Ask HN: Recommend me a Blender course

I would suggest trying to learn in the same way that one could learn programming: once you know the bare bones basics to get started (modeling) start building a project you're interested in and then look for tutorials on extra topics once you get stuck.

Once you learn enough modeling to be useful, start working on a real design you're passionate about. Eventually you'll get to a point that you realize you need colors and materials, textures, fine detail you can't otherwise figure out, better lighting, animations and physics, particles, etc. Thats where you search for specific guides to tackle your specific problem.

When it comes to blender, I'd also highly recommend keeping up to date with the release notes and blogs about the development. Not only is the project continuously adding great new features, but the development notes they have are really useful for understanding why and how something would be used.

+1 as well

Blender Guru is good, but the cg cookie videos are much more comprehensive.

While youtube videos are good, I don't think they teach the underlying "thinking" is a structured way. Without understanding that, the learning process becomes way more inefficient. If you value your time, then paid, focused courses like cgcookie will be 2x-10x more effective.

All of these are good, I'd also suggest looking at videos from Grant Abbott on youtube, he's got a lot of blender videos that are both beginner friendly but non-trivial and good, clear explanations.

May I recommend courses by cgmasters. [1]

You may want to get started with this [2]. Once you have the Blender foundations in place, you can expand into many other topics based on your specific interests:

- Character Creation

- Procedural Texturing

- Character Rigging and Animation

- Environment Modeling

- Vehicle Creation

- Sculpting

- Hard surface modelling

- Space VFX Modeling

[1] https://cgmasters.com/category/blender-training-courses/

[2] https://cgmasters.com/blender-for-complete-and-total-beginne...

This is super helpful to know and corresponds well with my experience when trying to learn Blender. As I had not followed along all those battles of the past, I miss a lot of context. That makes it hard to judge what is considered best practice now and what is the idiomatic way to do things.

What would you recommend? Is it worth getting used to right click select or is left click select OK? Are the new 'default' hotkeys good or is there an advantage in being able to use the old key bindings?