I am going to be walking my way through how to use Blender 2.61 and sharing what I discover here as both a reference for myself and a basic tutorial for others that want to learn how to use this program.
The version I am using right now is Blender 2.61. Get Blender. I am using the Windows 63 bits for Windows 7, you should select whichever version best works for your computer. When you have installed and open the program you will see a splash screen that should look a lot like this….
Blender 2.61
Here you can see the welcome banner with all of the details about your version of Blender and a list on the left of links to places of interest to users of the program and, on the right, to projects that you have worked on recently.
To start using Blender for the first time click somewhere in the dark gray region between the intro screen and the menus that surround the work area. You should now see something like the image below, that shows the basic Blender workspace.
The Blender Workspace
This is the area where we will create things and view them as we work on building a variety of objects, characters, and scenes with which to make future projects.
In the Blender Wiki, they start you out making a basic generic figure. I want to step past that and start you out diving headlong into how to make things that will be used in later tutorials so that we can build up a library of objects that will be used in the creation of a mini-short movie made using Blender and other free programs. For now, lets back up to the Blender 2.6 manual and make sure that we understand everything about getting started using Blender, then we will leap forward into creating our first object. Okay?