Studio@jumpers-inn.de

A lot of people are interested in learning Blender as it’s probably the most advanced and actively developed open source 3D package available. But after downloading and installing Blender the frustration quickly grows into desperation and many people finally give up because of the complexity of the program and the rather unusual user interface. To avoid this it is crucial to start with good learning material. While searching for tutorials for Blender the new user will experience a rather weird situation, he or she will find thousands of hits when using their search engine of choice. There are so many tutorials out there that finding the good ones that explain what you want to know is a difficult task in itself. I have gone through all this myself so I thought it would be good to give some recommendations in terms of learning material.

First of all, the basics:

• The official Blender UI tutorial (for reading): http://www.blender.org/education-help/tutorials/tutorial-folder/blender-user-interface-tutorial/
  This is a pretty complete description of the UI of Blender (up to version 2.49b, the interface changes in 2.5), good read for getting a basic understanding of the underlying ideas and principles.
• Blendercookie dedicated starter series: http://www.blendercookie.com/getting-started-with-blender/
  Blendercookie provides lots of very well done video tutorials. I have learned a lot from this site, so I highly recommend it.

For the advanced beginner that is not struggling with the interface anymore, advanced topics are of interest. This is the point where the Blender books and training DVDs get interesting and are a profitable investment. Two books that I own myself are “Bounce, tumble and splash” which covers physics simulation with Blender and Bullet and “Introducing character animation with Blender” which obviously covers character animation. If you’re interested in even more character animation and are more affiliated to moving pictures with sound than to books, I recommend the training DVD “DVD training 3: Character Animation” which comes with the character models and rigs from the short movie Big Buck Bunny.

I linked the books and DVD purposely to the Blender store as I think if you’re gonna by the books you can as well buy it from there as this ensures ongoing support for the Blender foundation that is behind this great open source project.