BlenderCookie is a great site and I can’t say enough good things about it, but I thought I’d just drop a few specifics which are particularly useful to solid modelers looking to learn more about designing physical objects with Blender:

Getting Started with Blender: Really pro instructional videos to get you started!

Cutting a Hole in a Solid: This is a tricky operation in Blender because it’s not a CSG package.  BlenderCookie isn’t a site specifically tuned to manifold geometry, but manifold is preferable for non-printed objects for a number of other reasons.

Adding a Background Image: Great tool when you’re designing something to match a concept sketch.

Sharpening with the Subsurf Modifier: Subdivision surface modeling is a real strong point for Blender because it allows much easier modeling of highly organic-looking models, and with the technique in this tip, you’ll learn how to make sharp edges and creases in these subdivided meshes.

Rounding off a square form: Retopo tool to make a nice transition from sharp to soft geometry.

There’s also some really involved multipart tutorials like this 7+ part series on a Porsche, and while a lot of the actual designs here aren’t manifold, if you read up on my Printability Tutorial on the subject, the fixes for these shouldn’t be too hard to work out for yourself.  BlenderCookie also covers animation, the game engine, and all those other things that make Blender such a powerful tool, but most of the ones that matter to Thingiverse members are going to be under the Modeling section.

Happy Blendering!

Blender 2.5 is still live and in development, but the most recent builds are getting really close to a stable version that can take over for 2.49.  I’ve been updating my Blender on a semi-regular basis for some time now, and so far it’s actually been a fairly stable platform, with the occasional crash, mostly in the weird corner cases people who animate with textures and physics run into.

The sculpt tool in particular has seen an awful lot of tweaking and upgrading– it works with the subsurface modifier now, the different tools have better design, and of the several Google Summer of Code projects on Blender, several directly or indirectly affect the quality of the overall sculpting experience.  One project explicitly extends and enhances the tool.

Versions of Blender show up first on GraphicAll.org, a sort of repository site for Blender builds.  There’s a walkthrough of this process on BlenderCookie, but it’s pretty much self-explanatory, except for the part where, if you’re on windows, you need to get 7zip.  BlenderCookie also has a great intro to some of the new sculpting features that are in Blender– this site’s a great resource!

Blender 2.5 is, in my opinion, pretty much ready for prime time already, and well worth tracking down a recent test build to try out.

Erik de Bruijn has made a great new page on the RepRap wiki for arranging multiple parts for printing!

Erik writes:

I just wrote a short tutorial on how to include objects for printing in one go. This is something most people run into as a beginners.  It was because people were asking me individually all the time. There’s an old movie somewhere but it’s nice to be able to read thoroughly or browse through it based on how familiar you are with Blender.

There’s so much to learn when you start with RepRap stuff, it’s helpful to have these tutorials:

http://reprap.org/wiki/Using_Blender_for_making_print-sheets

Neat!

Really stupendously spooky photography and build here– Black and neon green with red touches make for a really excellent MakerBot Transformer photograph.

The builds are getting more complicated, the photos are getting slicker and the projects are getting more ambitious.  It’s a really amazing time to be on Thingiverse.