Blender tutorial for beginners! The long awaited reboot of the popular donut tutorial, completely remade for Blender 2.8x. New videos will be uploaded every oth. Blender Cloud is a web based service developed by Blender Institute that allows people to access the training videos and all the data from the open projects. 3.40 for Blender 2.79; 3.56 for Blender 2.8 and above; What is Auto-Rig Pro? Auto-Rig Pro is an all-in-one solution to rig characters, retarget animations, and provide Fbx export for Unity and Unreal Engine. First developed as my own in-house rigging tool, i've released it a few years ago and many new features have been added since then. Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing and 2D animation pipeline. Free Blender 3D models. Free 3D Blender models available for download. Available in many file formats including MAX, OBJ, FBX, 3DS, STL, C4D, BLEND, MA, MB. Find professional Blender 3D Models for any 3D design projects like virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), games, 3D visualization or animation.
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Blender is a powerful 3D computer graphics suite that’s totally free for all users.
In Blender you can model objects, create textures, and animate models all under one roof. Because it’s open source Blender leans towards flexibility and customization more than many other 3D programs.
In fact, Blender is so capable with so many features and options, it can be easily overwhelming to new users. It was this fact that led to the new UI overhaul coming with Blender 2.8.
But beginners should not be afraid. Blender is worth learning and easy to use once you get the hang of it.
This is an exciting time to learn Blender! The last few years have seen a big surge in users and the development team has responded by adding plenty of exciting new features.
This guide will focus primarily on animation tutorials so this is perfect for anyone animating game assets or looking into animation as a career.
Animate in Blender
When it comes to learning animation, having a great instructor goes a long way.
Steve from CG Geek is an awesome teacher with a lot of great content on YouTube. In this video he’ll show you the ropes of creating animations using Blender.
This tutorial covers a lot of ground so get ready to dive in. You’ll start with the basics of animating a cube and work your way towards rigging and animating a character. This video, like Blender itself, forces you to learn quickly.
Rigging and animation are difficult even for experienced CG artists.
The trick is to practice and keep learning from others.
Animation For Absolute Beginners
In this beginner Blender tutorial by Surfaced Studio you’ll take an in-depth look at the timeline feature.
The timeline is where you create and manage the keyframes that define your animations.
Keyframe animation allows you to store data about the bones in your rig. Keyframes can store information about the position, rotation, and scale of the bones.
By changing these values along the timeline you create animation.
This video also covers using the dope sheet which is also crucial to learn.
The dope sheet gives you full control over the animations in your scene. You can speed up or slow down animations as well as define actions which can be exported to a game engine.
Easy Blender Animation For Beginners
I recommend this video to those who are brand new to Blender.
It serves as a great introduction to the basics of navigating the interface before diving into Blender’s more advanced features.
After a short demonstration of the basics you’ll learn how to animate objects using physics. This is a great tool to learn because adding physics can help you achieve more realistic scenes.
You’ll also learn about the grease pencil to plan an animation. Years ago, artists would make notes directly on their monitors. Now you can use the grease pencil instead.
Lastly you’ll learn how to export your video for playback as a movie.
Walk Cycle
Walk cycles are a necessary part of character animation and, unfortunately, they can be intimidating for beginners.
The secret to making good walk cycles is to break them down into key frames and practice often.
This excellent tutorial by Sebastian Lague details the creation of a walk cycle in Blender. There’s a lot of ground to cover so you might want to grab a cup of coffee before starting.
Lague teaches everything necessary for making professional quality animated characters. With a great teaching style and plenty of tips and tricks, I can’t recommend this tutorial enough.
Cartoon Tank(Modeling & Animation)
Blender is such a massive program with so many features. It can be hard to find videos that cover the entire process of creating and animation objects.
This one by Olva3D will guide you through building a tank from scratch and animating it.
The whole thing starts off with some great tricks using the array modifier to duplicate the tank tracks. After some low poly construction the tutorial moves on to lighting and animation.
Students looking for an overview of the process of animating in Blender should pay attention to the general workflow and speed of development.
Over time you’ll develop your own process, but it’s good to see how other artists create their work.
Quick Water Animation
Olav3D is back with this tutorial on creating an amazing water scene.
Blender is packed full of features thanks to the open source community so fluid simulations are surprisingly easy.
With Blender’s powerful physics and rendering engine, it’s possible to create realistic water with relative ease.
With this 10 minute demonstration you’ll learn how to set up a water simulation using the physics tab. After the simulation has finished baking, Olav adds textures and lights to the scene to finish the render.
Realistic Cutting Animation
In this advanced animation tutorial by BlenderMania you will learn how to utilize vertex groups to slice an object.
You’ll get a detailed overview of the entire process of creating a realistic scene of an orange being sliced.
Sounds simple but really there’s a lot to take away here. Paying special attention to the motion of the knife, BlenderMania achieves a higher level of realism in the end result.
Free movie creator software. You’ll also learn how to take advantage of nodes to create materials that use gloss and texture.
Realistic Animated Trees
Blender has a ton of add-ons that come pre-installed.
You can turn them on or off by visiting the user preferences options. CG Geek shows how to use one of these add-ons called the sapling tool. This tool makes it easy to create trees.
Using the sapling add-on it’s possible to generate an endless variety of trees for any scene.
With controls for the number of branches, sides, height, and so much more, you can create nearly any type of tree you could think of. Hint: try cloning the trees to make a forest environment.
Cannon
With another great tutorial by Olav3D, you can learn the process of modelling and animating a cannon start-to-finish.
This video offers a chance to sharpen yours skills and practice a workflow of Blender animation.
Olav teaches modeling a simple cannon and creating a metal texture before moving onto the animation. You’ll learn how to fire the cannonball using Blender’s physics engine too.
Plus by adding collisions the ball can interact with your scene in realistic ways.
All you need to do is set a few properties and Blender will handle the rest.
Rolling Dice
This stunning tutorial offers a step-by-step guide to creating some rolling dice. The video is about fifteen minutes long but the results will leave you astonished.
Instructor Jeremy Jones skillfully makes use of Blender’s advanced features to create a realistic dice roll. By taking advantage of the physics engine, Jeremy gives the dice a believable rolling motion along a simulated felt table.
This tutorial covers a lot of information in a fashion that’s easy to digest.
Do yourself a favor and follow along to really hone your animating skills.
Wood Chipping Text
3D text is an essential part of learning motion graphics.
This video teaches how to model and animate text in Blender to create a wood chipping effect.
With detailed instructions, tutor4u shows the entire process of building the scene. You’ll cover modeling, UV unwrapping, lightning, and animating in less than 20 minutes.
If that seems like whirlwind speed, don’t worry. The instructions are presented in an easy-to-follow manner.
There are some great tips in this video from a professional Blender animator making it well worth your time to follow along.
Flag Blowing in the Wind
In this half-hour tutorial on Blender’s cloth simulator you get to see the process of animating a flag in full.
Taking advantage of the physics simulation will not only save you time but also allow you to create more realistic effects.
The cloth simulation will deform a subdivided plane so that it looks like fabric. This feature has a variety of applications beyond making flags. Use it to drape a table with a tablecloth or dress a character in a wizard’s cape.
This also makes use of the Cycles render engine available within Blender.
With cycles, greater levels of realism can be achieved through the use of advanced lightning algorithms.
Planets Colliding
Blender Cgi Software App
This is the big tutorial you’ve been waiting for.
You’ll be making not one, but two planetary explosions set against a cosmic background in primordial space.
tutor4u’s excellent guide is easy to follow and filled with amazing tips.
You’ll see how to adjust the interpolation rates in the graph editor to create linear motion. You’ll also learn how editing the curves gives more control over the feel of the animation.
By the end of this 30 minute tutorial you should have a render you’ll be proud to show your friends. I mean, who doesn’t like smashing planets?
Fluid Simulation
Fans of low-poly art will love this video on fluid simulation.
3D animator Gabriel Aguiar demonstrates how to create a waterfall in a pirate’s cove.
Blender’s fluid system can calculate the flow of water dynamically. All we need to do is provide the outflow and the domain.
The outflow is necessary to input water into the scene while the domain is used to contain it.
With these tools it’s possible to create any number of fluid systems. Use it to make anything from a bathtub to an entire ocean.
Rig & Animate Anything
Rigging and animation take a lot of practice to master. But once you learn the tools, you’ll be able to animate anything you want.
It’s with this mindset that Remington Graphics approaches this tutorial on Blender animation.
By walking viewers through the entire process of rigging and animating a Star Wars character, you can more easily learn the workflow of creating motion in Blender.
It can be a tedious process but it’s well worth the effort when you finally bring characters to life.
This 20-minute video teaches all the basics you need to know within a real-world example. It doesn’t matter if you want to animate a dragon or a chicken, the process is the same: create a bone structure, parent it to the mesh, paint weights, and finally animate the bones.
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At least once a week I get an email like this: 'Hey Andrew, how did you learn blender? Do you have any tips?'
I used to be annoyed by this question. But I've grown to understand it.
When learning any new craft, it's natural to look to those with experience and ask for their 'story'.
I'm in Korea now and everytime I come across another foreigner who speaks fluent Korean I ask 'Hey how did you get so good at Korean?'. And I always secretly hope that they'll whisper something about a magical pill that made them speak fluent Korean overnight. But sadly the answer is usually always, 'Well I took a few classes, bought some books and just practiced whenever I could.'
The road to success is rarely discovered overnight, but it can be made shorter with the right advice. So in this post I'm going to answer the question I get asked the most, and then follow it with 5 Blender Tips on how you can accelerate your learning.
Way back in '04
Ahh yes, the good old days of 2004. Saddam was captured, and Facebook had just launched at Harvard. It was also the year that I first discovered Blender.
Ever since Toy Story I'd admired 3d animation, but always considered it an expensive professionals tool. Then I saw Killer Bean 2, and after realizing it was made by one guy, I wondered if there was some free software somewhere that I could use.
A quick search brought me to.. Anim8or! Which I downloaded it, dabbled around with and promptly quit after realizing there were no tutorials for it.
But a little more searching and I came across this image, created with 'Blender'.
It was all the motivation I needed. I decided right then and there, that if someone else could create a sexy red car like that, using this software called 'Blender', then so could I.
So I downloaded the latest version of Blender (2.32), and got cracking:
My first reaction was to push all the buttons and wait for something to happen, but once the novelty of that wore off, I searched for tutorials. I came across such gems as The Gingerbread man tutorial and A ride through the mines. (nostalgia overload!)
But back in those days, tutorials were somewhat of a rarity. All-in-all, there was probably about 10 in total. Which meant that you had to do most of the learning the hard way: solo.
My hard drive quickly filled up with dozens of dead end projects.. sword.blend, car.blend, tree.blend. All of them incomplete and horrible. But my goal was to make a red car, so I kept learning.
I burdened the blender community with questions on pretty much everything:
It was a painfully slow process.
And aside from my circle of school friends, most people were not impressed with my skills. After a year of using Blender, I created this animation. Which.. is an assault on your senses.
At one point I spent several weeks on a project called the 'Mystical Tree' which when I posted it online, got no responses.
That hurt.
'How can no one reply? That's so rude. I spent weeks on this!!' I thought.
Still to this day I post work online that sometimes gets zero replies. The pain is still the same, but theirs a lesson in every failure ;)
Anyway, slowly and steadily, over the course of 4 years, I created what I set out to do in the first place.. I created a red car:
So that's my story.
But thankfully, your story doesn't have to be as long or painful. The Blender of today has more users and more importantly.. tutorials!
Here's my advice for anyone hoping to improve their skills in Blender:
#1: Soak up tutorials
If you're just starting out, or you're entering an area of Blender you've never tried before, then tutorials are you ticket to success. There's no faster way to understand something than to learn from someone who does.
Even I still watch tutorials from time to time. If there's an area of blender that I've never used before, you better believe I'm going to watch a tutorial on it! Why fart around with the docs or ask on a forum when a screen captured tutorial will tell you the answer with the sound off?
Tutorials are a huge blessing.. and a curse.
There's something I call tutorial addiction. A lot of users today are falling into the trap of becoming dependent on tutorials.Just like an alcoholic who needs whiskey to start the day, if you need a tutorial before you can do anything, then you're addicted, and you're not really learning.
A tutorial will show you the ropes, but your aim should be to get off them at some point and fly solo.
Use them as you would training wheels.
#2: Challenge Yourself
This was one of the realizations that helped me the most, many years ago.
What you need to do is start a project that's outside of your comfort zone, then force yourself to complete it. Decide on the end result, and really lock it into your mind. Then once you've got that goal in mind, you'll always find a way to achieve it.
In 2008, I started this project of an Underground Carpark. And I learned more in those 3 months than I did the 4 years before it.
Blender Cgi Software
This is powerful stuff.
Your first project will probably suck (I'm just being honest). But that shouldn't deter you, because regardless of whether you notice it or not, you'll have learned valuable lessons during that project that you will carry with you into your next one.
Repeat this over and over again and you'll have slowly armed yourself with the skills to confidently take on any new project you can imagine. It's a wonderful feeling to picture something in your mind, and know exactly how to create it in Blender.
#3: Experiment
Sometimes it's fun to just play with features with no goal in mind. And sometimes those experiments lead to great things.
Use the fluid simulator and just throw water around a box. Not only will you learn little lessons in this, but it may spur you to turn it into something bigger.
My Sparks animation started as just a pposts test. After I realized I could get some attractive sparks, I began to experiment more and more, until I finally had a little animation.
It was a fun little project that I enjoyed. It's not world class or anything, but I learned a lot and had fun.
The most successful companies of today are letting their employees take on 'experimental' days. Google gives their engineers one day a week to work on anything they like - and get paid for it! Sounds crazy right? Well it was on one of those experimental days that Gmail was born.
Experiments are valuable.
#4: Be Patient
This is the hardest pill to swallow, and not one that people like hearing. But to get good at anything, you need practice and patience.
As a kid, the first time you held a held a paint brush you probably didn't paint the mona lisa. But as a kid you didn't care. You just painted coz you could and it was fun.
But as you grew older and you more mature, you began to fear failure. Websites like Failblog, Lamebook and r/cringe encourage people to laugh at those who fail. And if you expose yourself to enough of this utter dross, then you'll become increasingly hesitant to start any new project. You'll give up half way through, or hide the finished render on your hard drive in fear of criticism.
But failing is the only way you'll learn.
In the offices of Facebook, you'll find this large poster:
Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither were any of the masterpieces you see posted online today. If you saw their hard drive full of failed attempts you'd probably relax a little and realize how much in common you have with them.
One of my favourite quotes is: 'The brick walls are there to stop the people who don't want it badly enough.' -Randy Pausch
Practice hard and don't expect quick results necessarily. Anything worth achieving takes time.
#5: Distance yourself from the Blender Crowd
'Whoa whoa, what?! Andrew are you mad? Take that heathen attitude elsewhere!'
I realize that this advice sounds like an insult, but it's not. Let me explain.
CG studios and animation houses, generally use paid software like 3ds Max and Maya. Some use Blender, but most don't (sad truth).
That means that most artists who are striving for a career in CG, have paid for a formal education and are competing for top positions at Industrial Light and Magic, are not posting their artworks on BlenderArtists.
For example.. if you post a piece of artwork on the BlenderArtist forums and you can be showered with compliments. But post the same artwork on CGSociety? You can be flat out rejected:
So what can you gain by joining the mainstream CG community? A dose of reality.
When you apply for a job, enter a CG competition or do some freelance work, you don't get special points for using Blender. You get compared as equally as anyone else. Or to put it into words spoken by someone at the Blender Conference, 'Blender shouldn't be treated like the special olympics'.
When I first started out, I stuck to BlenderArtists. I posted my work there and enjoyed the compliments.
But it was only when I started posting my work on CGSociety that I got a real kick in the gut, and realized that I have a long way to go.
It's part of the reason that I started my inspiration tumblr blog. Whenever I'm feeling cocky, I go there and reflect on the works of the true masters and acknowledge that I have a long way to go.
If you can take on the position of a humble artist with lots to learn, I can guarantee that you'll never stay stagnant, and grow at a much faster rate :)
So that's all. I'm still learning Blender everyday, just like yourself. I'm having fun creating new projects and teaching others in the process.
If you have a tip for learning blender, post it in the comments below and help another user out!
By the way, my next big training course 'The Architecture Academy', is almost here! It's been the labour of love of mine for the last year. Next week I'll be launching the teaser trailer, and then following it with some free tutorials and finally a big launch trailer :) Stay tuned!