Free online courseBlender Fundamentals: Learn Modeling, Shading, Lighting, Rendering, Rigging and Animation

Course Description

Blender Fundamentals is a free online course designed to take you from getting comfortable in Blender to building complete 3D scenes and animations with confidence. Ideal for beginners and a solid refresher for returning artists, it focuses on the core tools used in modern 3D workflows within Design and Creative Arts, with a strong emphasis on Animation and 3D Design.

You will start with the essentials of Blender 2.80, learning how to navigate the viewport, understand the interface, organize projects with collections, and work efficiently with different workspaces. From there, you will move into modeling fundamentals, creating and editing meshes while mastering key techniques such as selection modes, extruding forms, adding loop cuts, beveling edges, and making precise edits with the knife tool.

The course then transitions into making your models look finished by introducing shading, materials, and texturing. You will explore the shading editor, learn the foundations of UV unwrapping, and experiment with procedural textures to add detail without relying solely on image maps.

To present your work professionally, you will cover lighting and rendering, including light types, three point lighting, and practical render settings. You will learn how to control output dimensions and optimize quality using different render engines, including working with Cycles sampling and Eevee lighting choices.

Finally, you will step into rigging and animation, learning how to prepare characters and objects for motion using parenting, armatures, constraints, inverse kinematics, vertex groups, and bone organization. You will then bring everything to life with keyframes and animation tools such as the timeline, dope sheet, and graph editor, with additional exposure to sculpting and workflow preferences like right click selection.