Blender FAQ

What you always wanted to know – and could have found out way easier and quicker

What ​is Blender?

That’s kind of obvious for many people. Nevertheless, if you’re new, check out
https://www.blender.org/features/​ for a quick and colorful introduction.

What are Addons?

Addons provide 3rd party extended functionality to the core of Blender. You can find paid
Addons on​ Blender Market​ and on selected gumroad links.

You can also search BlenderArtist section ​Released Scripts and Themes​, for paid and free
Blender Scripts and Addons.

Blendernation also as a dedicated section for newly released ​Addons ​and ​Scripts​.

How to start with Blender?

A search for Blender on Youtube.com produces thousands of results. There are a number of
channels, which provide nice starter tutorials. To name a few:

● Blenderguru
● cgBoost
● CGCookie
● FlippedNormals

In my eyes it is important not only to watch tutorials and to click where the tutor requests. Try
to understand what you you. And start slowly! Computer graphics requires a wide area of
knowledge. If you want to learn animation, you better start by moving pyramids around
instead of animating figures. This keeps the level of frustration low and you can improve step
by step.
Where can I get support with Blender?
First choice are search images like google.com and/or bing.com. Try asking your question
and enjoy the answers in fractions of a second.

Facebook hosts many Blender related groups like “​Blender​” and ​“Blender Ask and Answer”
Every Facebook group provides a search feature, which you should try next to get your
question answered instantly.

If that produces no useful answer, you may post your question into a group. If you are a
beginner and have kind of a “basic” question, it is a good idea to post it into a group like
“Blender Help for Absolute Beginners” or “Blender Beginners”.

You can also visit the dedicated websites like “​BlenderArtists.org​” and​ Blendrnation

How to get support the easiest way?

Try to explain your problem comprehensively. Don’t expect people to analyze what you
wanted to know. And please do not ​request​ a solution. Most users answer friendly if they are
asked. Nobody is required to answer the question of an impatient requester.

Does Blender run on my system?

Why not browse to​ ​https://www.blender.org/download/​, install Blender and see if it works.

You can also download a Portable version of blender, which can be run on a thumb drive,
external drive, or from anywhere on your desktop. ​Its great when using multiple versions of
Blender on one machine or updating, without the need to install or uninstall
https://www.blender.org/download/Blender2.81/blender-2.81-windows64.zip/

I want to purchase a new PC with the following

specification … ​Will​ Blender run on it?
Blender should run on most modern PCs and Notebooks. A good place to start is
https://www.blender.org/download/requirements/​, which lists the basic hardware
requirements. Possible problems are often related to the Graphics Card. Make sure that the
selected card is included in the list given on the page.

Why does Blender crash right after start?

This is usually a problem with the Graphics Card or an old driver. First check, if your
computer has a Graphics Card, which is supported by Blender. This list of supported
hardware can be found here: ​https://www.blender.org/download/requirements/​. If your card
is supported, try to update your driver. If Blender still crashes or shows artefacts, google the
error message.

Why does Blender create artifacts on screen?

This is often related to an older version of your graphics driver. Update the driver and try
again.

What is the perfect Blender PC for beginners?

Remember that you create images and your PC is the tool to do it. This shall state that
neither the possession of the state-of-the-art word processor turns you into a famous author
nor the big server machine on your desk into a graphics designer.

While Blender runs on a broad range of different systems, you should not concentrate on the
cheapest level. Even if Blender runs on it, you won’t become very happy because Blender is
very computing intensive. Although it is easy to make Blender lagging even with faster
systems, slower systems will lag even more and turn work into chores. I suggest to start with
a midlevel gaming PC. You will them be able to play with the computer even if you won’t
work with Blender anymore.

Does Blender run on a Notebook PC?

Yes. As Blender uses the number pad, it makes more sense to select a notebook with a
number pad. Many systems can emulate the number pad and you can change the key
bindings in Blender but that’s neither fun nor helps it with many tutorials, which rely on the
standard key bindings.

Does Blender run on my Tablet PC?

While Blender may run on a modern Microsoft Surface tablet, it does not run on an iPad or
Android tablet. There has been an Android version many years ago, but you need to
consider the usefulness.

Tablet PCs are built to run many hours on low power running standard applications like
video display and internet browsing. Creating graphics needs a lot of computing power. Only
notebook and desktop computers provide enough power to run a computing intensive
application like Blender.

Additionally, Blender is designed to use mouse and keyboard. Although some tablets feature
a pen, they all lack a keyboard.

I do not think that you would get happy with Blender on a tablet computer.

Does it help to use a graphics tablet?

A graphics tablet provides an area to draw on with a pen. Basically, the pen acts as a
mouse, such that you can use the pen to move the cursor and the mouse interchangeably.
Additionally, graphics tablets react on pressure. For instance, the dot size, which you paint
with, becomes larger the harder you press the pen onto the drawing area on the tablet. This
comes in very handy for painting.

Graphics tablets are best suited for painting and sculpting. It is much easier, for example, to
sculpt with a pen as with the mouse.

Nevertheless, Blender is designed for parallel mouse and keyboard operation. So you will
need your keyboard as well to press shortcuts. Additionally, drawing area coordinates of the
tablet are transferred to display coordinates on screen. Following, if you have a very small
graphics tablet, the cursor on screen moves comparably fast.

What is the best graphics tablet brand?

This is basically up to you. I use an old Wacom Intuos 4. I guess, Wacom has defined this
kind of device. My Intuos works fine.

Wacom devices are quite expensive (you may want to look for a used one). Cheaper ones
are built by Huion, which seen to work well.

I don’t know what type of mouse I should use.

In general, all types of mice work well with Blender. The more buttons a mouse provides, the
more you can configure Blender. You can configure additional commands for the additional
buttons. Disadvantage is that all tutorials (at least the ones I know) explain the Blender
standard, not that what you have configured.

From my personal experience I suggest to look for a “vertical mouse”. It is much more
ergonomic and reduces the strain in your arm.

What is the difference between CPU and GPU?

CPU is the acronym for ​Central Processing Unit​. This is the heart of a computer. It does all
the math and memory operations for you. A modern CPU is built of a number of ​cores.​ Every
core is a processor itself. Cores of modern CPUs have two computing ​threads​. So, if you run
Blender on a CPU with 8 cores having 2 threads each, Blender computes 16 pieces of your
image at the same time.

GPU is the acronym for Graphics Processing Unit. This is basically the Graphics Card of
your computer producing the images, which you see on screen. GPUs have a very small set
of instructions compared to the CPU. Usually graphic transformations, which need to be
performed to compute an image, are very well suited to such an instruction set. Following,
GPUs outperform CPUs in many cases.

Shall I spend more money for the CPU or the GPU?

This question depends heavily on the stuff you want to do with Blender.

Although a GPU can outperform an eight-core CPU, GPUs have one serious limitation:
Memory. It does not make that big difference if you use an 8GB “mainstream” GPU or a
super-expensive 11GB “Titan” GPU.

Things that require lots of memory:

● High resolution textures with diffuse, AO, roughness, specularity, normal etc. maps.
● Big high dynamic range images (HDRI) to light your scene.
● Materials with displacement.
● Use of volumes.

Overload of your GPU is guaranteed if you use the above listed features, which make the
image look very realistic. If you plan to use that, better select a multi-core CPU and a lot of
RAM (e.g. 64GB) and a cheaper GPU.

AMD or nVidia
As a long term nvidia user I can tell that the drivers are stable and the rendering works fine
on cards supporting CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture), which is a computing
system using the graphics adapter for simple computations as they are required for
computer graphics.

Another reason to use nvidia RTX graphics adapters may be the denoiser, which improves
image quality in many cases and provides for shorter computing times than without
denoising. (I have no experience with this kind of denoising. I can only tell that Blender
denoising and the Intel denoiser introduced with Blender 2.81 eat up image quality when too
few samples have been computed (resulting in too much noise to compensate.))

AMD radeon cards use OpenCL, which is a language comparable to CUDA. Support for
OpenCL has been improved dramatically since AMD supports Blender development. I have
no experience with AMD - Anyone else?
Eevee or Cycles or …
Eevee, Cycles, Octance, Luxrender, Renderman are renderers, i.e. components inside
Blender, which actually compute the image.

Eevee has been developed for “real-time”, which means that it has been designed for
speedy rendering under the acceptance of shortcuts. These limitations are often acceptable,
especially for draft renderings.

Cycles is the “fully-featured” Blender renderer, which is capable to generate images of

amazing quality. But these take time to compute.

Other renderers as named above can be used from Blender. If you use another renderer,
you need to take into account that the material systems deviates completely from Blender
meaning that materials for Cycles cannot be used unaltered fro Luxrender.

TBD: Somebody volunteer to describe other renderers?

Shall I work on Windows or Linux?

This depends on your situation. Blender runs on both operating systems (and MacOS as
well) and works more or less the same (expect the number of mouse buttons, I suppose).

There is an interesting comparison between Linux and Windows on CG Geek’s Youtube

channel (​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpE2B2QSsa0​). It points out that Blender on
Linux is a lot faster than on Windows. That may be a reason to render on a Linux machine.

On the other hand, there are a lot of other applications, which are only available on
Windows. To name a few: Poser, DAZ3D, Marvelous Designer, World Creator etc. If you use
one of them in your workflow, it is much easier for you to work on Windows.

So you have to decide by yourself ;)

How to make screenshots (and post them)?

Even if you’re only connected to the internet via your mobile phone, there is no reason to
post a bad picture of your computer’s screen. Please make a screenshot with the standard
tools and save it as a file. In Windows, you may use the “Print” key to snapshot the whole
screen, or ALT-Print to snapshot the Blender window. Additionally, you may use the
Windows-Key-Shift-S to snapshot an area of the screen.

Then copy the image to your mobile, for instance, via USB connection or Blutooth. Then post
the screenshot.
Note that this is probably the other way, you moved the Blender installation file to your
computer without internet connection.