Blender Community Starters Guide

by Wes Burke

Admittedly coming from a 3D Studio Max user background the world of Blender was new and unknown just a few years back. I had questions of; Who is using Blender, how can I learn Blender and what sort of quality is it able to produce? To my surprise it can do quite a bit more then the average industry artist may think.

But how does one get started or is there a road-map to follow to get drink of Blender and become a full-fledge Blenderhead?

Background / History of Blender

Blender has roots all the way back to 1988, and has transversed through time and a few roadblocks to get where it is today. Ton Roosendaal founded the Blender Foundation back in 2002 and has since then started the Blender Institute which has produced 4 major productions. The latest one “Sintel” premiered to a sold out crowd at Netherlands Film Festival. To get the granular details of this fantastic story read the history from the source itself http://www.blender.org/blenderorg/blender-foundation/history/

How to get Blender?

You may download the latest official “Stable” release from the download page at Blender.org. Or, if you prefer to live on the edge you will find that most up-to-date, development builds at http://graphicall.org.

Blender is available for Macs, Linux and even Windows! ;)

Where to learn Blender?

Here of course! Hah, but if you are tired of our sexy voices then these guys below are just as cool.. if not cooler. Give these guys a visit and check out the education they are producing for the rest of us.

Kernon Dilion - From Blender Newbies and has been rocking some tutorials with us for some time. Kernon was one of the first industry guys I met online and has been a fantastic educational resource to the Blender community for years.
bnew

Andrew Price - Is crazy good and pushing the wow out of blender and into your vocabulary when viewing the results form his tutorials. Andrew is awesome at controlling the elements and nature inside of Blender. Visit Andrew over at BlenderGuru.com
bg

David Ward is one of our own, but also has his own bag of Blender Contributions that are worth noting. His youtube.com channel is full of great educational and he has a central website you can find him hanging out at: http://blender101.com/
dv

Sebastian Koenig has taken a huge step and now teaches Blender Workshops. He also has several fantastic tutorials for purchase at cmiVFX
seb

Jason van Gumster - Whom has been featured in 3D world Magazine, and has had two books published. Including his recent update version of Blender for Dummies. Jason is quick to help and is even helping us on our support ticket system! :) Visit Jason over at Hand Turkey Studios
hand

Other Resources

There are several Blender educators stepping up each day to help spread their knowledge to others of Blender. Here are just a few that are worth taking a look at:

Here are some large resources as well that are worth keeping an eye on. Below links are filtered for Blender Tutorials.

Of course there is also education materials available for purchase from the Blender Foundation directly at: http://www.blender3d.org/e-shop/ Purchasing from the E-shop helps support the foundation.

The Blender Network

There are several sites that help serve up Blender news, Galleries and general community hangouts. The community is a very unique and close-nit community that all has one shared obsession.

Blender Nation – Blender news Served Daily. Bart is fantastic over there and spends a bit of his time helping the news flowing freely each day.
bn

Blendswap – Blend Swap was created after becoming frustrated searching through forums of broken links, and model websites full of ads. It is a great resource for people to download and post .blend files to share with others.
blend_swap

IRC – Yes this is still around and it is the place where you can find Blender discussions a plenty. There are specific channels for discussion types found here.
irc

BlenderArt Mag – The magazine was started for the blender community, having the aim of publishing a bi-monthly PDF magazine; free for download. The goal of the magazine is to provide quality learning content for the blender community, from the efforts of the community itself.
blenderart

Blender Artists – Though just recently apart of the CG Cookie network, this site has been around for years and serves roughly 15k unique Blender users a day.
ba

David Revoy – has worked with us on a few series and is a top-notch concept artist. His portfolio is great to visit for an arm of inspiration.
reovy

People to know

Along with the people and sites mentioned above, it is good to become familar with some of the community members.

Of course there are many other excellent artists, teachers and developers that we haven’t mentioned here. If you spend much time in the Blender Community you’ll come to find many people that you’ll want to follow.

How to help Blender

getinvolved

Blender is a living entity that changes from day to day, but there are things that you can do to help out. Things as straight forward as donating to the foundation HERE if able, or as simple as visiting the sites above. Supporting these sites and the people behind them, helps keep education fresh and filling up the Google search engine results.

Contribute back to the community whenever possible. This could be in the form of offering a critique back on an image, or helping out a newer artist that is looking to get their feet wet over at the Blender Artists forums.

Thank you guys and if we missed something just mention it below and we will work to get it added. Happy Blending!

You must be logged in to upload images. Register

Discussion

29 Responses to “Blender Community Starters Guide”
  1. aksjon
    Posts: 9

    for those who are hungry to get in details the whole interfase explained at first I would suggest also http://www.gryllus.net

    #
    1
     May 11, 2011 at 5:22 pm
  2. Richard Damian
    Posts: 47

    Well done.

    I’ve been with Blender since the “Not a Number” days.

    It is hard for most people to get their heads around the fact that such a fabulous tool:
    1. Is so small
    2. Is so powerful
    3. Is totally open source
    4. Has tons of tutorials and support on the net.

    I am speaking to the choir here, but whether you came to Blender from Lightwave or 3D Studio Max or Zbrush or Houdini, this powerful, free product is unexpected.

    Thanks for the links to many places to learn Blender from others.

    Dick

    -Dick

    #
    2
     May 11, 2011 at 5:22 pm
  3. Oliver Villar Diz
    Posts: 2

    Hey!! Thanks a lot for the plug :) You guys rock! Great tips and things to know about blender on this article ;) I’ll publish it on my web :D

    Love the blender community!

    #
    3
     May 11, 2011 at 5:31 pm
  4. Simon Coppard
    Posts: 31

    I think its also worth noting that cg-tuts has a filter for blender tutorials, rather than just being a wide open slather…
    You can subscribe just to the RSS for the blender channel too, so you never miss a vid!

    #
    4
     May 11, 2011 at 5:33 pm
  5. iklsr
    Posts: 35

    thanks for the plug. we love blender.

    #
    5
     May 11, 2011 at 6:11 pm
  6. Alex Telford
    Posts: 454

    Good tips :D one day my site will be on the list. one day… :P haha

    #
    6
     May 11, 2011 at 7:57 pm
    • unhunkyguy
      Posts: 11

      Indeed, one day…

      #
      6.1
       May 15, 2011 at 8:56 pm
  7. comeinandburn
    Posts: 62

    What a great article, very informative and concise. Thanks so much Wes for putting this together! There is so much happening in the community that from time to time I forget resources that I’ve discovered in the past. I won’t forget again!

    #
    7
     May 11, 2011 at 8:22 pm
  8. Viktor Mukayev
    Posts: 9

    You should also add in information about IRC. You can find blender artists and blender developers at Freenode IRC server. Chanels are #blender and #blendercoders
    And talk to each other in realtime)

    #
    8
     May 11, 2011 at 9:56 pm
  9. greg
    Posts: 115

    Great summary of blender resources there .
    I just ordered the blender newbies 4 dvd blender 2.5 training series, glad to see kernon dillon featured, extremely thorough teaching style he has!
    I also got the vehicle modelling series , now just need to spend way more time in blender, it does seem there is a ton of resources available , pretty cool!
    Gotta love the tuts from all these awesome blender teachers, all good , with different and diverse specialities and skills, just amazing.

    Thanks blender cookie!

    #
    9
     May 11, 2011 at 11:56 pm
  10. Hiza Ro
    Posts: 5

    Thank you for this article, great!
    I will share for new blender user users when they move from other software :)

    #
    10
     May 12, 2011 at 1:34 am
  11. Robert Papaureille
    Posts: 4

    Hey please include Demohero with his fabulous Foreverblender http://foreverblender.blogspot.com/, (news and pdf tuts, not to mention his own contributions to the code and his own builds)
    and the excellent Allan Brito’s “Blender Architect” http://www.blender3darchitect.com/

    #
    11
     May 12, 2011 at 2:13 am
  12. zanyman
    Posts: 11

    Amazing! A page like this is well needed!

    Couple of suggestions though:

    1. This page needs to be marketed well. I mean, make sure the link to this page is available everywhere – blender.org, blenderartists.com, luxrender.net, blenderguru.com and so on.

    2. It also needs to be updated regularly, everytime a new version gets released, someone new joins the team, another great resource of tutorials is available etc.

    #
    12
     May 12, 2011 at 3:30 am
    • Wes Burke
      Posts: 429

      Agreed – If there is a bit of attention to this we will start to move it a a dedicated page ;)

      #
      12.1
       May 12, 2011 at 7:58 am
    • John D Smith II
      Posts: 234

      This is an awesome contribution in itself. It took me years to comb the net for, and countless 1000′s of hours to soak in, most of these sites. I think I’ve even missed a few that you’ve listed here. Newbie’s will certainly have watering mouths as their cursors pass over these delicious links, but even though I think/hope I lost my newbie status, I thank you too Wes. Having new things to see and learn really helps keep my interest in Blender up. I watched the Last Star-fighter last night and those guys really took a big step in pioneering CGI. All the hard work that goes into this site and the others (Not to mention the awesome work being done on Blender itself!) is pioneering a world where I can learn do this kind of stuff on a laptop at home. And hopefully collect a check for it someday!lol
      Bravo!

      #
      12.2
       May 13, 2011 at 4:57 pm
  13. verticies
    Posts: 228

    Lot of tuts here also and if you click on Blender links you will find more LINKS.
    http://gryllus.net/Blender/3D.html

    Couple more
    http://www.tutorialsforblender3d.com/Game_Engine/Tutorials_index.html

    http://vimeo.com/pcaggegi/videos/page:1/sort:newest

    #
    13
     May 12, 2011 at 3:42 am
  14. Mitch McCollum
    Posts: 17

    Is there going to be any member exclusives coming out because having membership is no fun without any real reason to have it…..

    #
    14
     May 12, 2011 at 8:23 am
    • Jonathan Williamson
      Posts: 2964

      Absolutely! We have the final part of the M4 coming up soon and a couple new Baker videos that should go over well :)

      -Jonathan

      #
      14.1
       May 12, 2011 at 10:58 am
    • Wes Burke
      Posts: 429

      I echo what Jonathan mentioned and the ability to download all HD and source files on each full tutorial. ;) Hugs all around

      #
      14.2
       May 12, 2011 at 11:06 am
  15. yankomeister
    Posts: 16

    Thanks CGCOOKIE team, wath a great and noble community is Blender. Congatulations to all!

    #
    15
     May 12, 2011 at 8:50 am
  16. ejnersan
    Posts: 2

    “Blender is available for Macs, Linux and even PCs!”

    *ugh* not you too… they are all Personal Computers! Should be:
    “Blender is available for Mac, Linux and even Windows!”

    Other than that, thanks for running this site!

    #
    16
     May 12, 2011 at 1:03 pm
    • Wes Burke
      Posts: 429

      Edited! I agree and slapped myself. I always tell people, “PC = Personal Computer” so that means everything.. Thank you for the check. ;)

      #
      16.1
       May 12, 2011 at 2:00 pm
  17. BlenderNerd
    Posts: 1

    Thanks for the mention Wes :) very kind of you.

    #
    17
     May 12, 2011 at 3:30 pm
  18. Juan Pablo Amorocho Duran
    Posts: 10

    I have great respect for you guys and I don’t mean be an idiot, but the Blender Diploma site you mention is actually called BlenderDiplom. By the way, it is a great site to learn to use Blender for VFX.

    Wes, Jonathan and David, please keep baking those cookies. They taste terrific!

    #
    18
     May 15, 2011 at 8:15 am
  19. Gottfried Hofmann
    Posts: 25

    Thanks for adding BlenderDiplom and thanks Juan for the appreciation!

    Another site I think deserves to be on the list is Ben Amend’s Blender Tutorials: http://www.benamend.com

    #
    19
     May 18, 2011 at 5:09 am
  20. Carsten Holtkamp
    Posts: 5

    Well done!
    And now make a PDF available :)

    #
    20
     May 21, 2011 at 6:42 am

Leave a Comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.