In Scratch your sprite lives on a flat stage. In Blender your stuff floats in a 3D room and you fly a camera around it with your mouse. Before you build anything, get comfy flying around. Spend five minutes just spinning the view.
When Blender opens, click anywhere on the start screen to dismiss it. You'll see a gray cube in the middle, plus a camera (looks like a little pyramid) and a light (a dot with rays). That gray cube is your sprite for now.
The huge area in the middle is the Viewport — that's your 3D stage. The list in the top-right is the Outliner (every object, like Scratch's sprite list). The panel bottom-right is Properties (settings for the selected thing).
This is the whole game. Practice these until they feel automatic:
- Spin around (orbit): hold the middle mouse button (press the scroll wheel down) and drag.
- Slide the view (pan): hold Shift + middle mouse button and drag.
- Zoom: roll the scroll wheel.
No scroll wheel? Go to Edit → Preferences → Navigation and turn on "Emulate 3 Button Mouse." Then orbit with Alt + drag. Two-finger drag on a Mac trackpad also orbits.
The number keys on the numpad jump you to perfect straight-on views — super handy when building:
- 1 front 3 right side 7 top
- 0 look through the camera (what your movie will see)
No numpad? Use the little colored axis ball in the top-right corner of the viewport — click its dots to snap views. Or turn on "Emulate Numpad" in Preferences to use the regular number row.
Click the cube to select it (it gets an orange outline). Now you can move it. These three keys are the most important keys in all of Blender — they're the same as Scratch's motion blocks:
Scratch
"go to x: y:"
"turn 15 degrees"
"set size to 100%"
Blender
G grab / move
R rotate
S scale (resize)
Press G, move your mouse, then click to drop it (or right-click / Esc to cancel). Want it to only move one direction? After pressing G, tap X, Y, or Z to lock to that axis. Same trick works for R and S.
Select the cube. Press S, move the mouse, click. You just resized it. Press R Z and spin it. Press G Z and lift it up. That's it — you can already move things in 3D.
Press Ctrl+S (Mac: Cmd+S). Make a folder for your project and name the file something like my-first-3d.blend. Save often — every few minutes. A .blend file holds your whole scene, like a Scratch project file.
You don't have to be a sculptor. The easiest way to make your first character is to stack simple shapes — spheres, cylinders, and cubes — like building a snowman or a LEGO minifig. A robot, a blob monster, a little person... all just shapes glued together. Let's build a simple snowman-style buddy.
Click the cube, press X then Delete. Now add a ball: press Shift+A → Mesh → UV Sphere. A sphere appears in the middle. Shift+A is your "add anything" key — remember it.
Spheres look blocky at first. Right-click the sphere and choose Shade Smooth to make it round and nice.
Press Shift+A → Mesh → UV Sphere again. Make it smaller: S, move in, click. Lift it on top of the body: G Z, move up, click. Switch to the front view (1 on numpad) to line them up neatly.
Keep going! Add small spheres for eyes, a cone for a nose (Shift+A → Mesh → Cone), cylinders for arms. Each one: add, scale, rotate, move into place. This is just stacking shapes — you've got this.
In Scratch you pick a costume color. In Blender, color comes from a Material. Select a shape, then in the Properties panel on the right click the Material tab (the little checkered sphere icon). Click + New, then click the Base Color swatch and pick a color.
- Each object can have its own material (orange nose, black eyes, white body).
- To actually SEE the colors in the viewport, click the shaded sphere icon (top-right of the viewport, called Material Preview).
Scratch
Costume color / paint the sprite
Blender
Material → Base Color
Everything so far was in Object Mode (moving whole shapes around). If you want to actually reshape a shape — pull a point, stretch a face — select it and press Tab to enter Edit Mode. Now you're editing the dots (vertices), lines (edges), and faces that make up the shape. Press Tab again to leave.
Edit Mode is powerful but easy to make a mess in. For your first character, you can do everything with stacked shapes in Object Mode. Come back to Edit Mode for game 2.
- My character has a body and a head
- It has eyes, a nose, or some face
- Each part has a color (material)
- I switched to Material Preview and can see the colors
- I saved the file
This is the part that feels like magic and it's where your Scratch brain pays off. In Scratch you change costumes or glide over time. In Blender you set keyframes: you tell Blender "at frame 1 the object is HERE, at frame 30 it's THERE," and Blender fills in every frame in between automatically. That in-between is called tweening, and it's the whole trick.
Scratch idea
"glide 1 secs to x: 200" — the sprite slides over time
Blender idea
Keyframe at frame 1, keyframe at frame 30 — Blender slides it for you
The long strip along the bottom of the screen is the Timeline. The numbers are frames. The blue line is the playhead — it shows which frame you're looking at. Drag it left and right to scrub through time. Spacebar plays and pauses, just like a video.
Blender plays at 24 frames per second by default, so frame 24 is one second in, frame 48 is two seconds, and so on.
Let's make your character slide across the floor.
- Drag the playhead to frame 1.
- Select your character (click it).
- Hover your mouse over the viewport and press I (for Insert keyframe). A menu pops up — choose Location.
You just pinned "at frame 1, you are right here." A little yellow marker appears in the timeline.
Now the fun part:
- Drag the playhead to frame 30.
- Move your character to a new spot: G X, slide it sideways, click.
- Press I again → Location.
Now press Spacebar. Your character slides from the first spot to the second all by itself. You just animated in 3D. 🎉
Add another keyframe at frame 60 in a third spot. Add a rotation keyframe (press R to spin, then I → Rotation). The more keyframes, the more your character does. This is exactly like adding more blocks in Scratch — just on a timeline.
Pressing I every time gets old. Click the little record dot (⏺) at the bottom near the play buttons to turn on Auto Keying. Now whenever you move something, Blender drops a keyframe for you automatically. Just remember to move the playhead first, then move your object.
Real animation isn't robotic. After you have keyframes, open the Graph Editor (change a window's type in its top-left dropdown) to add bounce and ease. Optional for now — but it's how pros make things feel alive.
In the Timeline there are two boxes: Start and End. Set End to the last frame you used (like 60). That tells Blender where your movie stops. We'll use this number again when we render the movie.
Your character is floating in gray nothing. A scene needs a floor, a light so we can see, a background color or sky, and a camera aimed at the action. This is your Scratch backdrop — just in 3D.
Press Shift+A → Mesh → Plane. It's tiny — press S and scale it way up to make a big floor. Make sure your character is sitting on it, not sinking through (use the front view 1 and move the character up with G Z). Give the floor a material/color too.
Your scene already has one light. To make it sunny, add a sun: Shift+A → Light → Sun. Rotate it (R) to change where shadows fall. Select a light and open the Light Properties tab (the lightbulb icon) to change its Strength (brightness) and color.
Lighting is the #1 thing that makes a render look cool or flat. One bright sun + one softer light from the side already looks great.
Open the World Properties tab (a globe / red ball icon in the Properties panel). Click the Color swatch to set your sky/background color — a soft blue, sunset orange, whatever fits your scene.
Want a real photo sky (a sunset, a space backdrop)? That's called an HDRI. Download free ones from polyhaven.com and load one in the World settings as an Environment Texture. Optional, but it instantly looks pro.
The camera decides what your movie sees. Press 0 (numpad) to look through it. To aim it the easy way:
- Press N to open the side panel, click the View tab, and check "Camera to View."
- Now fly around normally (orbit/pan/zoom) and the camera follows your view. Frame up your character nicely.
- Uncheck the box to lock it in place.
Don't put your character dead-center and far away. Get a little closer, maybe slightly to the side and a bit low looking up — it looks more dynamic and heroic.
"Rendering" means Blender draws every frame as a real picture and stitches them into a video file you can play and share. Here's the no-stress way to get an actual .mp4 out.
Open the Render Properties tab (the camera-back / TV icon). At the top, Render Engine has two choices:
- EEVEE — fast, real-time, great for learning. Use this.
- Cycles — super realistic but slow. Save it for later when you have patience.
A 60-frame movie in EEVEE renders in seconds. In Cycles it could take many minutes.
Press F12 to render the single frame the playhead is on. A window pops up showing the finished picture. Check it: is the character in frame? Is it bright enough? Any part sinking through the floor? Fix issues now — before rendering the whole thing. Close the render window with Esc.
Open the Output Properties tab (the printer icon). Two things to set:
- Frame Start / End — match the End frame from your animation (e.g. 1 to 60).
- Scroll to Output → set the folder to save into, then change File Format from "PNG" to FFmpeg Video.
- Under the new Encoding section, set Container = MPEG-4 and Video Codec = H.264. That makes a normal .mp4 that plays anywhere.
If you forget to set FFmpeg Video, Blender saves a folder full of separate image files instead of one movie. Not wrong — just not a video yet.
Top menu: Render → Render Animation (or press Ctrl+F12). Blender draws every frame one by one — you'll see them flash by. When it finishes, go to the folder you picked and double-click your .mp4. That's your movie. 🎬
Character → animation → scene → rendered movie. That's the entire pipeline real studios use, just smaller. Everything else you learn is making each step fancier.
- Render engine set to EEVEE
- Tested one frame with F12 and it looks good
- Output set to FFmpeg Video, MPEG-4, H.264
- Frame End matches my animation length
- Rendered the animation and found my .mp4
Here's the wild part: Blender can be controlled by code, not just clicking. And Claude Code can write that code for you. You describe what you want — "make 20 spinning cubes" or "make my character bounce" — and Claude writes a little Python script you paste into Blender and run. It's like Scratch blocks, all grown up.
YES, CLAUDE CAN DRIVE BLENDER
There's a whole page on how it works, with copy-paste
scripts you can run today — no setup required.
Claude Code writes a Python script. You open Blender's Scripting tab, paste it, hit Run, and watch it build or animate stuff. Zero install.
Install the Blender MCP add-on and Claude can build in your live scene while you watch — even grab free 3D models. More setup; ask Dad.