Blender essentials

I am in the process of developing training material for Blender3D. Initially I want to focus on essential skills I suspect most users will benefit from. In time, I hope to make some more specialised training.

Where possible, I will provide simple examples that explain the benefit of each technique.

Introduction

- about me
- what you will need
- the value of 3 button mouse + numpad
- screencast keys

Interface Overview

- Mouse position awareness
- Interpreting the default scene
- Customisation and Preferences
- Preferences I like
- 3D Navigation and Controls
- moving around in 3D space
- Perspective vs orthographic projection
- View all
- Front, Side, Top view

Viewport Shading

wireframe, solid, Preview, Render

Overview of Workspaces:

- Layout
- Modeling
- Sculpting
- UV Editing
- Texture Paint
- Shading
- Animation
- Rendering
- Compositing
- Geometry Nodes
- Scripting

Mesh editing modes

- Object
- Edit
- Sculpt
- Vertex
- Weight
- Texture

Shortcuts

- Don't use shortcuts before this video?
G S R
X Y Z
Shift
Control
1 3 7 0
A

Common problems:

- normal reversal
- not applying object transforms
- things turning pink
- lost

Modelling

- Primitive Shapes
- Extrusion and Manipulation
- Proportional Editing
- Transform pivot point
- Mesh Editing Techniques
(Plus examples of when these are useful.)

Relationships

- Parent / Child / Sibling relationships
- Collections
- Empties
- Bones with vertex groups or varying influence

Modifiers

Constraints

- wave
- subdivision surface
- mirror
- constraint camera example

Lighting essentials

- lights
- environment lighting
- transparent film
- ambient occlusion

Rendering

EEVEE vs Cycles

Working with UV maps

- unwrapping
- save UV to image

Shading and Texturing

- Principled BSDF
- PBR image maps (and where to find them)
- Material slots (multi materials)

Animation basics

- keyframes
- Keyframes on UI values
- Shape keys

Animation intermediate

- bones and skinning
- Particles and physics
- vertex groups and weight painting

Project-based tutorials

 Create a basic scene by combining shapes and applying transformations.