I know I have talked a couple people into doing a little blendering. An easy project to start with that you can actually learn a lot from by doing very little is developing an eye. Messing with vertices in actual modeling takes time but you can always just hit space to add a mesh and choose mesh --> UV sphere. The following will teach you most of what you need to add great textures and materials. Hope you enjoy.
Note: In Blender RMB selects [highlight=#FFFF80]( Unless you have my version of Blender which uses the LMB to select and confirm )[/highlight] while the LMB confirms your placement of the selected object, or hit RMB again to cancel out. You can always change this in preferences which is tucked away at top.
Grab my custom version of Blender with a bunch of goodies at the following link:
Get Blender
Creating the eye:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfW_weFRe4o[/youtube]
Adding the materials to your eye:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJk3zeCyefs[/youtube]
Adding a texture for your Iris:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAyipBrI_Po[/youtube]
Modeling an eye is always a nice quick test to check out your modeling software because you get to use so many aspects of the software like multiple materials, alpha transparency, different Lights and shading tools and specular techniques, textures, gaining a little familiarity with the interface for deleting and adding a mesh and a bit of mesh manipulation. Of coarse their is much much more to modeling than that but it is a good basis and if you like you can always make the eye bounce around like a rubber ball to become familiar with different aspects of animation like lattices, armatures, key frames, and the other animation tools, I'll see if I can find something like that and add it here. So the eye is a really good test and learning experience. Have fun!
