Shading lab
Light, colour & texture
A render is only maths pretending to be light. The three-light rig, how colour is two colours multiplied, what a texture tells you, and a match-the-render task.
Read, play, then do itOpen lab →
Blender labs
Build your world in 3D.
17 hands-on labs. From your first render to your final scene.
Learn modelling, animation, physics, smoke and fire, and more, all in Blender. Each lab works offline, saves your progress in your browser, and ends with something to be proud of.
17 labsComplete 3D projects
406 animated stepsClear, visual instructions
Blender 4.2+(built in 5.2)
Works offlineSaves your progress locally
01
Start here: lighting & materials 2 labs
Two short reading-and-playing labs. Everything after this assumes you know what a light, a colour and a texture each do to a render.
Shading lab
BSDF: materials that look real
What a BSDF is, the five Principled settings that matter (base colour, metallic, roughness, IOR, etc.), and how to make plastic, metal, glass and more.
Read, play, then do itOpen lab →
02
Modelling & animation 4 labs
Shape things from primitives, rig them, move them. Each lab is one object built start to finish, with a still and a movie at the end.
Lab 10
Penguin
Build a penguin from spheres, give it a skeleton, and make it wave.
31 animated stepsOpen lab →
Lab 11
Car
Turn one box into a car with loop cuts, creases and subdivision; cut a door that opens onto a real cabin; build wheels that roll; drive it past a camera.
84 animated stepsOpen lab →
Lab 12
Chess pawn
Copy a real chess pawn from a photo: one cylinder, built up ring by ring with four keys, G, Z, E and S.
20 animated stepsOpen lab →
Lab 20
Character
Model a person from one block, give them a face, bones, a walk, a smile, and the light to make it real.
58 animated stepsOpen lab →
03
Physics & simulations 10 labs
Make things fall, break, splash, burn and flow. Explore realistic effects using Blender’s powerful physics tools.
03 · Physics & simulations
Keep experimenting
From falling objects to fluid motion, discover what Blender can simulate.
Lab 9new
Gravity and movement
Sweep a field of blocks with an animated bar, then topple a row of dominoes.
27 animated stepsOpen lab →
Physics Lab 2
Rust & metal
Rust, steel, concrete and dust: real materials for the wrecking ball.
18 animated stepsOpen lab →
Lab 16
Water physics
A domain, an inflow, particles: watch cubes splash and water pour.
Read, play, then do itOpen lab →
Lab 21new
A ball in a cup of water
A sloshing glass, ripples from a dragged ball, then gravity drops it in.
32 animated stepsOpen lab →
Lab 17
Smoke simulation
A domain and a flow: your first smoke simulation.
Read, play, then do itOpen lab →
04
Final challenge 1 lab
Bring everything together in a final scene. Show off what you’ve learned!
Watch what you’ll make
The capstone trailer
Thirty seconds of the scene this lab builds: the volcano, the chase, the crash, the fire, and the four camera moves. Everything in it comes from the labs above.
0:30 · sound onDownload .mp4
Capstone lab
Opening scene
Design and build your own 3D scene using models, materials, lighting, animation and effects from the course.
53 animated stepsExplore capstone →
iThe numbers on the labs are their own names (the series grew in pieces); the order in Resources › Teaching order is the order we do them in. Not every lab is set every year.
My progress
Every step you tick inside a lab is counted here. Ticks are saved by your browser on this computer, so a different computer starts at zero.
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Resources
Finished files to compare with, how a lab page works, hand-in rules, and the teaching order.
Finished files to compare with
Open these in Blender next to your own file when something does not match a checkpoint.
How a lab page works
- Today says what you will be able to do; the plan shows the parts.
- Every step has a Where line, a Watch animation of the mouse doing the move (pause, scrub, step with the arrows), and a Do this list. Do one move, look, do the next.
- Checkpoints are renders from the real file: if yours does not match, the caption links to the fix.
- Something’s not right lists the usual problems; the quiz and Check yourself are for you, not for marks.
Files and hand-in
- Save as the name the lab gives you, with your own name in it:
Lab11_Car_YourName.blend. Ctrl+S every few steps. - Most labs end with a Cycles still (PNG) and an EEVEE movie (.mp4); upload all three to SEQTA under the lab’s name.
- Blender 4.2 or newer: blender.org/download. The labs were built and tested in 5.2; where a menu differs in older versions the step says so.
- Not finished? Upload what you have and say which step you reached.
Teaching order
- Light, colour & texture Shading lab
- BSDF: materials that look real Shading lab
- Gravity and movement Lab 9
- Penguin Lab 10
- Car Lab 11
- Chess pawn Lab 12
- Wrecking ball Physics Lab 1
- Rust & metal Physics Lab 2
- Cloth physics Lab 15
- Water physics Lab 16
- Water splash Physics Lab 4
- Volcano Lab 17
- Smoke simulation Lab 17
- Fire & smoke Lab 18
- Character Lab 20
- A ball in a cup of water Lab 21
- Opening scene Capstone lab
Teacher notes on this page
This hub replaces the old index.html, which was a base64-packed copy of the shading lab; that lab is now the first card (Light, colour & texture). Every lab page is embedded inside this one file, compressed (the whole series is about 43 MB of pages; compressed and encoded it is under half that), and unpacked in the browser when its card is clicked. The finished .blend files and the cloth PDF are embedded too, so this single file is the entire course; it fits GitHub’s 25 MB web-upload limit. The separate lab files in the repository are the same pages and still work on their own.
Numbering. The pages keep the numbers they were published with. Two pages call themselves Lab 17 (Volcano and Smoke simulation); there is no Physics Lab 3 and no Lab 13, 14 or 19; the two Word labs “Lab 10 Water splashing” and “Lab 11 Object in the ocean” are combined into Lab 21 A ball in a cup of water because the HTML series already has a Lab 10 and a Lab 11; the Word lab “Lab 9A” is Lab 9 with its Part B rewritten from the video link. mysterybyte.html (a detective game, not Blender) is in the repository but not on this page.
Older-format pages (Cloth, Water physics, Smoke, Fire & smoke, and the two shading labs) are read-and-do pages without per-step animations; their cards say so and they do not count on the progress page. They are candidates for the animated format when time allows.
Progress reads each lab’s own saved ticks from the browser; served from a website they share this page’s storage, so the My progress view can see them. Opened straight from a folder, some browsers wall each lab off, and the view says so.