Hello all I’m new to Blender and these forums.
I’ve been watching some tutorials and have learned most of the basics but is there a good tutorial on modeling sets for films in blender? also characters?
And another question, my laptop takes quite a while to render an animation (3 second animation took like 25 minutes.) Is this normal? And if it is not what would be the best computer to get? My budget isn’t huge but just curious.
Thanks for any help I will get!
Hello & welcome!
yes, depending on what resolution, polygon ammount and other rendering features utilized,
rendering can be a very long process, so not to worry too much about that.
I would suggest getting either a propper pre-built workstation or building one your self,
but I don’t think one is needed for learning, so you should probably be fine for now,
it would be smart to start collecting some money for future though. 
lets say putting $10 /month aside should get you $120 in a years time which isn’t much for a workstation,
but it would be a start, I’d estimate if your building your own new machine rather than buying a pre-built,
500+ should get you a good starter machine, that might be perhaps not the most powerful speced,
but would be a machine that should be easily upgradeable in the future.
Hi Hwk10, welcome to the forums!
25 minutes for a 3 second animation does seem a bit excessive to me, but it really depends on whats in your scene and how many meshes, how many polys, and what kind of materials and lighting you have. Your computer could also lead to slow renderings, if its really old or not made for graphics. That said, it sounds like you could optimize the rendering a bit. That just takes practice and messing with things.I would look at some rendering tutorials, you should be able to find some here on the tutorial section of the forums.
As for your computer, there’s no specific computer i can recommend, seeing as i don’t know your your bugget, but if you know how to build a computer or know someone who does, you might try building a computer with the new Nvidia Ion card. They go for about 100- 200 dollars and if you get a couple you can sting them together to get a great rendering computer! It would be a very cheep but powerful set up, if you can do it.
Hope this helps.
Thanks for the info it will definetly help! One more question…is it feasible to do the construction on say a laptop or something then import and render on a work station?? it doesn’t matter I guess I’m just curious? Thanks this place is great! Can’t believe I hadn’t found Blender earlier!
sure, well, depending on what your doing obviously.
if your sculpting a human head of such high detail that even the skin wrinkles and pores are part of it,
then your laptop will probably not be the ideal machine for it, but for most modeling job’s I’d say it should be fine. 
oh, and also there are some fine introductory video tutorials at http://blenderunderground.com/ 
oh, and not to forget Jonathan Williamsons video tutorials at cgcookie
and blendernewbies is a good site of training material as well.
Alright THANKS for the tutorials exactly what I was looking for!