---
authors:
  - "Drac#9999"
  - "Calcium The Bored Penguin#2006"
created_at: "2022/02/08"
title: What is Blender?
---

## What is Blender?

You all have heard of it... or maybe not. Blender is an open source 3D modelling software that is probably the best in the market. It is very powerful and is made for everyone, whether you want to make cars, humans, a huge city, 2D and 3D animations, VFX and even edit a video or two... or all at once. This is a powerful tool in the toolkit of artists and game developers to make extraordinary scenes, characters and even stories come to life. Fun fact, Next Gen (on Netflix), a full feature animated movie was made entirely in Blender.

## How do I install it?

Well that's pretty easy. Just head on over to the [Blender website](https://www.blender.org/). Click on Downloads, and then choose your version. After that, simply click the download link on your OS. It's available on all Windows, Linux and macOS operating systems (no OS shaming here). Hell, you can even use it on a VR headset. If you want automatic updates for Blender, you can also download it from Steam or Microsoft Store. 

The latest version of Blender at the time of writing is 3.0 (which also marks the next major version change in 21 years) but anything above Blender 2.8 is fine, really, as that was the first version with their revamped UI that does not scare off new users at first sight. All tutorials of Blender 2.8+ will be valid to 3.0.

## Okay, I opened the program and I’m confused. What do I do now?

Blender as a software might seem confusing. If you feel like you need some helping hands, below I've listed some of the most popular beginner tutorials to get you into Blender. By the way, I'm totally not biased towards the donut tutorial because that's the tutorial I did. Absolutely not. 

Also, Blender has a whole host of keyboard shortcuts. The reason is that Blender was designed to be used by two hands. One on the mouse for navigation and movement while the other hand is meant to be for the various shortcuts so that you can do your work faster. Don't worry laptop users though, Blender is very touch-pad friendly these days.

* [Donut tutorial](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyJWoyVx_XI&list=PLjEaoINr3zgEq0u2MzVgAaHEBt--xLB6U)
* [Sword tutorial](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpvh-9H8S1g)
* [Free course](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MRonzqYJgw)

## Interface Cheatsheet
Here is a short intro to the various components of Blender's UI interface. 

On opening Blender, you'll most likely be greeted with a screen which looks like this: 
![Blender welcome screen](https://i.imgur.com/LlemZnX.png)

The first thing you'll need to do is select a new type of file. To clarify, these are all BLEND files, just with different layout configurations for Blender users to quick-start on whatever type of project they want to start. The most commonly used one is General but feel free to experiment and try out other default layouts as well.

![Creating a new file](https://i.imgur.com/vUX0uNc.png)

If you chose General, you should see a screen which looks something like the screenshot below. Lots of things to uncover here. On the top, you can see different layout tabs which Blender calls Workspaces. Blender has created these based on community usage but of course, these are all as customisable as you want them to be. Go through them and try to figure out what they do. You may not be using all of them all the time but it's good to know they are there.

![Blender cube](https://i.imgur.com/ihDWjQf.png)

Of course, these are all preconfigured layouts and you can make your own layouts very easily. To do that, go to any corner of the workspace buffers or as Blender likes to call them, "Areas" and wait until the cursor turns into a + sign. Then click and drag until a new window pops up. Alternatively, you can also right click the Area border and split them.

![Creating layouts](https://i.imgur.com/EAhpONn.png)

You can change what information is visible on these newly created Areas very easily by doing to the top left of that Area and clicking on the editor type button. By default, it is the 3D viewport. You can also collapse areas by right clicking on their boundaries and then by clicking Join Areas.

On the right, you can see the Outliner and Property areas. The Outliner area is fairly easy to understand, its a tree view of every object in the 3D viewport. The Properties area is a very important one where you can tweak several project specific settings like changing the render engine, output type or display device, or tweak object settings like making and editing materials, adding modifiers to objects, etc.

## I know the basics of Blender now. What do I do next?

Well, now it's time to let your imagination loose. There is a ton of different tools and features that Blender provides that you wont be needing most of the time, but its still fun to mess around with. (P.S. I would suggest messing around with the different modifiers that come with it).

There is a variety of channels I'll link here for tutorials and inspiration for you to follow:
* [Blender Guru](https://www.youtube.com/user/AndrewPPrice)
* [Grant Abbitt](https://www.youtube.com/c/GrantAbbitt)
* [CG Cookie](https://www.youtube.com/c/CGCookieBlender)
* [CG Geek](https://www.youtube.com/c/CGGeek)
* [Default Cube](https://www.youtube.com/c/DefaultCube)
* [Daniel Krafft](https://www.youtube.com/c/DanielKrafft)
* [Ian Hubert](https://youtube.com/c/mrdodobird)

If you already have an idea of what you want to do with Blender, search up some guides on how to make your scene come to life.

## Blender's Plugin Ecosystem

Blender has a very rich and diverse plugin ecosystem developed and maintained by the Blender organization as well as independent 3D artists and developers. There are quite a lot of useful plugins which Blender has preinstalled (although they may not be enabled). You can get to them from Edit → Preferences → Add-ons or by pressing the F4 key → Preferences → Add-ons. There's a huge list of pre-installed plugins here, most of which, I honestly have never used but it's great to know it's there. Some of the most common pre-installed plugins you will be using are the Node Wrangler plugin and the Extra Objects plugin, among others. [You can get a full list of pre-installed plug-ins here](https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/addons/index.html).

3rd party plugins are also extremely helpful a lot of the times and if you're doing some repetitive task, there are good chances that there are plugins out there, free or paid, which will reduce your effort and save precious time. [Here's a list of general recommendations for plugins](https://conceptartempire.com/blender-addons-plugins/). You don't have to get these but depending on what you are doing, these can be extremely helpful for you. 

## Creating your own Blender plugin

Blender offers a rich API for developers to use and they have a Python library using which you can extend and create plugins for Blender. 
[You can find more information about this here](https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/advanced/scripting/index.html)
You can use the blender API to create all sorts of awesome stuff like data visualisers, which is really cool!

## Blender OpenData

You might not have known this, but you have seen this. You see those BMW tests or the classroom tests everyone does for their GPU benchmarking videos? Well that's from [Blender OpenData](https://opendata.blender.org/), their benchmarking platform

Good luck on your blender journey....and delete the default cube

## Resources

- [Blender 3.0 Manual](https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/index.html)
- [Blender download page](https://www.blender.org/download/)
- [Official documentation on Blender's Window System](https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/interface/index.html#window-system)
- [Blender pre-installed add-ons documentation](https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/addons/index.html)