How I Learned Blender (And Why You Should Too!)

How to learn Blender in five easy steps. Step 1: Delete the Default cube. Step 2: Rewatch the donut tutorial for the fifth time. Step 3: Abandon and cry. Step 4: Repeat the process. Step 5: Profit?

So as the title suggests, I’ve spent quite a bit of time learning Blender. For those unaware, Blender is a free, open-source 3D modeling program developed by the Blender Foundation. It has a very unique position in the world of 3D software. Given its open-source nature, it’s accessible to anyone with a computer, and new addons to improve different parts of the process are constantly being created by members of the community.

It’s a popular choice for both hobbyists and freelancers, and has even started seeing some adoption in select studios in recent years since its 2.8 glo-up. While Autodesk Maya is still the industry standard given how thoroughly entrenched it is in most studios’ pipelines, Blender has created its own vibrant ecosystems of 3D generalists, modelers, animators, and so on. And one of those hobbyists is me, the writer who’s always considered my visual art to be… passable, at best.

But it’s never too late to pick up a new skill, especially a fun little hobby. When you do the kind of work I do, it’s important to find hobbies to let yourself have fun without fear of what people will think, or how it can be monetized. And animation has always interested me, ever since I was little watching the Winx kick ass while sporting the most fabulous outfits known to queerkind.

While 2D has always been my preference, I’ve come to appreciate 3D more over the years, not only through RWBY, but also properties that have integrated more 2D elements into 3D. The most obvious recent example is Arcane, but there’s also Into the Spiderverse, and Genshin Impact. And as such, I figured why not give Blender a go?

Now today, we’re gonna go through my process of learning Blender, showing off some of my creations (which I am VERY nervous about, but we’re doing it anyway), and some resources that can help you learn how to use it too! Trust me, it’s not as scary as you think.

HOW I LEARNED BLENDER:

As many others’, my Blender journey began… with a donut. Specifically the donut tutorial by Blender Guru, which walks you through the basics of Blender’s UI, modeling, texturing, and so on. It’s meant to make you familiar with the program, giving you the fundamental tools to navigate with confidence. I followed this when Blender gots its 2.8 upgrade, which was… wow, back in 2019? What the hell is time?

But that series definitely helped me understand the basics. After that though… I kinda waned off Blender for a while. It had my interest, but it wasn’t something I was too keen on pursuing any further. Which is okay! It’s good to try new things, even if you find they’re not something you wanna stick with. You might even be like me and find yourself coming back to it after a while.

I really started going ham with Blender back in September of last year. I’d been wanting to get back into the software for a while, ever since Dillon Goo’s Cyber Katsu animation, and the leadup to my book’s release left me needing something to pass the time and keep me from going insane. And what do you know, I still have that quirky 3D software installed! And luckily for me, Blender 3.0 was right around the corner at the time.

I picked up Dillon’s animation course, including the alleyway set and the models for Abi and Tabbi. This was focused on character animation and choreography. It was a nice way to see if animation was worth all the work involved getting models to that point, and uh… oh fuck yeah, it is! I loved figuring out where to place the camera, what shots I wanted to use, and how the characters interacted. I even decided on one shot from inside the vending machine on the spot, which yes I am still very proud of.

After that, I specifically wanted to try out character modeling, focusing on strengthening my understanding of anatomy while developing my style. Again, the visual arts have never been my forte. But this was specifically inspired by Lightning Boy Studio, who’d created their own toon shader for Blender and sported unique setups to allow for more exaggerated, cartoony facial expressions. This style of 3D, called NPR (Non-Photorealistic Rendering), was very much up my alley.

My first time around, I wanted to give redesigning Team RWBY a shot. I’m a lot more private when it comes to rewriting stuff nowadays (and… everything, honestly), so I’m a bit nervous sharing these, especially knowing how vicious the RWBY fandom can be. However, I also wanna show off some of my work, including reimaginings of Team RWBY. Now I wanna preface, I did darken the girls’ skintones, mostly because the girls all being porcelain-pale in canon itself seems odd. But I also did this mapping specific cultural backgrounds for each girl. I also made Ruby into a wolf Faunus, not only to keep Blake from being the token Faunus of the cast, and connect Ruby to the Faunus subplots more, but also because… well, hello, Red Riding Hood doubling as the Big Bad Wolf? Iconic.

Anyway, here they are. I do like how they turned out overall, but I still had to work on some of the finer details of the base models. Namely, the noses, ears, and chins. Also, I made the mistake of applying my subdivision surface modifiers, and letting vertices in places like the shoulders overlap, resulting in - to put it frankly - fucked loops and fucked edge flow. But for a start, I’d say I’m still proud of my girls, especially the hair.

For the hair, I used curves, which are basically little wireframe paths or circles that can be expanded to resemble regular geometry, but with only a few control points compared to potentially thousands of vertices. I do think I went a bit overboard in adding too much detail to the bevels I gave the curves, but I do find the approach pretty intuitive, less demanding than particle systems, and most importantly, pleasing to my eyes.

Yang also got the most critique from friends. I’m proud of her hair, especially this cool mesh fire effect I discovered, but the issue was her outfit. I wanted to emphasize the use of Team RWBY’s colors, and I wanted to get Yang away from the muddy shades of brown that canon always sticks her in. My idea was to have her cycle through her teammates colors through each kingdom until she dons mostly yellow in Vacuo, starting with red for Ruby at Beacon. However, red is a particularly loud color that tends to dominate any palate it’s part of, so it wound up reading as Yang’s main color instead of yellow. Which made me sad cuz I loved red for her, but there were other ways to go about that. (Foreshadowing)

Now rigging… oh god. Okay so, for the uninitiated, rigging is the process by which you give a model bones and weight their influences so that it can be posed and animated. And it’s by far my least favorite part of the process. Posing and animating, I’ve really enjoyed thus far, but rigging a model to get to that point? I don’t particularly enjoy it. It’s gotten less frustrating with time and practice, but there’s always one part of the 3D process that’ll always make you wanna defenestrate yourself.

Again, the shoulders were fucked. Not to mention that because I was entirely new to this part of the process (mostly since rigging wasn’t part of the donut tutorial), I experienced a lot of trial and error to even get my bearings. Thankfully the Rigify addon mostly simplified the process. It generates a basic “metarig” for you that you just shape to your model, and add any additional bones you’ll need for things like animal ears or tails, and from there you can generate a more user-friendly rig for animation with a very helpful panel. But even so, I still got so frustrated, especially realizing the fundamental problems with my models, that I wound up walking away for a bit.

And sometimes you have to do that. You gotta walk away and reevaluate your process to see what’s working and what’s not, or even just to clear your head to prevent burnout. Eventually I got back into Blender during February of this year through environment and set design, something that’s also always intrigued me, but I’d never given a shot.

I started with some ideas I had for a little rewrite I did for the Sailor Moon Eternal movies, namely with a Moon Castle set, and quick models of Super Sailor Moon, Queen Serenity, and Queen Nehalennia. I’d also been watching a lot of heavily stylized shows, and specifically Revolutionary Girl Utena made me wanna have a bit more fun with colorful visuals and imagery. Whenever I work on sets, I don’t automatically go for standard blue skies. Instead, I think about the overall atmosphere I’m going for, and experiment with one or two main colors, and pick accent colors from there. And specifically on the moon, I wanted to show we were no longer on Earth, and what better way to showcase that then a purple night sky filled with distant stars?

I’d also been trying to learn how to use Grease Pencil, which is a tool unique to Blender that allows you to draw 2D images in 3D space. It’s a surprisingly intuitive tool that I absolutely love, especially thanks to Dedouze’s video on how to use Grease Pencil as a beginner, and Kevandram’s videos showcasing what Grease Pencil is capable of. A favorite of mine is painting 2D leaves onto 3D trees.

Then moving back into RWBY, I wanted to make a set for my Team RWBY models for a fight I’d envisioned for them. The idea was that, at the end of my Volume 1, they’d chase Roman through Forever Fall, only to be headed off by a masked Cinder.

Forever Fall was the easiest way to start this, given it had a beautiful pale peach sky in the Black Trailer, and my hesitancy towards blue skies was confirmed by how jarring I’d found having it over Forever Fall in the Jaune episodes of Volume 1.

I do think it’s a bit too blocky, but my main focus for this was making a simple arena for the aforementioned fight, with a few setpieces for the characters to either navigate around or work with. Like, a river to break up the area or for characters to avoid falling into, or trees to leap to or for Cinder to burn with her stolen Maiden power. This was also helped by Kristof Dedene, who’s done several videos on how to achieve Studio Ghibli-esque imagery in Blender, along with a gorgeous anime sky that was very helpful.

From there, I started a few other RWBY sets, wanting to continue that experimentation. I started Tai’s house on Patch, and I wanted to emphasize the cozy sunshine aesthetic, and showcase Tai’s heritage through some Chinese and Cambodian influences in the architecture. Never finished it, but sometimes you need a rough first draft to just get the ideas out there to see what works and what doesn’t, and I guess that goes for 3D too.

And then we have Beacon Academy’s entrance. For this, I wound up solidifying my own color rule: try to rely mostly on Red, White, Black, and Yellow, and then add one or two accent colors to accompany them. In this case, I went with green to show this was Ozpin’s domain. It’s very emerald city of course, but I also feel this gives Beacon a bit of an ominous atmosphere that I’m kinda digging, especially with black being the Kingdom of Vale’s new main color (the kingdoms each having a main color for Team RWBY).

But what’s the point in making sets if you have no characters to run through them? It was time to get back into character modeling, and this time I wanted to make sure I was mindful of my topology. I wanted to keep the loops as clean as possible to make them more rig-friendly. And in that case, I turned to Dikko… maybe I’m the one gay who doesn’t deserve rights. But real talk, Dikko has great tutorials focused on stylized character modeling, rigging, and animating, and his latest tutorial playlist focuses on a loop-focused approach, beginning with a character’s face and building from there.

Of course, my approach was made easier given I’d used the Lightning Boy approach of using separate geometry for eyes and mouths, but I still found my end result infinitely superior to my last base model. And with that, I got to work on remodeling my Team RWBY designs, and gurl when I tell you how proud I am of them, I mean it. I’m especially proud of Blake, along with Yang’s new hair. I went with a more wild approach on the spot, and I think that coupled with having her don the black jacket and half-skirt with red accents really suits her.

Forgot to mention this earlier, but I also wanted to have Yang serve as some vitiligo representation. A friend of mine thankfully helped with that a while back and provided a resource on how to depict vitiligo in your art, so I’ll link that in the description for y’all. For the vitiligo, I used a black-and-white texture mask on Yang’s skin material, which allowed me to paint the discolored clothes onto her model after unwrapping her. Oh yeah, UV unwrapping is the process by which you lay out a model’s faces in 2D space so you can paint onto them. It can be a pain but it’s also molto necessario.

I did also give Team JNPR a shot. Not as happy with them, but this is also their first draft, and I also need to do more work on altering my base model for male characters. In general, I wanna make sure my characters have different body types, and thankfully having a strong underlying structure in your loops really helps with that.

I then gave rigging another shot, and… it was still hel. It was definitely easier than my last attempt thank to the knowledge I’d gained, and the new model I’d made being more rig-friendly, but it was still tedious, especially with adjusting weight paints and adding new bones. For Ruby, she needed new bones for her little wolf ears and tail, and I also made bones for her hair, skirt, and hood. I’ve given the cloth simulations a chance, and I just don’t like the loss of control that comes with simulations. Not to mention they were incredibly demanding on my PC, so wiggle bones it is.

This also involved learning how to use the dope sheet and graph editor, which allows you to tweak your keyframes to adjust the speed at which the character moves. You know, to keep from having a constant speed that looks super roboty. This also involved learning how to use drivers and corrective shape keys. Those crosses on the vest? A nightmare. But the final result? I’m pretty happy with it. But I do need to remodel those shoes. You’d be surprised how quickly you can pick up on better methods for your goals.

Moving on from Team RWBY, I then decided to model the Winx, namely their season 5 designs, along with their Enchantix and Believix forms. I thought it could be cool to make some fan animations for my season 5 rewrite. I’m especially proud of their wings, which I used Grease Pencil to create. Yep. Those wings are drawn, not modeled.

I’ve also started blocking out ideas for Bloom’s Enchantix transformation. I’m kinda weird given I like to plan out what I’m gonna do, but I also come up with a lot of my ideas on the spot. I basically winged all of the shots and movements you’re seeing here, and for a first attempt, I’m pretty proud, though I will admit I’m definitely gonna plan out this sequence some more, then once I’m happy, give them some tweaks in the graph editor.

SO WHAT AM I GONNA DO WITH IT?:

Well… keep making stuff, quite frankly. I’m surprised by how much fun I’ve found Blender, and I’m gonna continue exploring it because it makes me happy. Sure, it might not be something I ever excel in, but I don’t really care about that. I just like making shit. Again, hobbies are vital to staying sane, especially when your work is already creative.

I do think eventually, I’ll attempt some kind of fan animation. I wanna say maybe a RWBY one, but… that fandom scares me. And I’ll always wind up comparing myself to Cake Station or Switchback (both creators you should absolutely check out, by the by). I think it’s more likely I’ll eventually attempt a Winx transformation, or again, a scene from my season 5 rewrite. And maybe I’ll even incorporate Blender stuff into any future rewrites I do, or future books.

But ultimately, I just wanted to share how much I’ve been enjoying Blender, and also encourage people who might be thinking about trying out 3D animation but are too intimidated to follow through. You never know if you’ll love it until you try. I’m gonna link all the resources I mentioned during this video in the description below, along with some others that I think could be useful for y’all.

CONCLUSION & OUTRO:

Anyhow, if you enjoyed this video and would like to see more content like this from me, then be sure to subscribe and ring that bell for notifications because YouTube hates creators. Also please consider pledging your support over on Patreon, and checking out my debut urban fantasy novel De Cineribus: From the Ashes on Amazon and wherever else books are sold!

I’m the Unicorn of War, and weight painting is a shit show.