Change Units in Blender - Inches, Meters, Feet, Centimeters

How can you change the default units in Blender? Use the scene properties in Blender to change the units from the default meters.

Video Transcript:

In this Blender tutorial I'm going to show you how to quickly change the units used for measurements inside Blender. But what are the measurements in blender? Here in Blender we have the default cube. How big is it? Well you can press n on your keyboard or click this Arrow at the top. This will tell you the item information and the dimensions. Here we can see that it is 2 meters by 2 meters by 2 meters. I can change these numbers and it'll change the size of the object. What if we make a new object?

If I press shift a to create a new mesh and a new Cube it places it in the same spot. I can press G and then I can press y to move in the y direction. Now I have a 2 meter cube. If I click on this Cube, notice that it's one meter by one two meters by 2 meters. But what if you're working on a project that's using materials in a different unit and you want to be able to easily type them in. For example of course I can type in something like six feet right here and then it becomes 1.83 meters but what if I want to see it displayed as six feet because I'm working with imperial units? Well, we can change the units of the scene inside Blender.

It's quite simple. Over here on the right hand side we have a scene properties icon, it's right above the world. So if I click on this scene properties you'll notice that there is an item here called units. There's a couple options we have. To change the units, first I can change from metric to Imperial units. This will automatically change this to six feet. As you can see now this box is six feet the same thing happens over here but instead of nice round two meter numbers with the nice metric system now we have 6.56 feet. Using the metric system decimals aren't so bad they actually work quite well but with imperial units since it's not a base 10 number system they don't exactly work the best. So what you can do is click separate units and then what this will do is go six foot six point seven inches. So we could change that to six foot six inches and then we have a nice round number again. So if you do do this, remember that it's still keeping everything that same size just the units have changed.

So if you append this into another Blender file the objects will be the right size they'll just be written in the units of the new file. So once again you can also have the unit split in metric. Most of the time you wouldn't want to do this but sometimes for large numbers it can be helpful. So here we have one meter 98 centimeters so you can quickly change the mass and everything else as well, so you can change these to different numbers and different units as you need to work with your materials.

Because sometimes you're designing something and you're working with materials bought in a country that uses imperial units, it's much easier to design for those nominal dimensions. If you're working with metric materials it's better to work with metric. Most times it's better to work with metric units but Blender gives you that option for those cases that you need to change the units for your particular 3D modeling project. Happy 3D modeling.

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