Learning Blender

I spent some time trying to learn Blender. I have no previous experience with 3D modeling tools and Blender looks very complicated and confusing for me. It has many key combinations and buttons, even your actions can lead to something unexpected.

At first I spent some time reading Blender – Noob to Pro and doing the examples. I managed to get the basics – grab, rotate, scale, extrude, etc.

I haven’t made any decent model so I start to read Introduction to Character Animation by Ryan Dale. It is a really great document, if you need to learn Blender, this book can help you a lot.

Here are my first attempts, don’t laugh much:

Shaping the mouth.

The head. It looks creepy.

 

I made some mistakes.

Yey, almost done!

Blender – more than 3D

Blender is quite popular, open-source, graphics software released under the GNU General Public License. It is used in many projects – commercial or other, and can be a good choice for resource creation.

Blender has many nice features for modeling, rendering and animation of 3D characters and scenes.

Blender is relatively complex and difficult for newbies. If you intent to learn blender you need to equip yourself with some patience.

Animation with Blender - Best Character Animation for Suzanne Awards 2009.

Make a human with MakeHuman

Makehuman is a free tool for 3d character modeling. I kind a don't like it and the rough features it creates but in more skillful hands it can be a very useful tool.

http://www.dedalo-3d.com/

Art of Illusion – cute 3d modeling and rendering studio.

When once I just randomly searched sourceforge for anything related to games I ran onto Art of Illusion. It is a free open-source project written in Java. It has very easy to understand interface and some really nice tutorials. It is unbelievable how fast someone can start work with it in contrast with almost all the other tools for 3d modeling. I recommend it to anyone even just for fun.
http://www.artofillusion.org/