Start by downloading the latest version of Blender from blender.org and running the installer. Accept the license agreement and either select an installation folder or leave it as the default, and then click install. 

Now, launch your newly installed Blender. On first launch, it will ask you if you want to change the default settings, as well as give you the option to import settings if you have an older version of Blender installed. You can simply click elsewhere on the screen to escape this menu, and you’re ready to start working.

At first glance, the Blender UI looks intimidating, but don’t worry. Most of it can be safely ignored for now.

The most important window, and the one you will be interacting the most with, is the 3D Viewport. This is where all the 3D work, which is most of what you will do in Blender, takes place. 

Inside the red box here is the 3D viewport. The rest of Blender can be safely ignored.

In the 3D viewport, there are two things you should be aware of right now. The Toolbar on the left, and the Navigator Gizmo on the right..

The red box on the left houses the Toolbar, and the red box on the right houses the Navigator Gizmo.

The Toolbar shows all the ways you can currently interact with objects in the scene, and we will go more in depth on it later. You can choose various options from the toolbar to change what you do in the scene - for example, switching between moving objects around and routine them.

The Navigator Gizmo is a useful way to keep track of which way you are oriented in the scene. If you’ve done any sort of graphing work before, you should be familiar with the concept of the X and Y axis. In 3D, there are 3 axes, X, Y, and Z. In Blender, the X and Y axes point in the sideways directions, while Z points up and down. Looking at the Navigator Gizmo will tell you what direction each axis is currently pointed relative to your view. You can also click and drag on the gizmo to rotate the view. 
 

For any gifs presented here, I am recording using an addon that displays mouse clicks and keypresses. This is not part of how Blender normally looks, but it should be helpful while I demonstrate actions in the program.

The first thing that trips people up about using Blender is one of the simplest: moving around in 3D space. To rotate the view, you click down the middle mouse button (the scroll wheel) and move your mouse around. 

This may seem strange at first, but it makes sense if you think about it. For normal use, both the left and right mouse buttons already have purposes. The left mouse button is used for selecting objects, and the right mouse button brings up a menu, just like in most other programs. So, the middle mouse button is the only one that won’t get mixed up with other actions. After a bit of use, the middle mouse button will become second nature.

    There are two other things you need to be able to do to move around in 3D space - panning the view, and zooming the view. To pan, hold down Shift on the keyboard and use the middle mouse button. To zoom, simply scroll up and down on the scroll wheel. This is another reason for using middle click to move around - it keeps every action on the same button, since the scroll wheel is already intuitively used for zooming in everything.

The other window to be aware of right now is the Outliner. This acts as a list of every object in the scene. You can see which object is currently selected, see which objects are currently visible, and do lots of other scene management things. This isn’t a particularly exciting window, but it becomes very important when there are a lot of objects in the scene.

To select objects, just left click on them in either the 3D viewport or in the outliner. Selecting an object will let you edit it or change its settings.

Also, if you notice these gifs tend to end with the key display showing Shift + Ctrl, that’s just me ending the recording in my screenshot program. Nothing to worry about.

Before getting into modeling custom objects, it’s good to first understand how to move things around in the 3D Viewport. There are keyboard shortcuts for all of this, that I highly recommend you learn, but every action can also be accessed through the toolbar. 

There are three main ways of transforming objects in 3D space: Translation, Rotation, and Scaling. Translation is better thought of as “moving an object around,” and Scaling is better thought of as “making an object bigger or smaller.” 

There are also two different ways of performing transformations: Relative to an axis, or relative to the current view. This sounds intimidating, but it will make more sense in a moment.

To move an object around, make sure it is selected, then click the Move button in the toolbar. 
 

When moving an object like this, you’ll see that there are three colored arrows that appeared. These correspond to the different axes shown in the Navigator Gizmo. If you click and drag on any of these, the object will move along that axis. This is what I mean by moving “relative to an axis.”

You can also click on the white circle in the center of the gizmo to move the object relative to the view. Moving around like this, you will notice that the object stays basically the same size on the screen. This is more free than moving on an axis, but has the drawback that you may not realize where something has ended up after moving it. 

"Gizmo" is a general term to refer to onscreen tools that you interact with by using the mouse.

The keyboard shortcut for moving objects is G, for Grab. (If you’re wondering why not M for Move or T for Transform, M is too far away from all the other keys to press easily, and T is already used for showing and hiding the toolbar.) If you press G with an object selected, it will default to moving relative to the view. To move on an axis, press X, Y, or Z on the keyboard to lock to that direction. To confirm the movement, left click. If you want to cancel the movement instead, use right click.

There is also the option to exclude an axis when moving. This will let the object move freely on the other two axes - so you could exclude the Z axis, for example, and move an object around horizontally without worrying about it moving up or down. This is done by either dragging the squares in the transformation gizmo or pressing G, then Shift + an axis. 

To rotate an object, select the Rotate button in the toolbar. This will change the gizmo on the object to three colored circles surrounding it, which each correspond to an axis to rotate around. 

As with moving an object, the colored circles will rotate relative to an axis, and the white circle will rotate relative to the view. Dragging the colored circles will rotate around the corresponding color of axis. Dragging the white circle is harder to explain precisely, but it makes sense once you see it.

The keyboard shortcut for rotating is R. It works in the same way as the move tool, where you can press R to rotate relative to the view, and press X, Y, or Z to rotate around that axis. You can also press R twice without confirming to rotate like a trackball. 

While rotating an object, you can also type in a value for how much the object should rotate, in degrees. This is done just with your normal number keys, and the value will show up in the upper left corner of the 3D viewport. If you mistype, you can use Backspace as you would anywhere else, and you can also press right click on the mouse to cancel the operation entirely.

Like the other transformations, scaling can be done by selecting the Scale tool from the toolbar. The gizmo will change to three lines with boxes at the ends, and as before, each corresponds to an axis.

You might be wondering, why does the scaling tool have different directions it can operate in? Surely, making something bigger only works all at once, right? Well, not quite. Scaling along just one axis lets you stretch out an object in that direction. This is best understood by just trying it out.

Dragging on any of the colored controls will stretch along the corresponding axis. To scale everything evenly (as in, just make the object bigger or smaller) click and drag on the white circle surrounding the gizmo.

As before, there is a keyboard shortcut for this. Press S to scale, and press X, Y, or Z to scale along a specific axis. 

Scaling also has the option to exclude an axis. This works the same as with the Move tool. Use one of the squares in the gizmo to exclude the corresponding axis, or use the keyboard shortcut and press Shift and the axis to exclude.

Also, if you ever notice the mouse cursor going off one side of the viewport and coming back on the other side, this is normal. If you're interacting with the scene and move your mouse past the edge of the screen, it will wrap around to the other side so you can continue without interruption. I'm not sure if this works on Mac, though.

We've just covered the most basic tools in Blender, but these are the most important to practice, as every aspect of modeling requires you to be comfortable with moving around objects in 3D space. So, to put this into practice, we’re going to make a simple castle by just adding and transforming basic shapes. 
Here is what the castle should look like once we’re done.

The first thing we’re going to do is delete everything in the scene. The default camera, cube, and light can be added back in later if you want, but for now they will just get in the way. Select each object and press X to delete it, then click to confirm. 

Now, we need to learn a new tool: the Add tool. This is another of the fundamental tools you’ll work with in Blender, and it does what the name implies. It adds objects to the scene. This can be accessed by either clicking on Add in the upper left side of the 3D viewport, or by pressing Shift + A. This will bring up a dropdown menu with a lot of options, but the one you can focus on right now is at the top: Mesh. Hover over Mesh and another menu will appear on the side, and from there you can select from a list of basic shapes, called “primitives.” Select the Cylinder.

With the cylinder added, we can scale it on the Z axis to make it taller, like a castle tower. 

Now, add another cylinder and scale it excluding the Z axis to make it wider. (by pressing Shift+Z) Then, move the new cylinder on the Z axis up to the top of the tower, and scale it down on the Z axis to make it shorter, if necessary.

This gif was recorded at a later date when I had some addons enabled, so there are a lot more options in my Add menu. Don’t worry about those.

Add a cube and move it to the top of the tower, and scale it to make it smaller. Then, scale it on the X axis to make it thinner, and move it to the edge of the tower. If you need a bit more precision while moving objects, you can hold down Shift as you move the mouse and it will move everything in smaller increments.

Now for a new tool that will make our lives much easier here. The Duplicate tool does exactly what you think: it duplicates objects. This tool is accessed either by selecting Duplicate from the Object dropdown located next to the Add menu, or by pressing Shift+D with an object selected. After duplicating an object, Blender will act as though you have pressed G to move it around, and it will move with your mouse. You can still choose an axis for it to move on with X, Y, and Z, and simply click to confirm when it’s in the right location. If you want it to stay in the same spot, right click to cancel movement. 
With the cube (now no longer shaped like a perfect cube) selected, duplicate it and press X to move it over to the opposite side of the tower. Left click to confirm when you’re happy with its positioning. You can always transform it more after doing this, as well, if you want to tweak things.

Now, duplicate one of the cubes again, move it to another edge, (pressing Shift+Z to move it freely in horizontal space) and rotate it by 90 degrees on the Z axis. (Remember, this is done by typing in the numbers 9 and 0 while in the middle of rotating the object.) You can also press Enter or Return to confirm a transformation.

Repeat the duplicating and rotating until the top of the tower has 8 cubes on it and looks like a castle tower. For the cubes at a 45 degree angle, it is possible that they will rotate in the opposite direction from what you expect when you type in “45” as the rotation value. This can be gotten around by just confirming it and then rotating another 90 degrees, or by typing in a minus sign (“-”) at any point while typing in the rotation value. 

One other thing you will notice while selecting things is that the object most recently selected will have a yellow (or light orange, depending on how it looks to you) outline, while every other selection will have a darker orange outline. The yellow outlined object is called the Active Selection, and for now there isn’t a lot to worry about with it. However, you might notice that if you shift-select an object while a different one is the Active Selection, the object that has just been selected will become the Active Selection. All you need to know about this right now is that the active object is the one that you can edit settings for.

Now that we have the whole tower selected, we can move every object at once. To keep the castle square, I am going to put each tower in a spot that is 5 units away from the center in both the X and Y directions, although you can do what you like with your castle. To start with, I will move the tower on the X axis and type in “5” and press enter. Then, I will do the same with the Y axis. When moving objects, you can type in values just like when rotating.
 

Now, we will duplicate the tower with Shift+D and type in “X” to move it on the X axis, and then “10” and “-” to move it 10 units in the negative direction. Remember, each axis has both a positive and negative direction, so if you type in a value and the object moves the wrong way, type in a minus sign to move it the opposite direction.

Now that we have two towers, let’s select them both and duplicate them again. This time, we will move -10 units on the Y axis. Once this is done, there should be four towers in a square arrangement.

We’re almost done now! The only thing left to do is add some castle walls with stretched out cubes. This will be very similar to how we made the parts on top of the towers. Add a cube, move it until it’s mostly aligned with two of the towers, and scale it along the X and Y axis until it fits in with the towers. Then, scale it on the Z axis to make it a bit taller, and move it on the Z axis until it lines up with the bottom of the towers. 

To finish things off, we’ll duplicate this wall and move it to fill in the spaces on the other three sides of the castle. With that, the castle will be done!

Now that the castle is done, don’t forget to save your work. Blender does not have an autosave feature, so make sure you regularly save by either going to File and clicking Save at the upper left of the screen, or by using the common keyboard shortcut Ctrl+S. If you haven’t yet saved your file, Blender will prompt you to choose a location on your computer to save to. I highly recommend you make a folder for Blender projects if you plan to use Blender often. With that, though, your first steps into using Blender are done!