What is the Blender Tutorial Bible?
The Blender Tutorial Bible is the world’s most comprehensive collection of curated Blender tutorials and courses from all over the digital art community.
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Blender Beginner Tutorials
I also wrote an article dedicated to this topic. Check it out here:
https://stylizedstation.com/article/free-blender-tutorials-complete-beginners/
Are you new to the software? Looking to learn the basics of Blender? A few months ago I would have said good luck with finding relevant content. With the recent release of Blender 2.8, you’ve started at the PERFECT time. Tons of content creators are trying to cash in on the spike of newbies flooding to the software. I see new courses and beginner tutorial popping up daily. Here is a comprehensive list of the best tutorials to get you started:
Hard Surface Modeling Tutorials
What is hard Surface Modeling?
Hard Surface Modeling is a specific specialization of 3D modeling. As the name suggests, Hard Surface Modeling centers around the creating of inorganic or ‘Hard’ objects and assets.
Some examples include:
- Vehicles
- Weapons
- Armor
- Architecture
- Machinery
- Space technology
You get the idea.
This specific niche of modeling requires a very specific subset of skills. Precision, clean topology, optimization and accuracy are all important aspects of Hard Surface Modeling.
Interested in learning Hard Surface Modeling? I’ve got some tutorials for you right here:
Blender Organic Modeling Tutorials
What is Organic Modeling?
As the name implies, Organic Modeling is the discipline of creating natural and biological assets and objects. If the object is living, or was living at some point, most likely you will need to employ Organic Modeling techniques to get the job done.
Some examples of Organic modeling include:
- People
- Animals
- Food/Fruit
- Most cloth and clothing
- Leaves, trees, plants
- Hair
And the list goes on.
Unlike Hard Surface Modeling, Organic modeling doesn’t rely on precise edges and clean, almost mathematical measurements. Organic modeling often involves sculpting, which can also be done in Blender, using its powerful sculpting workflow. (We will cover sculpting tutorials next.)
Sounds interesting doesn’t it? If you’re looking to specialize in Organic modeling, or just looking to refine your skills, check out some of these tutorials:
Blender Sculpting Tutorials
Sculpting is an essential skill for any competent 3D artist to have. Most studios nowadays will require you to at least know some level of sculpting. In fact, plenty of 3D artists sculpt primarily as their full time career!
Sculpting is used all over the 3D professional world, whether its creating rocks, characters, trees, animals or almost any other natural asset you can think of, there is almost always a place in your workflow for sculpting.
Sculpting is one of the true creative outlets of 3D art, due to how close it is to traditional sculpting.
Blender has a very powerful sculpting workflow built into it. It has virtually everything you need to create professional level assets and environments.
However, as most artists would tell you, mastering sculpting is a lifelong pursuit. There is ALWAYS something else to learn, and another technique to master. I’ve compiled a list of some of my favorite sculpting tutorials for Blender, to help you get started and refine your talents.
Blender Retopology Tutorials
One of the foundational skills of any 3D artist is being skilled in the sometimes frustrating art of retopology. After you’ve sculpted your high-poly mesh, you’ll need to optimize your mesh so it can be used in a game and not take up too much memory. By simplifying the topology of the object, you’re freeing up a ton of memory space and performance for the game engine. Any sculptor needs to know this skill.
There is an incredibly powerful addon for Blender called Retopoflow that assists with optimizing your mesh. In fact, Retopoflow makes it almost too easy. This is a product I recommend to EVERYONE. I’ll include a few tutorials in the list below.
While this product normally retails for around $85 USD, this product is technically open-source, which means it can be legally purchased, totally free. The price tag simply helps support Blender, and entitles you to customer support. If you have the money to spare, I highly recommend just purchasing the product.
The free and up-to-date version of Retopoflow can be found on CGCookie’s GIT repository:
https://github.com/CGCookie/retopoflow
That being said, here is my curated list of Retopology & retopoflow tutorials:
Blender Texturing Tutorials
Texturing in Blender is no small task to master. Creating materials and textures is the art of storytelling. By texturing your objects and scenes, you’re conveying messages, emotions and thoughts to the viewer. Blender uses its rich node network to create and map textures to assets, characters and environments. This can be a little intimidating at first, but as you get to grips with the workflow you’ll see that it is very streamlined and intuitive.
Learning how to texture at a high level in Blender will really take your scene to the next level. This is an extremely important aspect of your 3D career, you should take a good chunk of time to make sure you’ve got at least the basics down.
Not only that, there are several different types of workflow when it comes to texturing, such as the PBR workflow and hand painting. In this list, I’ll try and cover a little bit of everything, as they are two very different styles of texturing.
Fortunately, there are a ton of tutorials on texturing and creating materials in Blender. Here are some of the best and most relevant ones:
Hand Painted Textures in Blender
Looking to give a little more of a hands on approach to your texturing? Check out these hand painting tutorials:
Texture Paint Quickstart
Blender VFX Tutorials
A lot of these tutorials have been heavily focusing on tutorials to create 3D art for games. But what about TV and movies? Almost every movie out there uses some sort of VFX (Visual Effects) in their films. Some movies are entirely made up of 3D animation! Where do we even begin with learning effects for movies? Can Blender even do this?
The answer is a resounding YES.
Blender utilizes a powerful rendering engine, Cycles to create hyper-realistic renderings which are more than capable of featuring on the big-screen. Not only that, but Blender also has great storyboarding features as well.
Here is a list of great Blender VFX tutorials to get you started:
Blender Simulation Tutorials
This guide wouldn’t be complete without showing you how to blow stuff up or set it on fire!
I personally love simulations. I’m not the biggest fan of animating stuff by hand. I’d very much rather plug in the parameters, set up a few nodes and let the software do all the hard work.
Simulating in Blender is another deep topic. Mathematics majors will talk your ear off on this topic, and probably scare you half to death. Luckily, creating liquid simulations in Blender isn’t as hard as you thought.
Blender can simulate a whole mess of situations. I personally LOVE simulating fire and smoke. You can also simulate:
- Liquid
- Cloth
- Fire
- Explosions
- Smoke
- Particles
- Hair
Creating your favorite major environmental catastrophe has never been easier. Want to simulate a tornado? Easy. Volcano eruption? Been done. Massive building explosions? You bet!
The world is your oyster and Blender is your oyster-shucking knife.
Fire Simulation Tutorials
Smoke Simulation Tutorials
Water Simulation Tutorials
Explosion Simulation Tutorials
Cloth Simulation Tutorials
Particle Simulation Tutorials
Hair Simulation Tutorials
Blender Environment Art Tutorials
What is Environment art?
Do you like the idea of creating breathtaking mountain ranges? Tiny, horrifying atmospheric rooms? Vast sweeping landscapes? If you answered yes, then chances are you might like Environment Art.
If you’re an Environment Artist, you’re a worldbuilder. Environment art is actually a collection of several disciplines. A good environment artist has a solid understanding of composition, 3D modeling, Sculpting, texturing, lighting, storyboarding and level design.
An environment artist has the fun task of creating a world that you can immerse yourself in.
Due to the complexity of Environment Art, it can be difficulty getting your foot in the door, especially with the overwhelming amount of content to learn and absorb.
Check out the list of Blender Environment Art tutorials I’ve compiled:
Terrain Building Tutorials
Blender Environment Art Tutorials
There is a lot to cover in this section, so bear with me.
Rendering is another topic that deserves more attention. What is the point of spending hours or even days creating that scene if you can’t even present it properly?
In this section, I’ll be going over:
- Eevee Rendering
- Cycles Rendering
- Lighting your Renders
Blender Eevee Tutorials
With the release of Blender 2.8, came the release of Blender’s new realtime rendering engine, Eevee.
If you’re looking for more technical information on Eevee, The Blender Foundation has a great Eevee FAQ HERE.
There is a lot to learn when it comes to Eevee. I’ve got a list of all the great Eevee tutorials here:
Blender Cycles Tutorials
Blender’s tried and true rendering engine Cycles, is a ray-tracing rendering engine capable of producing hyper-photorealistic results. There are a ton of tiny tweaks and tricks to Cycles settings you can change and adjust to get incredible and very optimized results.
There are a ton of tutorials out there to show you how to push the limits of Cycles (And your graphics card) Here are a collection of some of the best tutorials:
Blender Lighting Tutorials
Mastering lighting in Blender is one of the surefire ways to really take your renders to the next level.
If you’re applying for an art studio, your lighting skills are almost guaranteed to be judged. Proper lighting can completely make your scene, and poor lighting can ruin it.
Here come the tutorials!
Blender Game Asset Modeling Tutorials
My personal favorite tutorials.
What are game assets?
While this is a broad topic, an ‘asset’ can be any individually created 3D object that can be inserted into a game. Game assets can consist of:
- Weapons
- Rocks
- Vehicles
- Trees/Nature
- Architecture
- Clothing
As you can see, the topic of Game Assets covers a wide array of topics and art styles, and crosses over into several art disciplines. There are even freelance artists who make a living solely by selling their game assets on marketplaces like turbosquid, cuberush and sketchfab.
Indie Game studios will often opt to purchase pre-made game assets, as it is often cheaper and less time consuming for the studio. Asset modeling is so hot right now (Insert Zoolander meme) and my personal favorite art path. Who doesn’t love creating weapons and vehicles?
I’ve tried to divide this section up a little bit into appropriate sections. However, this is an extremely popular topic, so I will certainly miss a few tutorials here and there.
Nonetheless, here is the most comprehensive list on the internet of Asset tutorials for Blender!
Blender Character Modeling Tutorials
Character modeling is arguably the most in-demand 3D art form on the market at the moment.
Don’t believe me?
Hop on your favorite job recruiter website, search for ‘3D Artist’ jobs, and you’ll see that the vast majority of studios are looking for character modelers.
There has never been a better time to learn character modeling. Virtually every game, 3D movie and TV show ever made will need some sort of character modeler to create and bring the concept artist’s creation to life.
Like asset modeling, character art is a very popular topic. That means tutorials. Lots of tutorials.
While there are a few hugely popular educators such as Yansculpts and Danny Mac 3D who primarily use blender to create their character art, there are a ton of lesser known, but just as talented artists who have been kind enough to share their knowledge for us.
Here is a massively comprehensive list of the best character modeling tutorials for Blender.
Blender Hair Modeling Tutorials
I wasn’t even going to include a hair tutorial section, but after some research I found that modeling hair was a major paint point for some of my community. So I’ve done some digging and drudged up some really great Blender hair tutorials. There since there are a few ways to model hair, I’ve tried to make sure this list covers all the different ways you can model hair in Blender.
Blender Animation Tutorials
As the Blender community grows, more and more professional artists are beginning to use Blender in their professional pipelines. Animation is no longer locked behind expensive software such as Maya, 3DS Max, and Cinema 4D. Using online tutorials, you can easily become an advanced-level animator for a sliver of the cost of going to an animation school. Becoming a self-taught animator using only Blender becomes more and more of a reality every single day.
However, animation is one of the few 3D art disciplines that still heavily scrutinizes people for not having a degree; animation is a highly technical practice and takes years or even decades to master. Keep this in mind before you decide to go down the path of animator.
Why is Animation so important?
Animation is the backbone of any game or animated movie. With poor animations, the entire feel and flow of the movie/game can be thrown off, resulting in a poor viewing experience for the people watching. This is why it is so important to make sure that the animations are realistic, professional and clean.
Animation isn’t just isolated to character movement. Anything that moves in-game will need to be animated in some sort of way. Trees that blow gently in the wind are precisely keyframed to give the player the illusion of a gentle breeze. Walk cycles for NPCs, the kickback and recoil of your players shotgun, the explosion of gunpowder and the reloading action followed by the satisfying ‘chu-chunk’ of loading a shotgun, all of these actions need to be properly animated.
I’ll be dividing this tutorial section up into several parts, as Blender animation is such a broad topic, I know if I were reading this, I’d like to have everything well organized.
Topics:
- Animation for Beginners
- Rigging
- 2D Animation
Blender Animation Tutorials for Beginners
Animating in Blender can be an extremely intimidating topic for beginners.
Learning keyframes is tricky at first. Walk cycles are daunting. What is a rig? A Bone??
As intimidating as it may seem, this is easily avoidable by learning the basics of animation. After developing a rudimentary grasp of the foundations of animation, learning new animation skills and concepts (while still a great challenge) will come much more naturally.
To make sure you get off on the right foot, I’ve made a collection of solid foundational animation tutorials and courses to help you get up and running.
Rigging
Rigging is the process of creating a skeletal structure for your character, or any other object in your scene that needs movement added to it. Think of it as creating the bones of the character, so it can move around in the world you have created.
Rigging a character can be a complex task, depending on the complexity of the character. In fact, Pixar animated such a complex character, that one scene took two years to finish.
That being said, you probably won’t be creating this level of animation right off the bat, so here is a collection of Blender Rigging Tutorials to get you started:
Blender 2D Animation & Grease Pencil Tutorials
With the release of 2.8, came the release of Blender’s Grease Pencil, an amazing feature where you can draw 2D lines in your 3D space. These 2D lines are technically objects, so they can be affected by almost anything your 3D materials can. This opens up a HUGE amount of creativity. I’m blown away every day by all the cool stuff Grease Pencil can do.
With the introduction of grease pencil, 2D animation in Blender has become a very viable option. This is definitely one of the most exciting areas of Blender art at the moment, and a great time to start learning. This is such a new feature, and people that start learning now will be one of the main experts on the technology in a few year’s time, with some hard work.
There are SO many cool things you can do with 2D animations in Blender in 2.8. Look at this video where someone creates a 3D stylized explosion and adds a 2D animation cloud to it using grease pencil: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyIPkIfkdC8
If you really want an incredible demo showcasing the power of 2d animating in Blender 2.8, check out this demo:
Pretty insane right? With Grease Pencil, you are limited by ownly your own creativity.
That being said, here is a big list of curated Grease Pencil tutorials:
Blender Low Poly Tutorials
What is low poly art?
Low Poly is a minimalistic art style that uses sharp edges and generally very simple shapes to create a scene or object. Using minimal and simple colors, low poly art is able to portray a scene using a very minimal amount of complexity, while still being very aesthetically pleasing to the eye.
Learning low poly is a great way to introduce yourself to Blender. Since you do not need to worry about complicated modeling or texturing, low poly tutorials are a great start to help you grasp the basics of the software without feeling overwhelmed.
There are a LOT of low poly tutorials out there. And I mean a LOT. This is mostly because of how easy low poly can be. I’ve done a ton of these tutorials, and I can tell you that 90% of them are a waste of your time. Either they’re too basic, move to slowly, or the person teaching you has clearly never made a video before in their lives.
So instead of you wasting your time, I have decided to transcend from the heavens and bestow upon you this curated list of low poly tutorials that are definitely worth your time.
Blender Architecture Tutorials
Architecture Visualization (Also known as Archviz) is the art of creating photorealistic renderings of architecture (Interior and exterior) for magazines, mock-ups, design and architecture studios. Archviz is a highly specialized skill, requiring pinpoint accuracy and advanced texturing skills. As one of the more higher-paying 3D fields, Archviz is a great career choice, as there are plenty of different fields and disciplines looking for great Archviz designers to bring their concepts to life.
Blender Interior Architecture Tutorials
I’ve decided to keep the interior tutorials separate, due to the fact that modelling cloth, furniture, fabrics and other materials require a separate skillset.
You’ll be simulating clothing, pillows and bedsheets quite a bit if you are trying to achieve hyper-realistic look to your interior scene.
I’ve done quite a few of these tutorials myself, especially the BlenderGuru tutorials. It’s really great to see so many content creators opting for Blender to use in their ArchViz pipeline.
This Post Has 17 Comments
If you have any suggestions, to add to the tutorial, please leave them here in the comments 🙂
Well, my course about materials is the third most sold course regarding Blender on Udemy according to their statistics… and I couldn’t see it here. There where very little about procedural materials in your list. Most was about handpainted textures. Also, my course about Eevee contains tons more then the ones you recommended… and are more up to date. Anything against me ;)? Other than that a lot of good selections. Some a bit old, but most still very valid.
Great effort Friend. Thanks a lot. Everything in one place. Useful to all learners.
Thanks for the comment 🙂 I tried to make it as useful as possible!
This is awesome, I’ve looking for a list like this forever. Thank you
Happy to provide it 🙂
Hi Thomas, thanks for this! I think the only thing this is missing is an NPR section 🙂
Thanks！ Your work is really great dude！
Thanks Sarethet!
Very useful! Thank you!
Glad you like it Alan 🙂
is there anyway to organize this into 2.8 tutorials, im not a fan of 2.7 tutorials because they are hard to follow
Hello Thomas, I’d just like to let you know that the texture painting quickstart tutorial was been updated and it’d be nice if you updated the link to the newest video.
What about these? Especially the beer and watch. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrX3T62vasJkJx5dLy-sRWQ
You should update this list with the best EVEE tutorial at the moment by Joakim Tornhill
https://www.udemy.com/course/blender-28x-eevee-made-easy/
Great list. Any tips on motion graphics? C4d Style.
Keep up the good work, thanks!