Learn Animation with these Beginner Blender Tutorials
It’s time to start your animation journey with Blender!
Blender is a free 3D design creation suite. Completely open-sourced, Blender supports the entire 3D pipeline — modeling, rigging, animating, simulating, rendering, compositing, motion tracking, and video editing.
You can also flex your creative muscles with Blender’s 2D animation pipeline.
If you’ve already started looking into Blender, you may have noticed a large amount of 3D donuts out there. This is because one of the most popular beginner tutorial series for Blender is the free Donut Course by Blender Guru on YouTube.
Many animators using Blender got their start with this easy-to-follow and informative series.
There are even full Instagram profiles dedicated to highlighting these beginner donuts. The profiles are created as an opportunity for novices to share their first Blender renders. So if you’re feeling proud of your first creation and want to share it with the world, try submitting to one of these profiles for some exposure.
Obviously making a donut isn’t the only way to dive into learning blender. There are tons of other free tutorials available online which may suit your needs better. The official Blender website includes a handful of fundamental videos to start you off as well. These tutorials include; learning hotkeys, honing your knowledge of specific tools, and creating a ‘Cube Owl’.
Or if you’re more interested in learning the workflow of 2D animation in Blender, the developers have enlightening video instructions on the ‘newer’ feature of Grease Pencil animation in the program.
Being an open-sourced program, Blender has hundreds of community-created add-ons for you to explore. While beginners may not need these add-ons to learn the program, once you’ve started your journey, you may want to investigate deeper into the options available.
Teaching yourself new skills takes patience. Don’t worry if you can’t figure something out right away. Almost all art and design programs have steep learning curves. Getting a grasp on the interface may be easy but mastering a program can take a lifetime, especially when they’re constantly being updated and improved. So don’t be too hard on yourself if you run into a roadblock along the way, you’ll learn more from your mistakes than from your successes!
By Harlen Malkowich