Learn the Foundations of Blender

Learn the fundamental concepts and techniques of Blender 3D, the incredible free, open-source animation suite. Learn to create 3D models, materials, uv maps, and textures.  Learn to light and render your scenes with Blender's Cycles render engine.

Build a strong foundation from the start, so you can build your 3D skills quickly and efficiently.

• Blender 3D Modeling Tools

• UV Mapping

• Materials and Textures

• Cycles Lights and Rendering

Learn the fundamental 3D skills you'll need to create your own animations and visual effects.

Learning to create and texture 3D models opens the door for you to create your own incredible animations, visual effects, and video games. Blender is free to download and use for any purpose and has proven itself to be a powerful tool for independent and commercial projects all over the world.

Blender provides an excellent low-cost way to learn the fundamentals of 3D modeling, texturing, and rendering. Since 1995, it has been growing in features and usage in the animation and visual effects industries.

Content and Overview

In this course you’ll learn the fundamental concepts and skills that will allow you to create three-dimensional models in Blender. We’ll begin with Blender’s interface and navigation tools, and move steadily into the foundational modeling tools like Extrude and Loop Cut. We’ll talk about building up complex objects from basic shapes, and you’ll be introduced to some of Blender’s Modifiers, like Mirror and Subdivision Surface

We will then talk about using Blender’s Cycles render engine to create materials for our objects, light our scenes, and create stunning renders. We first look at Blender’s camera and render settings. We will then go over the different kinds of lights that Blender has to offer. And we use the Node Editor to create and modify the materials for our scene. The interaction of materials and lighting is an important part of any scene, and this course provides the fundamental concepts and techniques for achieving great renders in Blender.

Finally, we will talk about what UV mapping is and why it is needed. We’ll go over the tools that Blender has available for us to UV map our 3D objects. And we’ll look at how to export your UV maps out of Blender so you can build textures in image-editing programs like GIMP. We’ll then bring these textures into Blender and assign them to our objects using the Node Editor. In addition, we will work with Blender’s Texture Painting tools, and examine how we can paint textures directly on our 3D models.

Reference images and textures are available to download with their corresponding videos.

"I love your tutorials! For the first time, I'm able to understand Blender! Thank you so much!" -Jade W

"Great work, Darrin. You make a great teacher as well as a fantastic 3D artist. I really appreciate your work; can't wait to see what you do next! -theLegendofSamuel

"I just wanted to say how much I appreciate these high quality tutorials you put out!!! You are truly an inspirational person. -Zach B