How To Use Blender 2.79

Blender tutorials could be just what you need to speed up your process and save you money when creating your 3D art. Thanks to Blender being a free and open source software, no-one has to miss out on this quality resource.

You'll find hundreds of quality Blender tutorials online, designed to introduce you to the program and help you improve your skills. They'll enable you to focus on modelling, animation, rendering and composition, learning tips from the expert 3D designers teaching in the video and text tutorials.

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We've grouped the Blender tutorials into three sections. This means that as well as browsing the whole list, you can jump straight to the relevant guides for you (use the drop-down menu above to navigate to the page you want).

Blender tutorials for beginners

01. Blender 2.9 Beginner Tutorial

If you're about to start working with the latest version of Blender, be sure to check out this helpful Blender tutorial from CG Fast Track. It'll take you through all you need to know to get started with Blender's latest version. It's quite a lengthy one, split up into three parts so make sure you set the time aside to watch it as it's absolutely worth it.

This tutorial stresses the importance of practise, so you'll make a sword and a stone animation to learn the skills on the job. With over 265,900 views, this is a super-popular tutorial – and the comments reflect the effectiveness of the lesson's approach.

02. Blender tutorial: First steps

If you're using a slightly older version, take a look at this navigation overview, the first in a series of free Blender tutorials from the Blender Foundation. There are 41 short courses in total to help you master the fundamentals of the software, including interface overview, creating meshes and subdividing surfaces.

03. Blender basics: shading and lighting

Before you start creating anything in Blender, you need to master the basics. This 20-minute video tutorial will walk you through Blender's shading and lighting features, and shows you what you can do with them.

04. The basics of realistic texturing

In another offering from Andrew Price, he reveals the secrets of realistic texturing in this detailed Blender tutorial. Discover how to take a texture and create some variations of it, using Photoshop or a Photoshop alternative, then putting them into Blender. Want more? Price has a whole host of excellent Blender video tutorials on his YouTube page.

05. Creating meshes

In this video, the Blender team run through how to create a mesh – an object made of polygons. Here you'll learn the difference between a polygonal mesh, and a NURBS surface, and why modelling with polygons is a preferable option.

Blender tutorials: character animation — Learn the basics of character animation

In this series of lessons, Blender artist Beorn Leonard explains all the fundamentals of character animation in Blender. Highlights include working with timing and spacing, overlapping motion, animation walk and run cycles and understanding IK and FK.

07. Lighting and baking workflow

Get to grips with the complete workflow for setting up lighting for an outdoor scene. In this tutorial you'll learn how to bake light for a blazing fast render, taking 14 seconds per frame rather than eight minutes.

08. Greenscreen masking for VFX

Add some Hollywood flair to your projects. Here you'll learn the basics of masking and chroma keying in Blender – just the thing for mixing real world footage with CG via a bit of green screen action.

09. Introduction to rigging

Lee Salvemini is kind of a big deal in the Blender community. He worked on Sintel, Elephants dream and spent two years on Star Wars video game titles for LucasArts. In this free video tutorial for Blender Guru, he presents a complete beginner's introduction to rigging. The video above is part one of the series, with parts two and three available on the Blender Guru site.

10. Introduction to camera tracking

Blender comes bundled with an awesome feature called Camera Tracking. Camera Tracking is a process that involves using real footage and tracking its motion so that 3D elements and VFX can be added to it. This tutorial, again from the brilliant Blender Guru, gives you a complete beginners introduction to what this tool is and how to start using it right now.

11. Blender shortcuts: The hotkeys you need to know

Blender tutorials: hotkeys — (Image credit: Lukas Walzer)

This tutorial contains shortcuts that are super-useful, and that help to streamline your workflow. They'll allow you to cut out some of the fiddly bits, meaning your texturing process will be much improved.

Next page: Cheatsheets for creating objects and scenes