Blender Video Tutorials – Soup to Nuts
Okay, so it’s not called “Soup to Nuts”, it’s actually called Blender Basics, but it intends to be a start to finish on learning Blender. Now if you’ve never heard of Blender, it is from what I can tell, it is the only full fledged 3D modeling tool that has all the nifty features of its $5000+ competition products (3ds max, xsi, maya, etc), except its free. Open source, even. And being the cheap ass that I am, I like free. In fact, I downloaded Inkscape last week and have been playing with it (it’s a freeware knock off of Adobe Illustrator – vector based drawing. Which is good for me because I have the drawing skills of a first grader…).
Anyway, I needed a 3D Modeler so I can make some models for my XNA game I’m working on. I tried the freeware XSI version (limited to 64,000 triangles. Bad for terrain models), and I looked at Maya Personal Learning Edition (can’t export to anything useful, watermarks your models), and even looked at some of the other freeware stuff (Milkshape, Wings 3D) which were lousy at best. So with reluctance, I picked up Blender.
Why the reluctance, it’s free and full-featured right? What could be better? Well, let’s just say the interface is about as alien as it gets. Starting up the program is like jumping down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. The left mouse button does what you’d expect the right to do, there’s as many buttons on the panels as the space shuttle, and within 5 minutes you want to gouge your eyes out in frustration. But if you want to do cool modeling tricks like fur and hair, vertex painting, sculpting and Nurbs, it’s either deal with the interface or give up your first born.
So I needed a good start-to-finish resource to learn this complex beast, and I found it: blenderunderground.com. This is by far the most comprehensive, in-depth screencast series I’ve seen on Blender. Most videos I’ve found on the interweb are usually the advanced stuff, and not in any order of difficulty, making it frustrating for the beginning- and I must emphasize- artistically handicapped person like yours truly to even attempt to learn this stuff. And I personally like videos over books when it comes to things that are non-code because I can actually see what the person is doing, not just scrambling over where to find “Inter-Extrapolate” button, or whatever.
Anyway, there’s only 5 videos so far, each about an hour or so. By the 5th video, you’re already skinning models with textures, which I figure will get me far enough off the ground make some cool stuff. There isn’t much better instruction for $0 on Blender than this, ladies and gentlemen. And for some twisted reason, of all the freeware modellers, Blender gets the most love as far as features go (don’t ask me why, artists on a budget must also be masochists *shrugs*). Anyway, check em out. Either that or A: deal with the other lousy free stuff out there, or B: deal with the horribly crippled “lite” versions of the commercial modelers out there. Both options won’t get you much more than N64-quality game models out those.
