Design and 3D

How to learn Blender from scratch

Blender is a free 3D graphics program with modelling, sculpting, materials, animation and rendering in one package. Beginners are put off by the interface and the sheer number of shortcuts, but within the first two or three weeks it becomes familiar. This article is about the program itself — how to find your way around it and in what order to work through its parts.

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Before you start#

Download Blender only from the official site: it is free and released under an open licence, so there is no reason to pay anyone for it. A regular mouse with a wheel is much more comfortable than a trackpad — most navigation relies on the middle button. If your laptop keyboard has no numeric keypad, there is an option to emulate it in the preferences. Keep in mind that the interface has changed between major versions: a video recorded on a very old version may show menus that no longer exist, so check the manual for your version.

If you are not yet sure whether Blender is the right tool — for example, you want precise parts for 3D printing rather than art — read how to learn 3D modelling first.

Week 1: navigation and the interface#

Get to know the windows: the 3D viewport, the scene object list (Outliner), the Properties panel, the timeline. Rotate the view with the middle mouse button, pan with Shift plus the middle button, zoom with the wheel. The basic object keys: G to move (grab), R to rotate, S to scale, and after any of them you can press X, Y or Z to lock the action to one axis. Tab switches between object mode and edit mode, and F3 opens a search across all commands — a lifesaver when you forget where something lives.

Exercise: build a table and a chair from the standard primitives without editing inside them — only moving, rotating and scaling.

Weeks 2–3: edit mode and modifiers#

In edit mode an object is made of vertices, edges and faces. Learn a few key tools: extrude (E), loop cut (Ctrl+R), bevel (Ctrl+B), inset face (I). Then modifiers, which change the shape without destroying the original mesh: mirror, subdivision surface, array, bevel. The classic practice model at this stage is a mug: a cylinder, an inset face, an extrusion inwards, a handle from extruded faces, subdivision smoothing.

Weeks 4–5: materials, lighting and the camera#

Materials in Blender are built from nodes in the Shader Editor; to begin with, one general-purpose shader (Principled BSDF) and an understanding of its main parameters are enough: base colour, roughness, metallic. Set up three lights in the classic arrangement — key, fill and rim — place the camera and compare the two render engines: the fast Eevee, which works almost in real time, and the physically accurate Cycles, which takes longer.

Weeks 6–8: your own scene from start to finish#

Pick a small scene — a corner of a room, a desk, a still life — and go through the whole pipeline: blocking out with simple shapes, detailing, UV unwrapping and materials, lighting, rendering, a light touch-up of the image in the compositor. Your first render of your own is almost always worse than the tutorial one — that is normal; what matters is finishing it rather than abandoning it at the modelling stage.

How to follow tutorials without wasting them#

Long videos are the most common way to learn Blender and the most common way to stall. Pause after each step and repeat it in your own file; if the author does something you do not understand, look it up in the manual before moving on. A day later, try to rebuild the same model without the video — what you can recall on your own is what you have actually learned, the same principle as active recall. Keep a short list of shortcuts you keep forgetting and review it at the start of each session.

How to tell you have got the hang of it#

  • In a whole session you never searched for a button for more than a minute — shortcuts and F3 have you covered.
  • You can explain why a smoothing artefact appeared on a model and fix it with an extra edge loop.
  • You can take a scene of three to five objects to a finished render in one evening.

Common mistakes#

Watching long videos without repeating after the author. Scaling an object in object mode and not applying the scale — modifiers then behave strangely. Jumping straight into sculpting, simulations and animation before mastering basic modelling.

Step-by-step plan

  1. Week 1 — navigationThe interface windows, rotating the view, G/R/S with axes, Tab and F3; a table and chair from primitives.
  2. Weeks 2–3 — modellingExtrude, loop cut, bevel, the mirror and subdivision modifiers; a mug model.
  3. Weeks 4–5 — materials and lightingA shader in the node editor, three-point lighting, the camera, comparing Eevee and Cycles.
  4. Weeks 6–8 — your own sceneBlocking out, detailing, materials, lighting and rendering a small scene from start to finish.

Start learning this in your own space

The plan goes into your repository: tick off stages, keep notes — the change history shows how far you have come.

Start the plan

Sources

  • BlenderOfficial site: free download
    free
  • Blender ManualOfficial documentation for every tool and mode
    free

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