A Blended Journey
My Journey
Through
Blender
I began my Journey in August 2022, Version 3.0. I was determined to add this program to my skillset. After downloading and installing Blender my Journey began.
My Tips for Beginners:
Stay organized with Blender’s resources and plugins. Don’t get overwhelmed by its complexity. Follow my journey, and you’ll soon enjoy creating and animating anything you want. Most importantly, save your work often—Blender will crash eventually.
Where to Begin?
I’ve heard Blender is not an easy program to learn. So, like most beginners, I started by following the Donut tutorial on YouTube. It has to be one of the longest-running tutorials for Blender. The Blender Gurus Blender Tutorial for Complete Beginners – Part 1. is a classic. He has remade this tutorial countless times to stay current with the latest release of Blender.
It’s a great tutorial if you just want to dip your toe into Blender and get an understanding and feel for the very basics. It provides enough experience for you to decide if Blender is something you want to continue learning.
What you will end up knowing is how to create a donut in Blender, but not much else. Blender requires a lot of time, practice, and a commitment to learning. It’s a program you really have to use almost every day to keep up with, and having a robust Graphics Card doesn’t hurt either.
My Tip:
Stay away from outdated training videos to begin with. It’s hard enough to follow along with current tutorials let alone having your tools and windows appear differently or replaced altogether.
Blender does a great job at updating their software. Once you understand Blender in its current version, it’s much easier to understand its older versions and tutorials. You’ll begin to see and appreciate the improvements Blender has made over the years.
There is a lot of great tips and tricks that are still very relevant in the older tutorials.
Learning the Blender Basics
After the Donut tutorial I was ready to make the commitment to learn Blender. I knew I had to find some indepth tutorials that explained blender in a way I could understand.
I landed on the Crossmind Studios 7 Day Blender for Beginners series. It took more like 14 days for me to get through it. I liked that you create small things at first then gradually work your way up to fianl day with the airplane model and animation.
After working with Blender for almost two years now, I would still recommend the series. However, There are a few others I’ve noticed that may be great as well like Ryan King Art Blender for Complete Beginners also look at CG Cookie Blender Basics any of these series will provide a great beginners experience.
If you make it through any of the beginners training courses then you’ll probably want to continue learning Blender. It’s easy to become overwhelmed with the amount of stuff you think you need to learn. Focus on one area of Blender at a time. Hard surface modeling is a great place to start.
My Ode to Blender
What do I do with it? All this stuff I’ve created in Blender, Donuts, cheese, robots. I decided to take all my new found knowledge and all the things I’ve created following the tutorials and apply it to this mini tribute or my Ode to Blender and all the Blender tutorial artist who helped me get this far. I really appreciate all the time and effort they put into creating their videos.
Learning How to Work in Blender
After Basic training I wanted to learn more, but at the same time create something cool. I found the Ryan King Art robot tutorials. These tutorials were perfect for where I was at in my training. Easy to understand and follow. Truely created for the beginner. There came a point following one of these turorials that I had an AHA! moment and from then on I’ve been hooked on Blender.
By time I was on my fourth robot tutorial I could almost follow along with Ryan in realtime. I felt comfortable with the interface and knowing what shortcut keys to hit most of the time. Blender is king when it comes to creating shortcut keys. Knowing the shortcuts keys is imparative if you want to work in Blender.
If your interested in easy to follow tutorials I highly recommend these video series from Ryan King Art. He taught me how to develop a workflow and gave me a much better understanding of the tools and different areas of Blender and how they work with each other.
Sci-fi Mech Robot
11-Videos
Sci-fi Worker Robot
8-Videos
Sci-fi Security Drone
8-Videos
Sci-fi Robot Drone
6-Videos
It’s a matter of perspective
This little project was the beginning of my facination with fluid simulations. Just by changing the camera angle and lighting I was able to create some very interesting visuals using the same simulation.
Explore & Play
If your still reading this then thank you and kudos to me for making it somewhat intresting and entertaining.
After following all the beginner tutorial videos and creating the Ode to Blender Video I decided to take a break and just explore the Blender environment on my own. Look for tutorials that pertain to the areas of Blender that are the most interesting for you.
A Bit Overwhelmed
Sculpting, creating landscapes, rigging characters with an armature for animation and how to create textures from scratch. were all things that I was interested in but I admit it was a bit overwhelming. I started to question my mental capacity to understand this program. However, I had made it this far and it would be a complete waste if I didn’t continue with my training.
A Bit Over Simulated
I was most interested in discovering the amazing physics simulations that Blender can create. Many, tutorials were explored. And many hours spent on experimenting, baking and rebaking the simulations Making a ton of mistakes causing Blender to crash often. But now I feel confident in using the physics tools and understand what the limits are with my current graphics card and computer.
Physics in Blender can be quite heavy on your system. The bigger the GPU you have the better chance for success. Through trial and error I figured out what water, smoke, fire and rigid body simulation were all about. So cool it’s almost addictive.
Alice
Alice was my first attempt at rigging a charater. I learned so much about rigging and how hard it is to animate people and animals. Amazing tools for animation yet to be discoverd.
Ham & Noodles
I created Ham & Noodles. Two characters that I could animate fairly easily. It started as Duval Dave (aka Ham) and then evolved into Ham and Noodles for their debut in the Endless Engine Challenge. The firts Blender chanllenge I participated in.
Characters and Animation
I’ve always had a passion for cartooning and animation. One of the reasons I wanted to learn Blender was to be able to create and animate my own characters. Creating and rigging a character from scratch was hard enough but animating a the character is really hard. It would take me years that I don’t have left to master that skill.
Know Your Limits
I don’t see myelf ever working for Pixar so I can give myself a break with the character animation part of Blender and focus my time on areas that I’m more interested in. I can take what I’ve learned about rigging and apply it to other projects and things that are not so difficult to animate. Maybe one day I will revisit this area or just wait til I can prompt my AI assistant to do it for me. Blender has already proven to be a beneficial tool for creating unique and original web art for my clients at JOE Design, Inc.
No Dust in My Wind – 151 Views
Proximity JOE – 125 Views
Now and Zen – 388 Views
Learning Curve
The only way to keep your skills sharp in Blender is to use it everyday. After a year of Blender training I developed a method for myself to continue to explore different techniques in Blender without have to start from scratch on every project. Or follow a long tutorial.
I decided to use my name JOE as a model and see what different things I could do to it. I looked for tutorial videos that I could apply to my JOE model. I ended up creating 90 different “My Morning JOE” scenarios. It was a great learning experience but after 90 I got kinda burnt out and needed a break.
I learned a lot of tricks, shortcuts and bought my first plugin RBD Labs a must have for destroying things in Blender and their latest release is amazing. And plenty of Tutorials to watch on how to use it.
In the end it provided me a library of effects that I can refer back to if I need to remember how I did something. Which I know I will. It’s a lot to remember if you don’t use it everyday.
Basic Bot – As Per Tutorial
Basic Bot – My interpetation
Basic Bot – Animation
Paid for Blender Training Courses
I finally hit a wall with Blender. I felt like I was missing something. About a year and half into it and the YouTube videos are still great but I needed something more structured and more about the method and less about the UI and how to use tools.
I’ve always wanted to try a paid for online Blender course but was always to cheap to pony up for it. Why would I pay for something when there is a plethera of videos I could watch for free. It’s not like I’ve run out of content to consume I just need a different type of content.
I landed on CGBoost and discovered their Robot Planet World tutorial. It was lableled Intermediate so this would be a good test to see if I had graduated from beginner to intermediate. Glad to say after going through the first part of the tutorial that I am officially an intermediate Blender artist. Yeah! Now how to I get to the next level? I’m still working on that one but I think this course a a step in the right direction.
I’ve learned some cool methods and tools that I’ve never seen demonstrated in the hundreds of hours spent following YouTube videos. Can’t wait to get into the second part of this tutorial.
My Endless Journey Continues
My Training in Blender will never stop. It has become my favorite program to work in. I’ve used it to create imagery for my clients that I couldn’t have achieved in any other program. If your an aspiring graphic designer in 2024 I would highly reccommend learning this program. It’s a beast to learn but it will benefit your future career in many ways.