

Middle Mouse + Drag - Rotate view around scene

Shift + Middle Mouse + Drag - Pan view

Scroll Wheel - Zoom in/out

Ctrl + Middle Mouse + Drag - Control zoom in/out

Numpad 1 - Front view (looking down into scene forward)

Numpad 3 - Right side view (looking down into scene left)

Numpad 7 - Top view (looking down into scene down)

Numpad 0 - Toggle Camera view (view through the active camera)

Numpad 5 - Toggle orthographic/perspective

Numpad . - Focus on selected object

Numpad 4 and 5 - Rotate view around the Z axis (Yaw rotation around the top/down axis)

Numpad 2 and 8 - Rotate view around the X axis (Pitch rotation up and down around the side to side axis)

Numpad 8 - Rotate view up

Numpad / (Slash) - Toggle local view (isolates the selected object from the rest of the scene)

General 3D Viewport

F2 - Rename selected

F3 - Search program functionality

T - Toggle left toolbar

N - Toggle right panel

Ctrl + Alt + S - Save Incrementally

Object Selection

Left Click - Select object

Left Click empty space - deselect all

A - Select all

Rapidly double tapping A - Deselect all

Shift + Left Click - Append to selection

Ctrl + I - Invert selection

Shift + G - Open Select Grouped Menu

Objects selected will be outlined in Orange. The active selection object will be outlined in a brighter orange. The concept of "Active Selection" will become important later.

Adding Objects

Shift + A - The Add Objects Panel. Once open, click something to add it to the scene.

Also accessible up here without a hotkey press.

When adding objects to the scene, this will show in the bottom left of your view:

Click to expand the arrow

Here you can initialize the default values of the object. Every blender command will add a window like this to the bottom left of the viewport.

F9 or Bottom-left panel - Adjust last operation settings (the above) (only before next action)

Removing Objects

X - Open the delete selected menu.

The D and C are underlined because they are sub-hotkeys. Pressing X and then D will immediately delete whatever was selected.

Delete - Immediately delete the selected objects.

Object Visibility

H - Hide Selected

Alt + H - Unhide All

Shift + H - Hide unselected (Isolate Selected)

Transform Objects

G - Grab/move object

R - Rotate object

S - Scale object

Left click while transforming - Apply the transformation.

Right click while transforming - Cancel the transformation.

Escape while transforming - Cancel the transformation.

So, we select objects, we then either move, rotate, or scale them. But what if we only want to move something up and down? Or side to side? Or what about only along the floor?

G/R/S and then X/Y/Z - Constrain to axis (e.g., G + X = move on X-axis only)

G/R/S and then Shift + X/Y/Z - Exclude axis (move on all except specified)

G/R/S and then X/Y/Z and then Number and then Enter - Type exact values (e.g., G, then X, then 2, then Enter = move the selected objects 2 units along the left and right axis)

Resetting / Clearing Transformations

Alt + G / R / S - Will clear either the the Translation, Rotation, and Scale of the selected object.

Resetting / Clearing / Applying Transformations

Alt + G / R / S - Will clear / reset either the Translation, Rotation, and Scale of the selected object.

Ctrl + A (When in Object Mode) - Will open the "Apply Transforms" menu.

Transform Panel

N - Toggle properties panel (type exact values in Location/Rotation/Scale)

Pressing N will toggle this. Some of my plugins are also shown here, you won't have these.

Pivot Point Menu

Period (.) - Opens the menu where you can control your command pivot point.

Whenever you Transform anything, it will be relative to one of these Pivots. By default it is Median Point. Leave it on here for now.

• Ctrl + Z - Undo

• Ctrl + Shift + Z - Redo

Joining Objects

Ctrl + J - Join the selected objects together

Mode Switching

Tab - Toggle between Edit and Object mode

Ctrl + Tab - Mode selection pie menu

Can also be found in the top left with this dropdown.

Edit Mode

All of the following applies when you are in Edit Mode.

F (When selecting two vertices) - Create Edge

F (When selecting two or more edges) - Create Face

F in general is always the key to make a polygon out of the current selection.

1 - Vertex Selection Mode

2 - Edge selection Mode

3 - Face select mode

Pressing Shift while changing selection mode will allow you to use more than one.

Shift A - Add new Mesh Element (Similar to object mode, but directly inserts mesh instead of objects).

E - Extrude selection

I - Inset face from selection

Ctrl + B - Bevel selection

Ctrl + R (and then mouse over any edge) - Loop cut tool

K - Knife cut mode (but has other more indepth hotkeys explored in a later chapter)

Alt + Left Click - Select Edge Loop

Ctrl + Alt + Left Click - Select Edge Ring

C - Drag selection mode

B - Box selection mode

Holding Shift while Box Selecting - Remove from current selection

Shift + G - Open select similar menu

L (while mousing over an element) - Select all linked to hovered element.

Ctrl + L (while having an element pre selected) - Select all linked to selected element.

Ctrl + NUMPAD + - Grow selection

Ctrl + NUMPAD - - Shrink Selected

Z - Open the shading change menu

Also accessed up here:

Alt + Z - Enable XRay mode. Also accessed up here:

X - Open the delete Menu

Ctrl + X - Dissolve selection (you will use this a lot)

Ctrl + V - Vertex Menu

Ctrl + E - Open Edge Menu

Ctrl + F - Open Face menu

Merge Operations

M - Merge menu

Alt + M - Split Menu

Y - Split selection

V - Rip selection

P - Separate menu

Ctrl + M - Merge menu (context sensitive)

G + G - Edge slide (double-tap G)

Toolbar - On the left of the Edit Mode viewport, you will see a toolbar:

This has all of the basic box modeling commands on it. Hovering them will show you the hotkey for them.

Shift + Space - Open a smaller version of the toolbar, with hotkeys, at your mouse location.

Shift + N - Recalculate Normals

Ctrl + T - Triangulate Selection

Alt + J - Remove Triangulation (Tris to Quads)