I’m a noob at blender. This is pretty much how I felt when I first sat down and started learning things. I thought following tutorials would help, but in the beginning they simply frustrated me. Why? Well, I’ll tell you.
As any experienced Blender artist knows, the interface is not the friendliest thing in the world. On top of that, there is a whole new language to learn. Vertex? Mesh? Ambient occlusion? Bump Mapping? I just want to make a ninja slicing through 30 opponents! *sigh*
So it’s an uphill battle right from the beginning. You have to learn the language, the concepts, the interface and keep all of that in mind while trying to follow someone explain 50 million new things. For me, I would get about 5 seconds past the intro in the tutorials and have to pause it and google “blender subdivide” or something like that. I couldn’t remember the keyboard shortcuts and didn’t know where to find anything in the menus.
So, here are some suggestions if you are just starting out and want some basic ideas about how to make those first steps easier.
1) If you are just starting in Blender, one of the best uses of your time is to watch the “Getting Started” tutorials at Blender Cookie http://cgcookie.com/blender/category/getting-started/ Do the tutorials on downloading/installing, intro to interface, intro to modeling, and intro to materials. In my opinion, trying to jump into lighting, animation, and rendering right at the beginning is a mistake. You can’t do any of that until you have something modeled.
2) Be prepared to pause the videos… often! I found that it was very helpful to watch part of the video first and see what the person is going to do. Then, go back and do it with him/her. You will still have to pause it quite a bit, but I found it very difficult to follow along if I didn’t know where the author was going. Unfortunately, this is a common problem with tutorials – they don’t do a good job of explaining where they are going. They just dive in. So, save yourself the mystery and watch it first.
3) Get the keyboard shortcut cheat sheet from Blender guru http://www.blenderguru.com/blender-2-5-cheat-sheet Print it out and keep a copy right by your computer. It has saved me countless hours of trying to google for a particular shortcut.
4) After you know the basics, find a single tutorial on something that you think looks cool. I found it best to do tutorials that go through everything from start to finish so that when I’m done I have a complete project. Blenderguru.com has some great tutorials, but be aware that he goes quite fast. I’ve done a lot of his stuff and really like it, but need to pause quite often. CG Cookie has a TON of tutorials and they can be sorted by difficulty. Just find something cool and do it from start to finish
5) Show off your work! Seriously. I show my stuff to all my friends and family. They don’t have to know it came straight from a tutorial. The encouragement that comes from people ooh’ing and aww’ing over your images will give you the motivation to keep working harder.
6) Finish one project before moving on to the next. As you learn more, you will get really excited about new tutorials you see. Just make sure you finish one thing completely before starting another one. The psychological importance of having finished projects cannot be underestimated.
If you want my suggestion on a good place to start, the tutorial at blender guru that creates a subway scene is awesome http://www.blenderguru.com/videos/create-an-underground-subway-scene-part-1-of-2 It’s two parts – the first is modeling and the second is texturing and lighting. I didn’t say it is easy, but it is awesome. It was the first complete scene I did and it looks fantastic when you show it to people. It is a good place to start because it covers everything from modeling to texturing to materials to lighting to the compositor. It also shows you some other cools things to speed up modeling.
Here’s my final scene from that tutorial:
Subway
I hope some of these suggestions were useful. Have your own suggestions? Then post them in the comments!
** the top image is from http://alalearning.org/2010/06/01/5-things-that-make-you-look-like-a-noob/ Always give credit where credit is due 
