History

I downloaded Blender over a decade ago (before Youtube), tinkered with it, and let it rot because I couldn’t figure it out. To be fair I gave it no real investment of my time or energy but I was really happy it was so powerful and I was excited to get to know it when the time was right.  A few years ago I read about Blender and how much it had matured.  The impression I got was that although it works a bit unconventionally it had a fantastic user interface which some people swear by.  A few months ago I downloaded it again when it was time for me to start making games and I read a book about it but it wasn’t until tonight I finally legitimately dug into it and figured out some of the things I can do with it.

Goals

In this article I’ll lay out what I know about the Blender 3D modeling tool and will keep track of the best resources that I find for the swiss-army-knife of 3D tools, the mighty Blender.

What I learned today

I learned a bunch of keyboard and mouse shortcuts:

Select, Deselect, Create, Extrude, Select Objects, Vertices, Edges, Faces.
I learned to turn on “Screencast Keys”

I learned to create cool pipes using bezier curves and related Bevel Objects.

I also learned how to navigate Blender from my MacBook Pro Trackpad.

Specifics

Here I’ll list some specifics that I didn’t mention in the videos above:

Select a segment of faces easily.

select a face, then alt select a nearby edge to select the segment in that direction.

You can see it in action in this tutorial

Other Blender Tutorials and Videos

• Using the Tools
  • Bevel in particular
  • Using Nurbs Curves to make pinball lanes (as well as Array Curves, Mirror Modifiers (with clipping and merging))
  • Using Subsurface Modifiers and Array Curves
  • The Inset Faces tool
• Creating Meshes
  • Low poly Animals
• Rigging and Animating Characters