Learn Blender to a finished 3D render in three months
Three months of daily evenings — about 45 minutes a day modeling, texturing and lighting — gets a total beginner to a portfolio-worthy still render. Roughly 70 hours total. You will not be a generalist 3D artist. You will own the full pipeline for one finished image at a time.
3 months · ~70 hours · model, light and render an original scene to a 1080p image
1.Blender Guru — Donut Tutorial (5.0)
Andrew Price's donut series is the universal Blender on-ramp and the 5.0 rewrite released in late 2025 is current as of this writing. Every menu, every shortcut, every concept beginners trip over is covered in roughly twenty short lessons that build one finished render. Don't watch passively — pause and replicate every step. By the end you will have shipped your first piece of 3D art and know the entire interface.
Free
Blender Donut 5.0 Tutorial →2.Grant Abbitt — Getting Good at Blender
After the donut, most beginners freeze because they don't know what to model next. Grant Abbitt's beginner exercises and "Become a Blender Master" series fix this with bite-size, gradually harder challenges — a low-poly sword, a stylized house, a simple character. His teaching style is calm and his exercises were designed for self-learners. Pick six projects and finish them all the way to a render.
Free on YouTube
Grant Abbitt YouTube →3.One original scene from reference
Pick a single photograph — a quiet kitchen counter, a desk lamp, a windowsill — and rebuild it in Blender from scratch. No tutorial. Use Blender's manual, Polyhaven for HDRIs and textures, and BlenderKit for stuck moments. This is where Blender stops feeling like Andrew Price's hands moving the mouse and starts feeling like yours. Spend the entire month on one image and finish it.
Free; Blender, Polyhaven and the manual are all free
Blender Manual →If this doesn't fit you
If you specifically want hard-surface or product visualisation rather than artistic scenes, swap Grant Abbitt for Ducky 3D's procedural and product tutorials. If you want character art, swap him for CG Cookie's character course ($21/month). The donut and the original-scene project stay; only the middle stretch changes.
Why this path
Blender is famously deep — sculpting, simulation, geometry nodes, animation, compositing, video editing all live in the same app — and beginners drown in tutorials trying to learn all of it at once. The donut, varied beginner projects, and one original render compress the actual essentials into about seventy hours. Skipping the original-scene step is the most common mistake. The first time you face an empty viewport with no instructor is the moment you actually become a Blender artist.