Blender People I Watch or Recommend
January 7, 2022•709 words
I'll split them up into what they're mostly/primarily geared towards, but it's worth noting that I've learned a lot of the shortcut-y ways of doing things, and general "oh, that's neat" stuff through watching videos that aren't necessarily targetted towards "you will learn these blender tricks!" or "this is how to do X"; they just come out as parts of the people's normal workflows.
General / All-round
- Blender Guru
- The guy most blender users start with. Pronounced (maybe still pronounces) vertex as "verti-see". The doughnut tutorial series is meant to be a start-to-finish beginner's guide. Can't remember how much of the interface and settings were gone through.
- Southern Shotty
- Someone I wish I'd found out about sooner. Earlier stuff is good for beginner friendliness. Has a skillshare course for blender learning so might not have everything on youtube.
- Grant Abbit
- One of my preferred beginner tutorial youtube people. His complete blender 2.8 beginners coursewas fantastically useful. The well and desert island shack walkthroughs were also really well done.
- Blender Secrets
- Best short-form blender content on the web in my opinion. lots of videos for specific "how to do thing" things. This is how I learnt how to do cloth!
Hard Surface Modelling
I feel HSM is slightly different to shape modelling like you'd do for creating things like letterpress jigs and such. Never the less.
- Gleb Alexandrov
- The primo blender HSM guy. Also apparently does photogrammetry-related things now. Interesting. And has a lighting tutorial series. Well. Hello again, Gleb. It's been a while.
Character / Organic modelling
- Cherylynn Lima
- Doesn't upload much. This is what I used to learn low-poly humanoid modelling.
- MAR
- Does the frog look somewhat familiar? Similar workflow to the low-poly workflow above but slightly more "cutesey"
- YanSculpts, Danny Mac 3D
- Both of these guys tend more toward sculpting, and stylized character sculpts at that. Yan I think has more experience, but Danny's videos are more my style.
2D-in-3D / Drawn content in 3D Space
- Sophie Jantak
- Uses blender's grease pencil for her art, has a turtorial series for rigging 2D layers, and some good videos for how to use grease pencil effectively in 3D space.
- Team Miracles
- Mixed bag of media, but many blender videos within, focussing on animations made using either imagery drawn in external software and imported to blender as a plane, or drawn using grease pencil
Free shit (addons/plugins/tools)
- Steven Scott
- Steven does a weekly round-up of freely- and commercially-available plugins and addons for and by the blender community.
On this subject, I have a bevy of free add-ons I can totally recommend. They are, as you might expect, numerous... So I'll leave them out of this list.
Worthy Mentions and Other People
- Ian Hubert
- His Lazy Tutorials are incedibly tongue in cheek, but house ridiculous amounts of knowledge for their length. May be one of the best blender uses alive when it comes to using it for integrated VFX. Certainly one of the best I'm aware of.
- CG Matter/ Default Cube
- I learnt a lot about procedural materials from this guy. CGM is the original channel, which does meme-y / jokey tutorials (which surprisingly enough do still help), DC is long-form walkthroughs on how to do certain things. Less beginner-friendly, probably.
- Ducky 3D
- Some good stuff here, though not one of my go-tos. I've watched a few of his looping / abstract animation videos. They were good.
- Imphenzia
- Have had some good "oh so that's how you do that" moments while wacthing his videos. Good content in general, but not someone I've watched with intent to learn a specific thing. Passive learning, perhaps.
- Erindale
- Does a lot of procedural material and geometry generation. Not watched his stuff much (since I've not yet dipped toe in the Geomtry Nodes pool). Less beginner-friendly, most probably.
- Captain Disillusion
- Doesn't do tutorials per sae but looks at viral videos and disproves them, while trying to replicate the effect in blender. A fun, and often educational watch.
- Me! (Seriously, if y'all have questions let me know and I'll try to help)