Imphenzia
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2020–2025
1:23:16 · 2.1M views · Jun 25, 2020
Imphenzia's 83-minute tutorial covers the low poly modeling techniques he learned over five years of Blender use, with timestamps from navigation and extrusion onward. It uses Blender 2.83 with default keys.
It is the most-recommended beginner Blender tutorial on HN, with several people saying it made them comfortable in a couple of hours.
4 comments from Hacker News
hey me too!! The video that finally helped me get going was this one from Imphenzia on YT: this video all his other stuff is great, like building and rigging a low-poly character. Instead of having to follow tutorials and make stuff I didn’t want to, he shows you how to use the tools to make what’s in your imagination!
I uncomfortably poked at blender a few times over the years until this tut by Imphenzia, which made me comfortable in under 2 hours: this video
Wrong tutorials. A lot of these models consist of just taking a primitive like a sphere, scaling it, and then creating another primitive, scaling it, moving it, so you have overlapping hulls ("bad" topology). Then in shading you just create a default material and set its color. There are models in the examples that require e.g. extrusion (which is literally: select faces, press E, drag mouse). Some shapes are smoothed/subdivided with Catmul-Clark Subdivision Surface modifier, which you can add simply by pressing CTRL+2 in "Object Mode" (the digit is the number of subdivisions, basically use 1 to 3, you may set more for renders). Here's a good, albeit old tutorial: this video Yes I made some assumptions when estimating it takes about a day to learn to make models like this: you have a free day to spend it in its entirety to learn, and as a hackernews user your IQ is over average and you're technically savvy. And last assumption: you learn skills required evenly, rather than going deep into the rabbit hole of e.g. correct topology; if you go through something like Andrew Pierce's doughnut tutorial, it may take more than a day, especially if you play around with the various functions of Blender rather than strictly following the videos - but you will end up making significantly better models than the examples presented, e.g. you will know to inset cylinder's ngons to avoid the Catmul-Clark subdiv artifacts you can see on the 2nd column of hats. > this tech is insanely useful. No, i
For Blender, I've really liked this video, and others by the same chap: this video For game dev, I'd start with something with a UI and general-purpose like Godot or Unity, or if you're not a coder, maybe GameMaker and its ilk.