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You already understand objects, trees, transforms, interpolation, pipelines, coordinate systems, and data structures.
Suddenly there are meshes, vertices, normals, modifiers, F-curves, armatures, constraints, materials, world space, local space, UVs, nodes, render engines, and approximately 700 buttons.
Blender is a system for describing a scene as data, transforming that data over time, and finally projecting it into pixels.
This article picks 15 concepts from the Blender vocabulary that give you the most leverage for making small animations. The terminology follows the Blender 5.2 LTS glossary.
I will use a simple running example: imagine a cube-shaped owl mascot that jumps into frame, looks at the camera, hops onto a platform, and points at some text. Start With the Right Mental Model Object
An Object is Blender's container for something that exists in the scene: a mesh, curve, camera, light, armature, and so on.
The two objects can have different positions and rotations while sharing the same underlying geometry.
This is one reason Blender can represent a complicated scene without duplicating everything. Data-blocks
Meshes, materials, armatures, node trees and animation actions are examples. The glossary explicitly describes data-blocks as the base units of data in a .blend file.
This explains many Blender behaviors that otherwise seem strange: changing an object's transform does not necessarily modify its mesh two objects can share geometry materials can be reused animation data is stored separately linked data can be reused across files
Blender itself grew out of an in-house production tool at Ton Roosendaal's Dutch animation studio NeoGeo. The first Blender source files date to January 2, 1994. The original motivation was partly practical: make a 3D production system where repeated changes from clients were easier to manage.
That history explains something about Blender's architecture: it was built around manipulating a production scene, rather than merely drawing individual pictures. Transform + Local Space + World Space
and the owl itself moves across the scene, the eye can move with it without changing its local coordinates.
This is exactly the same reason hierarchical transforms exist in graphics engines.
Often the answer is that (0,0,0) is being interpreted in a different coordinate system.
Blender distinguishes world space from local space in roughly the same way a game engine does.
but the order matters. In certain orientations, two rotation axes can line up and you get gimbal lock.