BLENDER

[Patrickivan]

I've decided to give Blender a go this upcoming week. I'm off work and completely offline from distractions. I've also been off Sketchup long enough to not let it mess me up learning this.

I've downloaded Blender and a manual. Any thoughts for offline learning materials or tips in general with this new endeavour?

Hopefully I'll have some new art to post when I get back. Something other than circles and squares. This is The Trek BBS after all, so it'll be discs and cylinders.

 

[MadMan1701A]

This one is good... I used the older version back when I was starting.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c1/BlenderDocumentation.pdf

-Ricky

 

[Irishman]

A good set of beginner's tutorials done by Jacob Lewis on Youtube helped me get started.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLV7h-WLIx0

 

[Serin117]

BlenderGuru is pretty great as well. Both youtube and the step by step tutes are on their website.

 

[Psion]

CGCookie has a great Blender section. Although a lot of the material is only available to paying customers, there's tons of free stuff, too -- especially the introductory materials.

Anything by Jonathan Williamson is worth watching.

 

[Architect]

The only real tips I can offer are to play with it, a lot. I started, a long time ago, with 3dsMax. When I switched to Blender, the big challenge was just unlearning everything I'd learned.

Blender, itself, pretty much does what you expect.

Generally speaking, I don't do tutorials in terms of the tutorial. I build what I'm building and when I need to figure something out, I replicate the information in the tuts on my own stuff.

Figure out what you want to do, then jump in. When you get stumped, google is your friend.

While I totally see the benefit of disconnecting from the interwebs, I can't imagine learning Blender without the ability to reach Blender Artists and youtube. But, good luck!