Blender in an afternoon

00 Before you start

5 minutes

Blender is already installed. Open it from Applications, or from a terminal:

open -a Blender

You'll get a splash screen — click anywhere to dismiss it. You're looking at the default scene: a cube, a camera, and a light.

Two settings worth changing immediately, both in Blender → Settings → Input:

• Emulate Numpad: ON — lets the number row do view shortcuts. Essential on a laptop.
• Emulate 3 Button Mouse: ON if you're on a trackpad — then ⌥+drag orbits.

01 The mental model

10 minutes · read this properly, it saves an hour later

Almost everything that confuses people about Blender comes from three ideas that nobody tells you. Get these and the interface stops fighting you.

1. Blender is modal

The same keys do different things depending on which mode you're in. The mode dropdown is top-left of the 3D viewport.

• Object Mode — you move whole objects around. A chair, a head, a lamp.
• Edit Mode — you change the shape of one object by moving its vertices, edges and faces.
• Sculpt, Pose, Texture Paint… — specialised modes for one job.

Tab toggles between Object and Edit mode on whatever is selected. If a shortcut "isn't working", you are almost always in the wrong mode. This is the single most common beginner problem.

2. The mouse points, the keyboard acts

Blender was built for people who keep one hand on the keyboard. You don't click a "move tool" — you hover over the thing and press G. The command applies wherever your cursor is. This feels alien for about twenty minutes and then feels faster than everything else.

Because of this, where your mouse is hovering matters. Pressing G over the Outliner does nothing; over the viewport it grabs.

3. Modifiers are live

A modifier is an effect stacked on an object that recalculates continuously — mirror, subdivide, thicken, shrink-wrap. The original mesh stays simple and editable underneath. You model half a face and a Mirror modifier makes the other half, forever, as you work.

This is the biggest practical difference from a 2D tool, and it's why Blender files stay malleable. Prefer a modifier over doing a thing by hand.

And one oddity: the 3D cursor

That little red-and-white target floating in the scene is the 3D cursor. New objects appear wherever it is, and it can act as a pivot point. If you accidentally click in the viewport with the wrong tool it moves, and suddenly new objects spawn in strange places.

⇧C snaps it back to the world origin. Remember that one.

02 Moving around

20 minutes · do not skip, this is where people quit

You cannot judge a 3D shape from one angle. Getting fluid at orbiting is the highest-value twenty minutes you will spend.

Straight-on views

With Emulate Numpad on, the number row gives you orthographic views. These are how you check proportion honestly — perspective lies.

Seeing your work properly

Z opens a pie menu of shading modes. Pick with a flick of the mouse.

• Solid — grey clay. Best for judging form, because colour can't distract you.
• Material Preview — colours and materials, lit by a default studio environment. Your everyday mode.
• Rendered — the real lighting of your scene.
• Wireframe — see the structure underneath.

03 Objects and the golden keys

25 minutes

The three that do most of the work

Select something, then:

Each one is confirmed with a left-click and cancelled with Esc or right-click. That cancel is important — it puts things back exactly, so you can try a move and abandon it freely.

Constrain to an axis — this is the real skill

Press the transform key, then an axis letter:

• G Z — move only up/down
• S X — scale only along X
• R Y — rotate only around Y
• G ⇧Z — move in the two axes that aren't Z

And you can type numbers. G Z 0.2 ↵ moves something up exactly 200mm. Precision without a dialog box.

The N panel

Press N for a side panel showing exact position, rotation, scale and dimensions of whatever is selected. You can type into it.

For our workflow this panel is the whole point of opening Blender: move a thing until it looks right, then read the number off the N panel and put that number in the generator script.

Adding and organising

• ⇧A — Add menu (mesh, light, camera, armature…)
• X — delete selected
• ⇧D — duplicate
• ⌥D — linked duplicate: shares the same mesh data, so editing one edits both. Great for symmetrical props.
• ⌘J — join selected objects into one. The active object (last selected, lighter outline) wins its name and material order.
• M — move to collection (Blender's folders)

Top-right is the Outliner — the list of everything in the file. Click names to select, the eye icon to hide, the camera icon to include or exclude from renders.

Origins matter

Every object has an origin — the little orange dot. Rotation and scale happen around it. If something spins in a huge arc instead of turning in place, its origin is somewhere else.

Fix with Object → Set Origin → Origin to Geometry.

04 Edit mode — actually making shapes

40 minutes

Select an object and press Tab. You're now editing its mesh.

Three ways to select

1 2 3 switch between vertex, edge and face select. (In Edit mode the number keys mean this, not view angles — modes again.)

• A select all · ⌥A deselect all
• L select the connected island under the cursor
• ⌥+click an edge — selects the whole edge loop. This is the one that makes modelling feel possible.
• B box select · C circle (brush) select

The five operations you'll use constantly

Proportional editing

Press O to toggle it on. Now moving one vertex drags its neighbours along with a soft falloff — scroll during the move to change the radius. This is how you shape organic forms without touching every vertex.

Smooth or flat

Right-click → Shade Smooth makes a low-poly mesh look rounded by interpolating its normals. Shade Flat gives you facets. Neither adds geometry; both are just how light is calculated.

The modern option is Shade Auto Smooth, which smooths gentle angles but keeps genuinely sharp edges crisp. Usually what you want.

05 Modifiers — the superpower

30 minutes

Blue wrench icon in the Properties panel (bottom right). Add Modifier, pick one. They stack top to bottom, and each one feeds the next.

06 Building a character

50 minutes

For stylised game characters you almost never sculpt from a block. You block out with primitives, then refine. It's faster, it keeps the topology clean, and it's much easier to change your mind.

Proportion first, always

Work in heads. Total height divided by head height is the single number that decides whether a character reads as cute, heroic or realistic.

• ~3 heads — chibi, toy-like. Villagers, mascots.
• ~4 heads — stylised hero. Most modern cartoon game leads.
• ~6 heads — stylised realism.
• 7½–8 heads — realistic adult.

Decide this before anything else, in a front orthographic view (1), and don't drift from it.

The blocking pass

1. Front view. Add a cube, scale it to the torso.
2. Mirror modifier on, so you only ever build one side.
3. Add spheres and cylinders for head, upper arm, forearm, thigh, shin. Don't join anything yet — separate pieces stay easy to move.
4. Step back constantly. Press 1 and 3 and just look.

Judge the silhouette. Switch to Solid shading, or drop the viewport to wireframe-on-black, and squint. If the character isn't readable as a black shape, no amount of detail will save it — this is why professional turnaround sheets nearly always include a silhouette row.

The Skin modifier trick

For limbs there's a much faster route. In Edit mode, delete everything and make a single vertex (⌃+right-click places one). Extrude it with E to draw a stick figure. Add a Skin modifier and it inflates into solid tubes. ⌃A then mouse-move resizes the thickness at any vertex.

Add a Subdivision on top and you have organic limbs in about two minutes. This is exactly what our generator does.

Faces read at a distance or not at all

On a stylised character the face is mostly graphic, not sculpted. The reliable construction is layered shapes rather than intersecting balls:

• A white almond for the eye — wider than tall
• A large dark iris filling most of its height
• A heavy dark lash line along the top edge — this does most of the expression
• A small highlight dot
• A thick brow, well clear above

Intersecting two spheres to make an iris inside an eyeball gives you a torn, faceted edge where they cross, and no amount of nudging radii fixes it, because the silhouette is the intersection curve. Flat shapes conformed to the face and stacked a few millimetres apart look far better and are trivially adjustable.

07 Materials

30 minutes

Materials live in the sphere-icon tab of Properties. Click New and you get a Principled BSDF — one node that handles almost every real-world surface.

The four sliders that matter

Multiple materials on one object

An object can hold several material slots. In Edit mode, select some faces, pick a slot, click Assign. That's how one mesh has skin, trousers and boots without being three objects.

The boundary follows polygon edges, so if you want a straight line where two materials meet, cut a loop there first (⌃R) — otherwise you get a zigzag.

The shader editor

Change an editor area to Shader Editor to see materials as a node graph. ⇧A adds nodes. You only need a handful:

• Image Texture — plug into Base Color to use a painted map
• Color Ramp — remap values into bands; the basis of toon shading
• Noise / Musgrave — procedural variation, good for fabric and dirt
• Bump — turn any greyscale into surface relief
• Mix — blend two of anything, usually with a mask

08 UVs and texturing

45 minutes · the part most people skip and shouldn't

A UV map is the flattened pattern of your 3D surface — like a sewing pattern. Textures are 2D images, so the model needs a plan for how the image wraps onto it.

Unwrapping

1. Edit mode, select all (A).
2. Mark seams: select edges where the "fabric" should be cut, then Edge → Mark Seam. Put seams where they'll be hidden — inside arms, under the chin, down the back.
3. U → Unwrap.
4. Switch an area to UV Editor to see the result.

Good seams are the whole craft here. Think about where a real garment would have a seam — that's almost always the right answer.

For hard-surface or blocky things, U → Smart UV Project does a decent automatic job in one click.

Checking for stretch

Add a checker texture and look for distortion — squares should stay square. In the UV editor, Overlays → Display Stretch tints stretched areas red. Fix by adding more seams.

Texture painting

Switch to Texture Paint mode and paint directly onto the model.

1. In the Material, add an Image Texture node into Base Color, and create a new image (1024×1024 is plenty for a stylised character).
2. Texture Paint mode. Pick a brush, paint on the model.
3. S picks a colour from the surface. F resizes the brush.
4. Save the image explicitly — Image → Save As. Painted textures are not saved with the .blend by default, and this catches everyone once.

What actually makes stylised textures look good

• Bake in the soft shading. A little darkening in crevices and warmth on raised areas does more than any amount of detail.
• Fabric weave and trim patterns. The reference tunics carry visible knit texture and woven trim along hems and cuffs — that's what separates a "3D model" from a "character" at a glance.
• Keep the palette muted. Save saturation for small accents.
• Paint at the size it'll be seen. Detail below a few pixels on screen is wasted work.

09 Rigging and posing

30 minutes

A rig is a skeleton that deforms the mesh. Even if you never animate, rigging lets you test that a shape still works when the character moves — a garment that looks fine standing can tear open mid-stride.

Building an armature

1. ⇧A → Armature. A single bone appears at the origin.
2. Tab into Edit mode. Select the tip, E to extrude the next bone in the chain.
3. Place bones inside the mesh, at the real joint positions. Turn on Viewport Display → In Front so you can see them.
4. Name every bone. Use .L and .R suffixes — Blender then understands symmetry and can mirror poses.

Binding the mesh

Select the mesh, then ⇧-click the armature (so the armature is active), then ⌃P → With Automatic Weights.

Blender guesses which bone controls which vertices. It's decent on a clean, closed mesh and poor on anything with separate floating pieces — those need binding by hand.

Posing

Select the armature, ⌃Tab for Pose Mode. Click a bone, R to rotate. ⌥R clears a rotation, ⌥G clears a move.

Use this constantly as a test: swing the arms, bend the knees, and look for cloth tearing, skin poking through, or joints collapsing.

Fixing weights by hand

Weight Paint mode shows influence as a heat map — red is fully controlled by the selected bone, blue is not at all. Paint to adjust.

The rule of thumb: at a joint, influence should blend across the bend. A hard boundary — one bone owns these vertices, another owns those — tears open the moment the joint moves.

10 Lighting and rendering

20 minutes

Two engines

• EEVEE — realtime, near-instant. Right for everything here.
• Cycles — physically accurate raytracing, slow. For final stills where it matters.

Three-light setup, which is all you need

• Key — the main light, above and to one side, slightly warm.
• Fill — opposite side, much weaker, slightly cool. Stops shadows going black.
• Rim — behind the subject, picks out the silhouette edge.

Exposure

In Render Properties → Color Management, View Transform defaults to AgX, which is filmic and desaturating. For judging flat stylised colour, set it to Standard — but be aware Standard has no highlight roll-off, so an over-bright light clips surfaces to pure white and form vanishes. If a render looks strangely flat and washed, turn the lights down before suspecting the model.

F12 renders. ⌘S in the render window saves it.

11 Exporting to the game

15 minutes

File → Export → Universal Scene Description, save as .usdz. That's the format Apple's RealityKit takes.

The settings that actually matter

Check the result before trusting it:

usdchecker --arkit yourfile.usdz

You want the literal line Success!. Warnings above it about schema registration are noise.

12 Gotchas worth knowing early

10 minutes · these each cost real hours

• Scale must be applied. If you scale in Object mode, the object carries a scale factor that breaks modifiers, physics and exports in confusing ways. ⌃A → All Transforms bakes it in. Do this before rigging, always.
• Normals can be inside-out. Faces have a direction. If a surface looks dark or vanishes from one side, select all in Edit mode and ⇧N to recalculate. Turn on Overlays → Face Orientation to see it: blue is right, red is inverted.
• Doubled vertices cause shading seams that look like lighting bugs. Select all → M → By Distance.
• A modifier at level 0 counts as disabled, and applying it throws an error rather than doing nothing.
• Rotate after baking position and you rotate around the world origin, not the object. See the eyelids-as-wings story above.
• Subdivision shrinks open edges. Subdividing an open tube pulls its rim inward — sometimes 25%. Close the shell first (Solidify) if the dimensions matter.
• Painted textures aren't saved in the .blend unless you pack them or save the image separately.

— If you remember only five things

1. Tab is the mode toggle, and being in the wrong mode explains most "broken" shortcuts.
2. Hover, then press. G R S, then an axis letter, then a number if you want precision.
3. Prefer a modifier to doing something by hand — and check the stack order when one doesn't behave.
4. Judge in orthographic and in silhouette. Perspective lies, and a shape that doesn't read as a black outline won't be saved by detail.
5. Pose it before you trust it. Shapes that work standing still fall apart when the joint bends.

13 Shortcut card

keep this open on a second screen

— Where to go after this

An afternoon gets you competent, not expert. The gap closes fastest by finishing things — a complete rough character teaches more than a perfect head.

• Sculpt mode — for organic detail, once blocking feels easy. Dyntopo and multiresolution are the two workflows.
• Retopology — rebuilding clean geometry over a sculpt. The professional bridge between "sculpted" and "usable in a game".
• Baking — transferring detail from a dense mesh onto a normal map for a light one. This is how game characters get their detail.
• Geometry Nodes — procedural modelling. Conceptually close to what our generator script does, but visual.

And the honest shortcut: keep reference open beside you, always. Nearly every problem in this guide's warning boxes came from working from memory of a style instead of from the actual thing.