# Advanced 3D Animation: Create Professional Renders with Blender - review & insight | Gareth B. Davies Source: https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/advanced-3d-animation-create-professional-renders-with-blender/ [← All courses](https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/) Video & Animation · Quick win · Rated 6 /10 # Advanced 3D Animation: Create Professional Renders with Blender Updated September 2026 Derek Elliott · Product Designer + Animator Advanced · 66 min A tight 66-minute deep dive into armatures, rigid-body bubbles, and fluid-illusion curves, but too short to fully teach any of them. [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fadvanced-3d-animation-create-professional-renders-with-blender%2F560771774) New to Skillshare? Your first month is free, enough to take this course at no cost. Derek Elliott's class is built around a single project: a mock skincare commercial with a box that opens, bubbles that swarm a cleanser bottle, a bead of lotion that traces itself out of a pump nozzle, and a closing shot where the products sink into liquid. Rather than teaching Blender features in the abstract, each lesson solves one visual problem inside that pipeline, which gives the course a clear narrative arc from sketchbook to rendered rough cut. ## What the techniques actually are The armature lesson is the most concrete: two bones control a box lid, assigned to vertex groups by hand rather than automatic weights, with a specific warning that the armature modifier must sit above solidify and bevel in the modifier stack or the vertex groups break. The rigid body lesson repurposes a physics force field, set to a negative strength so it attracts rather than repels, to pull small icosphere bubbles onto a bottle's surface, then animates the strength value from negative to positive to send them flying outward. The standout is the liquid lesson, which sidesteps a true fluid simulation entirely: it drags an object along a Bezier curve with a follow path constraint, gives the curve volume with a bevel object and a taper object, then animates the curve's end mapping so the "stream" appears to extrude in real time. It is a clever, render-cheap trick, and the kind of lesson that is worth the price of admission on its own. The camera and editing lesson covers marker-based camera switching, matching rotation curves between shots so motion reads as continuous, and using the graph editor to offset keyframes so multiple objects do not move in unison. A brief but useful aside covers baking rigid body simulations to cache and using a viewport render with the Eevee engine to generate fast client-facing previews. ## Where it falls short At 66 minutes across nine lessons, several sections move faster than the material deserves. The armature explanation is solid but narrow: it openly states this is not how the technique is typically used and offers little beyond this one case. The camera lesson, in particular, compresses a lot of trial and error, including a real mistake about which axis controls object placement, that a viewer has to sit through rather than a distilled explanation. The course also assumes real comfort with modifiers, the graph editor, and Blender's physics tabs already, so anyone without that baseline will lose the thread quickly despite the "advanced" label doing the necessary gatekeeping. The bonus lesson on breaking into freelance work is generic career advice, more motivational than actionable, and the closing lesson adds little beyond encouragement. ## Verdict This is a narrow, technique-specific course rather than a broad one. It rewards someone who already models and animates in Blender and wants to see how a working professional actually assembles a commercial, especially the fluid trick and the camera-matching workflow. It is not a place to learn armatures, rigid bodies, or the graph editor from scratch, and anyone expecting a comprehensive treatment of any single tool will find the coverage thin. Taken as a fast, applied case study, it holds up well. The standout The fluid-illusion lesson, which fakes a convincing liquid stream using a curve, follow path constraint, and tapered bevel object instead of a true fluid simulation. ## What you will learn - · How to plan a commercial-style animation with sketches, storyboards, and client-driven word association before opening Blender - · How to rig a simple armature with two bones to open a box lid, including vertex group assignment and modifier ordering - · How to use rigid body physics and a surface force field to pull bubble objects toward a product and then release them - · How to fake a liquid stream with a Bezier curve, follow path constraint, bevel and taper objects, and a remesh modifier - · How to sequence multiple cameras and markers across scenes to build a rough cut with matched motion curves - · How to use dynamic paint on a plane to create a simple wave effect for a final sinking-product shot Best for: Intermediate to advanced Blender users who already know the interface and want a compact, real-world workflow for product commercial animation. Skip it if: Total beginners to Blender or to core concepts like armatures, modifiers, and the graph editor, since the class moves fast and assumes that foundation. Organization of Lessons Audio & Video Quality Clarity of Instruction Engaging Teacher [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fadvanced-3d-animation-create-professional-renders-with-blender%2F560771774)