The very first things you need to do are download Python, Blender, PyFFI, and the Blender NifScripts.

Python: http://www.python.org/download/
Blender: http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/
PyFFI: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=199269
Blender NifScripts: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=149157&package_id=166219

Make sure to install all of these in the order I just gave. Once everything is setup and installed, run Blender.



Here's the window you'll be greeted with upon running Blender for the first time. This is the default setup for Blender and it will always load looking like this. There's a few things I hate about the default settings and I'm sure you guys will hate them, too, so we're going to change them!

First, hover your mouse over the top border under the File, Add, Timeline, etc. It should turn into a two-way cursor indicating you can drag this edge. Do so and drag it down.



Welome to the User Preferences window! Here we can change how Blender behaves and looks. The things I'm going to change here are in the View & Controls area, so click that button.



Now, the things I'm changing are the View Rotation, setting it to Turntable; I'm also going to set Auto Perspective. The last thing I'm doing here is changing the behavior of the middle mouse button. I've set it to Pan View.



The settings should look like this, now. You can also set it to snap to grid for moving objects, rotation, and scaling if you like.



After you've finished changing the settings, slide the Preferences window back to the top.

Now we're staring at three objects: a cube which is selected (as can be seen by the pink border around it), a lightsource (the black dot with a dotted line around it) and a camera (the triangular thing at the bottom). We don't want these since they'll just get in the way and we don't need them to edit Oblivion files, anyway.

Hit the A-key twice, once to deselect the cube, and again to select everything, while your cursor is in the 3D view screen. Now all three objects should have pink around them. Hit the X-key and you'll be asked if you want to delete the selected objects. Hit enter and they disappear :)



We've got everything how we want it now. There's no clutter in the 3D view and the zoom and mouse settings are how we want. We want to make sure Blender loads each time with these settings. If you were to close the program now, it would start up looking exactly like it did the first time.

To save the current settings as default, hit Ctrl+U. This will bring up a box asking "Save user defaults" Hit enter. Now every time you launch the program, you will have these same settings. If you want to change them, remember to save them again! You can also find the Save Default Settings command under File. You'll have to try it for yourself since I can't get a screenshot with the menus in it as Fraps apparently is ignoring them :(

Before I finish this lesson, I'd like to mention how to navigate in the 3D view. Click and hold your middle mouse button to pan around the 3D view. If you hold down Shift while doing this, it will rotate your view to a perspective view. This is handy when you're looking around a mesh and trying to see a hard to reach spot.