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