Recommend me a Blender course

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.

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

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...

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.

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

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

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.

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.