For me, Blender is like having the ultimate creators design kit. I’ve learned a lot of different applications over my career, all the Adobe products from version zero on, but nothing compares to Blender. It’s a beast.
With that, hats off to Blender for creating such a dynamic program and offering to anyyone who is willing to learn it for free. It has truly rekindled my imagination and has given me an opportuinity to explore my own vision.
I began by following these 7 videos from CrossMind Studio. Excellent courses for beginners. I liked the way the content methodically rolled out. It helped me make sense of all the different workings and environments within Blender. After somewhat successfully completing these tutorials. I felt that I had a good understanding of the basic elements of the program which made the next set of tutorials alot easier to follow.
Afer that took a couple of weeks off and just played around in Blender.
My Experiments
Smokey Ape
Fireball
Chunky Milk
Water Run
Breakin Bad
Land Ho
Watered Down
Next I followed all of Ryan Kings Robot tutorials. These easy and follow tutorials taught me a good workflow within the program, and were really fun to build. From using reference images, proceedual textures, animation to rendering he covers it from beginning to end. Ryan also has a beginner tutorial series as well. I haven’t wathed them but imagine they are as well done.
I created a video featuring all the robots and other stuff from other tutorials to showcase my finished results. It’s my Ode to Blender. From here I continued to watch vairous other videos, more advanced videos and videos specific to what I was trying to achieve.
Learning Blender can seem be a bit daunting and overwhelming when you first start out but at some point you no longer fear the unkown. Thats when you know your half way there. I’ve been at it for six months now and the one thing I have learned about Blender is that I have so much more to learn about Blender. About audio, about lighting, animation, physics the list goes on.
From here I will continue to learn, watching the latest YouTube videos and reviewing old ones. They only way to retain what I have learned is to use Blender daily. Blender is a program that will keep interested for a very, very long time. Good Luck to all those who are inspired to learn something new.
