Ask HN: Recommend me a Blender course
I'm primarily interested in modeling but will need an intro to Blender concepts, philosophy, and UI idiosyncrasies.
I have some professional experience in CAD and Finite Element Analysis modeling, so I'm not a complete noob in that respect. Blender is sufficiently different from everything I know, though I feel my experience is more of a hindrance than a benefit.
Now, the plan is to just go with the flow and do things the Blender way.
Does anyone know a course that teaches the basics and enough basic modeling to get started?
- Paid courses are OK
- Video is preferred
- Language must be English or German
It should be less than 8 hours long; shorter and high info density is better. Most courses are dragged ridiculously on platforms that pay creators by course length (Udemy, AFAIK), and I don't have time for that.
Any tips and hints would be greatly appreciated!
48 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 81.7 ms ] thread“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
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/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIoXOplUvAw
PS, definitely use an external mouse! You cannot really only use the trackpad/keyboard for Blender effectively.
A friend of mine has also put together some videos here: https://www.youtube.com/c/BlenderForge/playlists
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
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.
If you post a project until the 31st of October you will participate in the give away for one year of free Skillshare.
Greetings
It just about does everything. I never finished but I was able to at least 3d model with some efficiency pretty quickly.
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-...
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 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
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.
Greetings
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
I recommend her, because I've been following her graphics for many years.