Jason van Gumster

Jason van Gumster is an expert Blender consultant to top studios and toolmakers. Jason and his family live the life of digital nomads while he builds custom tools and leads workshops on Blender all over the world. He’s author of all editions of Blender For Dummies, as well as GIMP Bible.

Articles & Books From Jason van Gumster

Blender All-in-One For Dummies
Create excellent 3D animations with free, open-source software When you’re looking for help with creating animation with Blender, look no further than the top-selling Blender book on the market. This edition of Blender For Dummies covers every step in the animation process, from basic design all the way to finished product.
Article / Updated 03-18-2020
Blender offers a variety of sculpting tools to help you master stunning creations. Once you’ve created your Grease Pencil object, it’s time to do some sculpting.After you have your drawing created in a Grease Pencil object, may want to go in and do some custom tweaks to it. Perhaps you want thicker or thinner lines in some places.
Article / Updated 03-18-2020
Blender has sooooooo many great tools for getting your animation just right. Part of getting the movement right involves giving your characters the natural movements. Guess what? Blender also has a tool for that!Not everything that reacts to physics has the internal jiggle and bounce that soft bodies have. Say, for example, that you have to animate a stack of heavy steel girders falling down at a construction siteFor that animation, you don’t want to have a soft body simulation.
Article / Updated 03-17-2020
If you’re already used to object animation and the basics of Blender, using armatures to animate in the Dope Sheet extends naturally from that process. The following is a common process for animating with Blender. ©Shutterstock/FrameStockFootages Plan the animation. This point can’t be emphasized enough: Know what you’re going to animate and have an idea about the timing of the motion.
Article / Updated 07-28-2022
One of the most groundbreaking features to hit Blender’s modeling community in recent years was the ability to have dynamic topology (Dyntopo for short) while in Sculpt mode. Simply put, when you enable Dyntopo, your sculpting brush can add or remove geometry from your mesh on the fly.Need more detail in just one part of your model?
Blender For Dummies
Make your 3D world a realitySome of the dramatic visual effects you've seen in top-grossing movies and heralded television series got their start in Blender. This book helps you get your own start in creating three-dimensional characters, scenes, and animations in the popular free and open-source tool.Author Jason van Gumster shares his insight as an independent animator and digital artist to help Blender newcomers turn their ideas into three-dimensional drawings.
Cheat Sheet / Updated 04-30-2024
When it comes to Blender, you can save time in many ways. Memorizing common mouse actions and numeric keypad hotkeys in Blender or common keyboard hotkeys in Blender’s 3D View help you work more efficiently in Blender. If memorization isn’t your thing, you can even print lists of these mouse actions and hotkeys and refer to them whenever you need to.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
There are many sites on the web that are excellent places to check out for Blender news, extensions, and services. This is a listing of some of those helpful sites. Blender.today Blender.today is a community-run website for Blender news. It works similar to sites like Reddit, where anyone can post a link or an article and the community up-votes or down-votes that post based on how interesting or relevant it is.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
Blender is designed to be used with one hand on the keyboard and the other on the mouse. Nearly every key on a standard keyboard is assigned to some task within Blender, and sometimes more than one task. For example, the numbers across the top of the keyboard reveal each of the first ten Blender layers. Alt+Any number shows each of the last ten layers.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
The numeric keypad gives you a high-speed means of navigating the 3D View in Blender. The following table explains some of the more useful and common hotkeys that involve the numeric keypad. (Note: If you’re using a laptop that doesn’t have a numeric keypad, you can enable the Emulate Numpad check box in the Input section of User Preferences and use the numbers along the top of your keyboard instead of the numeric keypad.