There are so many Blender tutorials available that it can be overwhelming when you’re just starting out. The incredible free and open-source 3D software is a powerful package and a firm favourite among creatives, but as a beginner, there are always new things to learn to unlock new creative possibilities. Whether you’re a complete novice or an intermediate user looking for helpful hints to speed up your processes, there’s a tutorial below that’s bound to help.
With the release of Blender 4.1 earlier this year, the software has received some subtle but well-needed productivity changes, speed enhancements some interface tweaks – all it needs is your creativity. So if you want to learn how to get the best out of designers’ favourite 3D modelling software, take a look at our top tutorial picks for all your creative needs.
The best Blender tutorials
Blender tutorials for beginners
01. Learn Blender 3D in under 24 hours
(Image credit: Blender)
If you’re looking for a quick rundown on Blender, there’s no better place to start than Lance Evans’ day-long crash course. Chronicling his journey from beginner to Blender convert, Lance takes you through his experience trying to master the software, trawling through books and the sea of online tutorials to find what works best.
Concluding with an extensive list of resources and tutorials that helped to familiarise him with the modelling software, Lance’s journey is worth learning from so you can skip the typical beginner’s mistakes. Find out how to learn Blender 3D in under 24 hours here.
02. Blender fast track beginner tutorial
This helpful Blender tutorial from CG Fast Track takes you through all you need to know to get started. It’s quite a lengthy one, split up into three parts so make sure you set the time aside to watch it as it’s absolutely worth it.
You’ll make a sword and a stone animation to learn the skills on the job, and as some students have noted in the comments, it can be exciting and motivating for beginners to start out with something so cinematic rather than the usual “donuts and bananas”
03. Ten Tools Every Blender Noob should learn
This beginner Blender tutorial takes a different approach. Rather than taking a fast-track approach to one complete end-to-end process, it breaks things down into 10 specific tools that Blender newbies need to learn how to use, including applying transformations, the loop cut, array tool, extrude tool, moving the camera and speeding up rendering. It’s all presented by an animated Brad Colbow.
04. The basics of realistic texturing in Blender
In this video lesson from Andrew Price, he reveals the secrets of realistic texturing. Discover how to take a texture and create some variations of it, using Photoshop or a Photoshop alternative, then putting them into Blender. Want more? Andrew has a whole host of excellent Blender video tutorials on his YouTube channel.
05. Creating meshes in Blender
In this video, the Blender team run through how to create a mesh – an object made of polygons. Here you’ll learn the difference between a polygonal mesh, and a NURBS surface, and why modelling with polygons is a preferable option.
06. Blender character animation toolkit
Learn the basics of character animation
In this series of lessons, Blender artist Beorn Leonard explains all the fundamentals of character animation in Blender. Highlights include working with timing and spacing, overlapping motion, animation walk and run cycles and understanding IK and FK.
07. Blender Lighting and baking workflow
Get to grips with the complete workflow for setting up lighting for an outdoor scene, in this top-quality Blender tutorial. You’ll learn how to bake light for a blazing fast render, taking 14 seconds per frame rather than eight minutes.
08. Greenscreen masking for VFX in Blender
Add some Hollywood flair to your projects. Here you’ll learn the basics of masking and chroma keying in Blender – just the thing for mixing real world footage with CG via a bit of green screen action.
09. Introduction to rigging in Blender
Lee Salvemini is kind of a big deal in the Blender community. He worked on Sintel, Elephants dream and spent two years on Star Wars video game titles for LucasArts. In this free video tutorial for Blender Guru, he presents a complete beginner’s introduction to rigging. The video above is part one of the series, with parts two and three available on the Blender Guru site.
10. Introduction to camera tracking
Blender comes bundled with an awesome feature called Camera Tracking. Camera Tracking is a process that involves using real footage and tracking its motion so that 3D elements and VFX can be added to it. This tutorial, again from Blender Guru, gives you a complete beginner’s introduction to what this tool is and how to start using it right now.
11. Blender shortcuts: hotkeys you need to know
(Image credit: Lukas Walzer)
This tutorial contains shortcuts that are super-useful, and that help to streamline your workflow. They’ll allow you to cut out some of the fiddly bits, meaning your texturing process will be much improved.
Intermediate Blender tutorials
12. What’s new in Blender 4.1
Blender 4.1 was made available in March 26th, 2024, and while this release mainly focuses on performance improvements, there are also some new features. In the video above, AskNK talks us through some of the highlights, from the UI to rigging and animation, modelling improvements and all-new drag-and-drop capabilities.
13. Cut your render time in half in Blender
Tired of waiting forever for your stuff to render? This short but sweet video could help you speed things up. 3D artist Nathan Duck talks you through his process and how he cuts down render time to a minimum, from addressing issues like sample count and denoising data to getting the right hardware in place.
14. Animate text in Blender
This text effect Blender walkthrough comes from the team at tutor4U. It demonstrates how to make an animation of vines growing to form a word, and techniques that might be helpful when creating your own 3D typography.
15. How to speed sculpt in Blender 2.80
(Image credit: Glen Southern)
Character and creature designers who use 3D sculpting software will often do speed sculpts. These are 10-30 minute sculpting sessions where you practise blocking out your design as quickly as you can. This tutorial explores Blender’s speed sculpting tools, and teaches you how to use them.
16. How to create interiors with Blender’s EEVEE
Use EEVEE to get more flexibility and reduce render time and cost (Image credit: Atypique-studio: Contains textures from Poliigon.com – Textures may not be redistributed)
This tutorial from Pierrick Picaut runs through how to use Blender’s EEVEE engine to create the interior found in the Noara game teaser. You’ll understand how to set EEVEE properly to a render a nice-looking, dark interior scene, and how to deal with its limitations. Picaut will go over some shader tricks, and the use of light and reflection probes.
17. Model a complex 3D city scene
Creating a city scene is hard work, but these tips break the process down
Creating a detailed city scene is no small undertaking, and requires a significant amount of repetitive, and sometimes boring, modelling actions. Rather than just enumerating point by point what he’s doing, in this 3D World city scene tutorial Mateusz Wielgus breaks down his workflow into pieces and presents them as a series of general steps and tips that you can easily follow.
18. Create a morph between two shapes
Morphing an object from one shape to another smoothly is an impressive 3D trick to be able to pull off, and in this quick tutorial from Blender Nation you’ll learn not one but two different techniques for creating an amazing shape-shifting effect.
19. Create a spaceship
In this two-part video-based Blender tutorial from Blender Guru, you’ll learn how to model a concept spaceship; how to use your own sketches as reference; and how a combination of modifiers can aid you in modelling. The Blender Guru site also has concept sketches and the finished .blend file to help you get to grips with it. You can find part two here.
20. Create a realistic planet Earth
This tutorial uses several textures from NASA to create a realistic planet Earth using Blender Cycles. The tutorial from Blender Guru shows you how to create easy texture mapping for spheres; how to use maps to make more convincing materials; how to create a realistic sunflare entirely in Blender; and how to add glow, colour grading and a warp effect in the compositor.
Create your own Jurassic Park with this easy to follow tutorial
This hour-long beginner tutorial walks you through how to model, uvmap and texture a low-poly T-Rex in Blender.
23. Animate a flame using materials
In this superb Blender tutorial, Bassam Kurdali shows how procedural materials and the software’s compositing tools can create movement.
24. Create an energetic fire and water scene
Blender tutorial guru Andrew Price returns to show you how to simulate real-world flame and fluid effects. His digital weapons of choice? Enter Blender’s fluid and smoke simulators.
25. How to enhance a game level environment
In this video-based Blender tutorial, 3D expert Christopher Plush shows how to create low-overhead in-game effects that won’t tax your players’ machines.
26. How to use hair assets in Blender 3.5+
This Blender tutorial from Stache offers a quick overview of the added hair and grooming assets that were added in Blender 3.5 in March 2023. It introduces the Generate Hair Curve Node, the Interpolate Hair curve node, the trim hair curve node, the hair curve noise node, the frizz hair curve node and more and explores the geometry nodes aspect of these hair elements.
27. Create braided hair in Blender
(Image credit: Paul Hatton)
This speedy tutorial teaches you how to effortlessly create braided hair using the Blender extension Braidify. Created by Nino (AKA DefoQ), the free tool is available alongside some incredibly helpful training videos.
The tool takes all the hard work out of creating braids by requiring a single curve that is then used to drive the braid. The looks you can generate are realistic, predictable and suitable for production-quality work. Without a plugin, braided hair can be a cumbersome and monotonous task, so skip the hassle and check out the tutorial here.
Blender tutorials for professionals
28. Create stunning tileable textures
Make your own tileable textures with the Dynamic Topology system (Image credit: Future/Pierrick Picaut)
Blender’s Dynamic Topology system is, amongst other things, a great tool for creating nice-looking, tileable textures. In this tutorial, Pierrick Picaut explains how to create stylised wooden and stone tileable textures from sculpted surfaces.
29. Rig a 3D vehicle
This vehicle rig makes the most of bone constraints
Discover how the rig for this futuristic combat jet was created, by following this expert animator Dennis Haupt’s insights. You’ll learn how a bone constraint works in Blender and how to set it up, and also how a bone constraint affects the animation skeleton.
30. Create a realistic water simulation
This Blender tutorial by Andrew Price shows you how to create realistic fluid effects and render it using the new Cycles rendering engine.
31. Make animal fur with cycles and particle hair
Jonathan Lampel demonstrates how to use multiple particle systems to add realistic hair to an animal and how to easily set up a great looking fur material using Cycles’ new hair shader.
32. Photorealism explained
“If you’re a CG artist hoping to work in the industry, photorealism is the most important skill you can focus on,” says Andrew Price on Blender Guru. “It not only helps you to learn and understand how real life looks (a crucial step for creating cartoonish exaggerated styles), but is also highly in-demand for Hollywood, gaming studios and new industries.” Price’s guide lasts for nearly an hour, but is packed with helpful tips and tricks.
33. Animate a circular swipe
Bassam Kurdali’s video explains how to set up a clock face-style swiping action using the popular open-source 3D package. You can also download the accompanying project files for this tutorial.
34. Camera mapping
Here, Andrew Price explains everything you need to know to do camera mapping using Blender.
35. Fun with rigid bodies
Bring the destruction! Andrew Price demonstrates how to go wild with Blender’s rigid body simulator, making a chain, a wrecking ball and a load of stuff to destroy in an entertaining manner.
36. Making Materials in Blender
If making 3D materials in Blender seems like a scary idea, 3D artist Nathan Duck is here to show you otherwise. In this 16 minute video he walks you the process of making a procedural galvanized steel material, to show how easy this process is in practice.
37. Create atmospheric concept art
(Image credit: Nenad Nacevic)
This Blender tutorial created by concept artist Nenad Nacevic details how to use the 3D software to create an immersive scene. “Right now, it’s the closest thing to perfect for creating concept art, and on top of that it’s completely free,” he says. From creating the initial models to adding the final firey detail that brings the piece to life, it’s a great tutorial if you’re looking to improve your concept art skills. Check it out here.
If you’re looking to update your kit to get the most out of Blender 4.1, take a look at our guide on the best laptops for 3D modelling. You can also check out our guide to the best monitors for CAD and AutoCAD to ensure your creativity is displayed in the best quality.
