Blender is a free 3D Modeling Software (not CAD, which is a term reserved for more technical uses) with hundreds of resources online to assist in learning it. Many of the amazing Blender tutorials are sadly locked behind paywalls, but YouTube provides plenty of resources to make learning Blender easier. With these tools, anyone can learn Blender, even those with no artistic background.

Blender is something I have never attempted before. I came with an artistic background but have never attempted 3D modeling prior to Blender. However, I wanted my Senior Research Project to focus on self-teaching myself how to 3D model. As such, I started my journey with the most popular beginner tutorial on YouTube: The Donut Tutorial.

This tutorial is the starting point for most Blender users I've spoken with. Here, you follow along Blender Guru as he creates a donut using Blender's many tools. It's a well-planned starters guide showcasing many important basics for Blender. Many of the shortcuts I still use in Blender today originate from this tutorial video. However, no matter how good a tutorial is, you cannot learn everything about Blender through just one playlist. There were many bits inside this tutorial that I still needed clarifications on, so I moved on to another tutorial playlist soon after.

The second tutorial I took on: The Sword Tutorial

This tutorial was a lot simpler than the first tutorial. Many of the tools shown in the first tutorial was shown again in this tutorial, so going through this tutorial was not difficult. Rather, this tutorial served as my introduction to hard-surface modeling. A trait that all knights have is that they wear armor. To create armor, I know I needed an understanding of hard-surface modeling. This tutorial taught me certain tips to get started on hard-surface modeling, but it was not enough.

Since I wanted to continue doing hard-surface modeling, I decided that my next tutorial should be the Chair Tutorial.

This is another tutorial made by Blender Guru. This tutorial showed how to create hard-surfaced object through creating a chair. This chair tutorial was practically my introduction in showcasing how important the Subdivision Surface modifier was, and how we can manipulate it to get natural curves while maintaining a hard-surface exterior.

There truly is no better way to understand a subject than to practice what you've learned. Despite following all those tutorials, there's no way to know if you've truly understood everything you've learned until you put them to the test.

As practice, I just chose to make various different objects that I thought would be interesting to create, such as some glasses or a sword. Make sure the objects you create are within the boundaries of your skill level, or you may just end up ruining some of your models. Still, I think I did pretty good with my practices, with most pieces only taking at most five tries to get correct. After the practice was over, it was time to move on to the final and longest tutorial.

The tutorial that basically made this whole project possible for me was the Character Modeling Tutorial by Daniel Kreuter.

Daniel Kreuter goes through his process of making a character, with each video being a follow-along type videos. It's probably a very inefficient way of learning Blender, but it's a great way to understand a professional's workflow while working on a character. This guy was also sadly one of the monotone teacher out of all the YouTubers I've followed along to, but his voice is honestly pretty nice to listen to. It's monotone, but I don't think I've ever felt like falling asleep while following along to his tutorial.

Since the character that Daniel Kreuter was creating was very similar to the ideal character I wanted to create for this project, I thought this tutorial would be nearly perfect to follow along to. I didn't need to finish all of his videos, since I noticed some videos were unnecessary to the project I was working on. However, the videos taught me a great deal about a professional workflow and how to tackle certain situations in Blender. Eventually, it was even possible for me to relate math to Blender, as horrible (or great) as that sounds. My only gripe with these tutorials was that because Daniel Kreuter was a professional, he sometimes spent too much times on the small details, which made going through the videos much slower. However, if you're completely invested in Blender at this point, I recommend watching through some of his tutorial videos. He has been the biggest help in my Senior Research Project.