Blender Guru's Donut tutorial is regarded as the "Hello World" of Blender. Long tutorials will start getting boring after a certain period of time. So I would suggest following a couple of random Ducky 3D's abstract designs after this one. After that follow the OG IanHubert's lazy 1 minute tutorial.It contain only the core concepts remaining you have to explore and find out. Checkout Polyfjord also.

100% agreed, the Donut tutorial is great. Make sure to use the 3.0 version instead of the 2.8 version, he released an updated tutorial with the improved Blender UI:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIoXOplUvAw

PS, definitely use an external mouse! You cannot really only use the trackpad/keyboard for Blender effectively.

You must do this Blender Donut tutorial series. It is a rite of passage and source of bonding with other people, but it is also quite excellent. You may do other things too, but this is where you need to start.

Agreed. In life there aren’t many times where there is one clear and correct answer, but this is one of those times.

This is really the way to go, Blender Guru covers all the things. He also has a modeling playlist that is really well done for after the Donut: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjEaoINr3zgEL9UjPTLWQhLFA...

Agree with this one. I did the Blender Guru course and was blown away by the quality and the depth

You can definitely skip the animation sections at the end unless they interest you.

That the thing about his series: You can skip any topic.

Hi there! Glad you asked - I am a creator of Blender courses, my main platform is Youtube and Skillshare. I am a goldsmith, autodidact in Blender and freelancer for about 5 years in 3d design for 3d printing, but I also dabble in illustration and animation.

I recently launched a Blender course for complete beginners. It gives a complete overview of the basic functionality. It think it is exactly what you requested. It is available in German and English.

It is relatively short, around 1:50. If you already have CAD experience you may be able to work through it in even less time. You will gain a very good basic understanding of the Blender UI functionality and may branch in any direction you would like to.

Here is the introductory lesson on YT in English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uubpbTLQQzk

...und hier in Deutsch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qISnAxWaMQA&t=2s

If you'd like one free year of Skillshare premium, you might participate in my give away which runs until end of October, I also plan another one in November. Just create a project model and post a screenshot under the Skillshare course (will be explained there also), and you enter the give away. Honestly, you will have a real chance of winning, as the courses just launched recently and there aren't as many projects yet :)

Hope this helps!

Greetings and viele Grüße Gesa

Happy to hear that people are offering courses for Blender.

I skimmed through the course and will do the tutorial later on my machine.

The combination with jewelry is nice even if I didn't know such use-cases exist.

Thanks! I do have a lot on jewelry and 3D printing, but I also recently launched a purely introductory course which is for anyone interested in Blender. Just visit my Skillshare profile page, there you can find all the courses if you scroll down, as well: https://www.skillshare.com/r/user/gesa_pickbrenner

Greetings

Imphenzia got me (back) into Blender: https://www.youtube.com/c/Imphenzia

He does low poly modelling if that's your thing. He had a 'Lets model an X in 10 minutes' series. He explains the basics of the UI and does a really good job of explaining what he's doing.

After you know the basics, you can probably just watch any old (or rather, new, because blender is changing fast) tutorial on youtube and know what's happening.

I would suggest trying to learn in the same way that one could learn programming: once you know the bare bones basics to get started (modeling) start building a project you're interested in and then look for tutorials on extra topics once you get stuck.

Once you learn enough modeling to be useful, start working on a real design you're passionate about. Eventually you'll get to a point that you realize you need colors and materials, textures, fine detail you can't otherwise figure out, better lighting, animations and physics, particles, etc. Thats where you search for specific guides to tackle your specific problem.

When it comes to blender, I'd also highly recommend keeping up to date with the release notes and blogs about the development. Not only is the project continuously adding great new features, but the development notes they have are really useful for understanding why and how something would be used.

Hey weinzierl, I'm a CAD modelere/mechanical designer who wanted to learn Blender. I highly recommend https://www.blenderbros.com/products/hard-surface-modeling-j... . It was outstanding for me. It showed me many, many ways to speed up the Blender modeling workflow, and it's about shapes/types of things that I actually want to make, unlike a donut.

May I recommend courses by cgmasters. [1]

You may want to get started with this [2]. Once you have the Blender foundations in place, you can expand into many other topics based on your specific interests:

- Character Creation

- Procedural Texturing

- Character Rigging and Animation

- Environment Modeling

- Vehicle Creation

- Sculpting

- Hard surface modelling

- Space VFX Modeling

[1] https://cgmasters.com/category/blender-training-courses/

[2] https://cgmasters.com/blender-for-complete-and-total-beginne...

Like many others, I heartily recommend the Donut tutorial as a start. It'll teach you the basics, get a handle on the most used shortcuts, and a feel for how the modifier keys (shift, alt, ctrl) work with the mouse. I also recommend that you print out a shortcut cheat sheet ¹).

That's just Blender, though. Learning modeling at least partly depends on what you want to model. Are you wanting to make models for 3D printing, for offline rendering/animated movies, or for real-time animation (aka games)? Do you want to make hard-surface objects, characters, landscapes? Are you purely interested in polygonal modeling, or also sculpting workflows?

If you don't already have some sort of a goal in mind, I would recommend you pick one. It'll make it much easier for you to work towards and if you share it, people might be able to recommend much more targeted courses.

¹) https://www.google.com/search?q=blender+shortcut+cheat+sheet...

Hard-surface is what I know and what I'll stick with for a start. Maybe later I will look into sculpting, which I find super fascinating but also a bit scary.

Hijack because blender rarely hits the front page and this seems relevant to my interests:

Anyone who has courses that are not youtube tutorials feel free to throw them at me. Anything goes, as long as it isn't hyper-specific on an obscure part of blender.

Hi there, if you'd like to give my course on Skillshare a chance, you might test it for a month for free :) I have some on jewelry and 3d printing (somewhat obscure ;), but also a purely introductory and very general course for Blender: https://skl.sh/3xw8S77

If you post a project until the 31st of October you will participate in the give away for one year of free Skillshare.

Greetings

Genuinely, Blender guru is the absolut goat. Just do the donut tutorial, trust me. From there on, feel free to specialize.

Link: "Blender 3.0 Beginner Donut Tutorial" (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjEaoINr3zgFX8ZsChQVQ...) — youtube playlist to learn the basics of Blender while making your very own donut

I started learning Blender a few months ago and I agree, the donut tutorial is excellent. One tip that helped me was to recreate the tutorial from memory after each video. So I had two files, one for following the tutorial and one for practice.

+1

I can’t give you a good tutorial but this is a must watch for inspiration and laughs:

“Captain Disillusion: World’s Greatest Blenderer - Live at the Blender Conference 2018” https://youtu.be/1qSTcxt2t74

Note for after: The UI has apparently been fixed

A friend of mine did this course of how to do a short film from beginning to end in blender.

https://www.skillshare.com/en/classes/Filmmaking-with-Blende...

I saw how much effort and love he put into it, and honestly I think it is a great course.

This is older but was extremely helpful for me: https://www.udemy.com/course/blender-28-the-complete-guide-f...

It just about does everything. I never finished but I was able to at least 3d model with some efficiency pretty quickly.

Both Udemy and GameDev.tv have very good tutorials and you can get them on sale for about $10 or so every now and then, especially in Humble Bundles. I've been taking several of their blender courses and it depends on what specifically you want to learn. An excellent overall Blender course is The Blender 2.8 Encyclopedia. It covers many subjects, as the name implies. It is constantly updated whenever Blender comes out with new stuff. Their Unity 3d course is the best. I took it for over a year because there were so many lessons and I learned a great deal.

Ian Hubert's Lazy Tutorials would be an excellent supplementary series once you know some of the basics. They're not a general guide to Blender, but they're great resources. He has his own style of working and he's shockingly productive with it.

Lazy Tutorials: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4Dq5VyfewIxxjzS34k2NES_P...

My favourite guides of his are not in the Lazy Tutorials playlist, though. Perhaps they were not lazy enough:

Blender Motion Tracking: Room Transformation - https://youtu.be/lY8Ol2n4o4A

Wild Tricks for Greenscreen in Blender - https://youtu.be/RxD6H3ri8RI

Check out CG Cookie https://cgcookie.com

I actually plan to subscribe to them in a bit (focusing on animation and rigging courses from P2Design[0] currently, which i recommend), just unsure if their whole course is worth it.

Protip, if you're like me and undecided on whether the entire suite is worth it - they have specific courses, and even a bundle that can get you a lot of bang for your buck over on Blender Market[1]. BM has many of their courses for purchase rather than the large sub. The one i'm primarily interested in is their HUMAN course bundle[2], which is interesting because for ~$150 you can get 5 courses which appear to be some of their best work.

This whole thing sounds like an Ad... but i suppose that's the point of this thread lol. I'm not affiliated with anyone in my post. Though i do really like P2Design :)

[0]: https://www.p2design-academy.com/ [1]: https://blendermarket.com/creators/cgcookie [2]: https://blendermarket.com/products/human-realistic-portrait-...

+1 as well

Blender Guru is good, but the cg cookie videos are much more comprehensive.

While youtube videos are good, I don't think they teach the underlying "thinking" is a structured way. Without understanding that, the learning process becomes way more inefficient. If you value your time, then paid, focused courses like cgcookie will be 2x-10x more effective.

I enrolled a few years back and I also recommend them.

This course has been recommended seriously on vfx subreddits for awhile now:

https://www.fxphd.com/

I remember the subscriptions makes you login through a vpn, so you get a license to all the software so you can use the professional tools.

Philosophy in blender -- whew that's a topic! We can all wish it had stayed monolithic but there are multiple, like overlapping waves holding onto vestiges of previous eras.

Left click versus right click select was a real war and to some degree, minor skirmishes are still being fought. If you really and truly want to learn to 'go with the flow', realize that the 'default' hotkeys are not the real 'default' hotkeys for blender veterans and that it was fairly recent when the program defaults got switched over to be noob compatible.

This is super helpful to know and corresponds well with my experience when trying to learn Blender. As I had not followed along all those battles of the past, I miss a lot of context. That makes it hard to judge what is considered best practice now and what is the idiomatic way to do things.

What would you recommend? Is it worth getting used to right click select or is left click select OK? Are the new 'default' hotkeys good or is there an advantage in being able to use the old key bindings?

Learn the new default ones.

First, not all veterans stay with the old ones. Second, going forward all learning material and documentation will use the new ones. Third, even those veterans who stay with the old shortcuts for convenience mostly don't see it as a war and will tell you to just go with the "new" flow.

And last, but very much not least: it's a numbers' game. There are quite few veterans (Blender was and still is relatively niche), but a boatload of new Blenderers learning it right now (or having started within the last three years when the UI revamp was released). And many many more than even that boatload of new people will start learning in the next few years.

cgboost courses are in English (with German accent) and very good.

Blender Launchpad is the paid beginner's course, the Apple basket course is free and also really good. Don't watch it on YouTube (as I did), but on the cgboost web site where it has been updated (at least with text comments) to newer Blender versions.

See also https://www.thomas-huehn.de/2020/11/ein-start-in-blender-3d/

I learned blender way quicker by watching short condensed videos showing the workflow rather than the result. I'm still not familiar with all the terminology and hotkeys, but just seeing what happens conveys more than hours of video explaining what something does - here is a good one: https://youtu.be/9mWrEXvnk9o

Janine Pauke has long been an excellent CGI artist and teacher, first with Cinema 4D, and now with Blender. She's released a Blender Crash Course - 2 hours that cover all the Blender basics: https://www.3dfluff.com/video/

I recommend her, because I've been following her graphics for many years.

Once you get through the basics check out Entagma's work; they've been making Houdini content for a long time and are now doing the same for Blender: https://entagma.com/category/blender/

Just watch any Ducky3D video and you'll learn a lot. No need for a full course, it's faster to learn by doing.

These are my favorite Blender resources:

- Blender Guru : Start with the Donut Tutorial

- Arrimus3D : For hard-surface modeling and topology (software agnostic)

- CGBoost : high information density

- Ian Hubert and Blender Secrets - Short and direct tutorials

- Erindale : Procedural Shader and Geometry Nodes

- CGCookie : another general Blender channel

- Derek Elliot : Product animation and motion graphics

The donut tutorial is definitely a classic go-to.

A friend of mine has also put together some videos here: https://www.youtube.com/c/BlenderForge/playlists

Have tried blending on my own. YT tutorials seem "algo-generated" now. I really really want to immerse at the Full Sail Winter Park campus (but who has the time). I think having proper mentors in industry is key ;)

I'm in the middle of this course and finding it to be very good: https://www.udemy.com/course/blendertutorial/

Don't let the long total length fool you - the course was updated for 3.2, but still contains the 2.8 lessons as an appendix.

Lessons are very brisk and the instructor narrates every action and keypress. I'm flying through the course.

I'd look up Grant Abbitt. I think he's excellent for beginners and provides a good foundation. He does some paid stuff, but there's plenty of good free stuff on YouTube.

I tend to listen to him at around 1.5 times normal speed, but that works ok.

All of these are good, I'd also suggest looking at videos from Grant Abbott on youtube, he's got a lot of blender videos that are both beginner friendly but non-trivial and good, clear explanations.