Finding Good Tutorials

There’s a lot out there and a lot of them suck.

One thing people often say about Blender compared to other 3D software is that since it has such a big community (thanks to its low barrier of entry; Blender is free) you can find a tutorial for anything. What people often don’t mention is the other side of that coin; the barrier of entry is so low that just about anyone can make a tutorial with absolurely no experience or knowledge of what makes a tutorial good.

It might sound weird if you haven’t seen the difference yourself, but it’s very noticeable once you find an actually good tutorial for you. Many Blender tutorial-makers end up becoming “blender-influencers”, in that they start to resemble the “smash that like button and hit that bell” kind of YouTuber. That doesn’t mean that their content is automatically bad, but many of them will avoid describing workflows in as much detail as they need for you to learn something, because that would make the video too long. Instead of explaining why you’re doing what you’re doing they just go through a checklist of “do X, then Y, then Z”.

This is the main type of tutorial to avoid if you’re a beginner. If you notice that you’re just following step by step instructions you’re probably not learning the fundamentals you need. You should probably try and find a tutorial that’s more general and covers what you’re trying to do from a beginner perspective (or one that’s just better at explaining).

Here are a few general tips when it comes to finding tutorials:

There are usually multiple ways to do the same thing.
Skim multiple tutotials to see if they use different workflows. One method may suit your needs better than another. For example there are many ways of doing a cloth simulation, and one video is unlikely to show all of them.
Try to find ones that actually explain things.
As explained above some tutorials will simply tell you to do things to achieve your goal, but they don’t tell you why it works so it’s harder to see what other things you may be able to do with it.
You want a tutorial that explains how to do something, but also explains the underlying system. If you start a tutorial about creating nice grass and you see that it’s doing something called “instancing” with “geometry nodes” and you don’t know what that means, look up a tutorial that’s specifically about that instead and you’ll learn a lot more.
Don’t just go to the donut.
A larger beginner tutorial can be good to see what’s possible, dip your toes a bit into different parts of Blender so you learn “Ah, this ‘Modifier Stack’ lets you add modifiers that adjust a mesh in various different ways” for example. However the main thing you will fight with is motivation, and if you’re given a project by someone else that doesn’t align with your interests, you likely won’t care enough to fight through the difficult and confusing learning parts.
Also, the guy who made the infamous Donut Tutorial (Blender Guru) has been very openly pro-AI and pro-NFT, so keep that in mind.
Since you’re here, your main interest is probably taking your FFXIV character and making a cool still render or animation of them, so the project in Getting Started will probably be a good primer.
Instead of just watching tutorials, start a project.
Then when you get stuck, look up how to get yourself un-stuck. This is the main way you’ll avoid getting stuck in what many call “tutorial hell”, where you just keep watching tutorials to learn more things but never actually do anything with that knowledge. Actually working on a project will teach you a lot, even if it doesn’t turn out great. You can re-visit it and do better now that you’ve tried once already.
For example if you decide to make a realistic portrait of your character, maybe you realize you want the hair to look nicer. Then look up specifically tutorials for making realistic hair.