blender basics
1. The Viewport
first things first, when you open blender you should know how to move around the viewport (the space where you are looking at your 3D objects). I reccomend using a mouse for this. To rotate your view you press and hold the middle mouse button. To move your view right or left or up or down, you hold shift+middle mouse button. You can snap to a direct fron view by clicking on the Y axis in the little circular gizmo in the top right of your viewport. this goes for side vie or top/bottom view aas well! the keyboard shortcuts for that are pressing certain numbers on your numpad. I do not have a numpad, so I don't know which numbers! I do know 5 on the numpad will switch your view into isometric mode which is fun and cool.
2. Object Mode
Now that you know how to move around, you can look in the top left corner and see that you start out in object mode. If you are new to 3d modelling you might be wondering what is an object? Since I got into blender with a digital art background I like to think of them kind of like layers in a drawing, but basically they are shapes or groups of shapes that you can easily modify seperately from others. Object mode in blender is pretty simple; you can move around and add and delete distinct objects, but you cannot change their shape directly. Object mode is where you will be adding and removing objects, changing things like shaders and modifiers, and lighting.By default you start out with 3 objects: a camera, a light, and a cube. The camera is pretty self explanatory, it will be the point from which images are rendered.
3. Sculpt Mode
sculpting is where I started when I was first learning blender! If you want to do the same, I reccomend starting out with a high poly sphere (i realize I havent explained polygons yet... they are the squares that make up the 3d shapes you see basically) you can do this in object mode by pressing 'add' or shift+A, and selecting mesh>UV Sphere (you might delete the cube too, by selecting it and pressing delete). You can add more polygons to make it more smooth! you will want to open the modifiers menu which is the little blue gear icon on the right side of your screen. In the modifiers menu, you can add the 'subdivision surface' modifier. This is a very useful modifier in blender! later when you are modelling, it allows you to edit simple shapes and turn them into more smooth and detailed shapes. It works by adding extra loops in between each existing one, basically it takes each square and splits it into 4 smaller squares. Wihtout applying it, this only affects how it looks, but doesnt actually add any extra polygons.For now, you want a sphere... so I would set the subdivision surface to 2 and apply it to the mesh. when you click apply, it gets rid of the modifier and applies the effects, essentially quadrupeling the amount of polygons in your sphere. Now you can move to sculpt mode! you can do that by clicking on the menu that says object mode and selecting sculpt. I don't have a whole lot of tips for sculpting but it is really fun to just mess around with it! it is kind of like playing with clay. This will also hopefully be good practice moving around the viewport.
4. Edit Mode
Edit mode! edit mode is for modelling! all of your shapes are made up of faces/polygons, which are made up of edges, which are made up of vertices. In edit mode you can mess with individual vertices edges or faces. when you have a groupd of vertices selected, you can move them by pressing G (for grab), you can scale them up and down by pressing S, and you can rotate them with R. you can also extrude faces by selecting and then pressing E. after doing any of those 4 things, you can specify an axis you want them to move along by pressing X, Y, or Z, and you can specify an amount by typing in the number (it respects negatives and decimals as well). When scaling the number represents a multiple of the original size, so 1 would be its current size, 0.5 would be half that, 2 would be twice that. When moving the number represents meters, and when rotating it represents degrees. In edit mode, you can add modifiers but not apply them, for that you will have to move back to object mode temporarily. You can also add new "objects" in edit mode, but keep in mind they will be a part of the original object, and so you can't easily edit them seperately.
5. Useful Shortcuts
lets review!
Viewport:
- mouse2: rotate camera
- shift+mouse2: move camera
edit/object mode:
- G: grab or move
- R: rotate
- S: scale
- E: extrude
- A: select all
- shift+D: duplicate
- shift+A: add
- ctrl+C: copy
- ctrl+V: paste
- tab: toggle object mode
- mouse1: select
- mouse3: deselect
Final Thoughts
I unfortunately don't have any absolute beginner blender tutorials on hand, but if you are interested in learning I reccomend going to youtube, there are lots of good ones out there! If you've got the basics down I have some experience and some good videos in mind about character modelling! If you ever forget how to do something or it's not explained here, blender has some great documentation as well as a lot of active forums so google is your friend. Have fun!