Hello, im a designer working out of china in publishing, its my first full time job out of uni way back in the uk, anyway my major is illustration and animation and i want to take this chance with a steady job to get to grips with 3d animation for when i move on in the artistic direction i want to , which is film and design. so i got this program “blender” and have no idea about it at all, do i start with learning how to sculpt, or animate, render? i just dont know so if anyone could point me in the right direction i would be grateful .
Welcome!
First, you should take your time to get used to the amazing Blender User Interface that for the beginners is the first nightmare. Just try to move cubes, rotate them, scale, arrange windows, add stuff, try to edit some things, etc.
2nd , you should probably follow some basic modeling tuturial, nothing to much complicated yet, to make some quind of object.
Third thing it would be trying to add some materials to your recently made object. Play a little with shaders settings for example and try to put 2 materials in the same object.
4th now that you have materials, add a texture to it and studdy all the methods possible.
Now that you have something made you can try to animate it, nothing to fancy, just move it around a bit, take a look to the ipo curves and to the Non Linear Animation (NLA) editor .
Latter when you fell more confortable with blender I recomend that you pass to character design, rigging, skining, Driven shape keys and animation using the combination of the Action editor, Ipo curves, NLA :eyebrowlift:
If you like physical material, you can also buy the three major publications out there, The Essential Blender, Introducing Character Animation with Blender, and The ManCandy FAQ (all about animating with the ManCandy character, which teaches you a butt-load about animation).
It’s funny to think that only recently we wouldn’t be able to point people to half of this stuff. Blender’s documentation is GROWING!!! It’s alive!!! It’s alive!!! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAA!!!
My main advice is to just try. Things can be undone so press buttons and slide sliders and see what they do. For the rest, check the links already given.
If you get stuck, have a search on this forum. If you can’t find what you are looking for/have an additional question, just post it in the relevant support forum.
If you want a faster response, there are 2 options,
Post a question with a useful title (don’t post “HELP!!!”, post something like “Can’t change colour of material”). Seems obvious, but many miss this
Check out irc. #blender on freenode usually has a load of people who can help out.
If you want, feel free to pm me, I always want a diversion from my dissertation.
If you like physical material, you can also buy the three major publications out there, The Essential Blender, Introducing Character Animation with Blender, and The ManCandy FAQ (all about animating with the ManCandy character, which teaches you a butt-load about animation).
For beginners, I think the first two are most helpful (full disclosure, I’m the author of the second one). The Mancandy FAQ, which I admit I’ve only just begun to look at, is really for intermediate and advanced users. When you’re ready for it, though…
I agree with Riffraff, Felix_Kutt, and Papasmurf about good places to start. I think my current favorite beginner learning reference is BlenderUnderground though. There’s a growing series of great in-depth video tutorials for beginners there. Definitely worth checking out.
