ARC

Writing

My personal experience learning 3D & blender

By ARC First published on Medium

(Disclaimer: this guide is just my personal experience)

TL;DR

  • Learn by signing up for a full structured course, not through sporadic YouTube tutorials because courses can help you stay on track and have a clear path with goals, visual progress and structure
  • Setup a timer so you don’t get bored while learning, and when that timer is done you can go about your day
  • Don’t get discouraged when you finish watching a video and feel like you didn’t understand much, it’s a slow process and i like to imagine it like water dripping on a stone, the first few drops won’t do anything but constant dropping wears away the stone
  • These are the courses I recommend. CGcookie[paid] Udemy Complete Blender Creator[paid] Blender Guru[free]

First of all I started by researching which is the best 3D software I should be learning and watched countless videos on that subject and i can honestly say that was a massive waste of time, because at this point i didn’t fully understand 3D or had any experience with it so I was just trying to find the software with the most bells and whistles

After watching countless videos titled “best top 10 greatest 3D programs of all time!!” I came face to face with reality, most of those programs are expensive and at this point I just wanted something to play with and learn slowly without needing to pay a subscription. and trust me, at this early point of learning don’t waste your time with “this program is better than that program” etc because it’s like fighting about which pen you should use while drawing when you didn’t even start learning how to draw. so just pick the program you’re most comfortable with and later on when you have a basic understanding of 3D you can switch to any other program you think is better

The program I ended up choosing was blender, why? because it’s free :)

but joking aside blender is a perfect choice for anyone who’s just starting, besides being free which is great I can confidently say it has the biggest community online so you’ll have tons and tons of tutorials, resources, and sites to help you learn and showcase your progress

So now I have a program I wanted to learn so the obvious first step is to open it and mess around, but 2 minutes in and I was already overwhelmed with the amount of menus, buttons, sliders and words I didn’t even know existed in the English language, so i tried watching YouTube tutorials and stumbled upon this playlist called blender fundamentals, so I watched a couple of videos and I bookmarked the link so everyday I would try watching a few more and after a week or two (yes it took me weeks) I finished the playlist and… I didn’t understand much

I mean i knew how to navigate the program and do some very basic stuff but I didn’t feel comfortable making anything on my own so I started watching those short random tutorials on YouTube on how to make very specific stuff like an explosion or a smoke simulation etc

Those videos are very fun but you don’t actually learn much and it made me lose motivation so I started researching better methods of learning and I found this Udemy course, it’s pretty outdated now so I recommend doing a more up to date one covering blender 2.80

if i was starting today I would start with CGcookie, they have the best courses on blender so I recommend them heavily, I wish I found out about them when I was just starting to learn blender instead of Udemy

and at first it seemed boring compared to flashy short YouTube tutorials but I thought I’ll give it a shot, so i signed up and started watching and following along and after a few videos I started getting bored and stopped watching :(

the next day I started watching again but this time I had a system to helps me with not getting bored by setting up a countdown timer for 1 hour and whenever that timer was done I was allowed to leave and go do whatever I wanted to do, having a timer helps a lot with not getting bored because you know after the timer is done you’ve achieved your daily goal and now you can go do whatever you want guilt free

Some days I go over that hour because i’m having too much fun and other days I’m checking on the timer every a few minutes because I’m so bored I just want to put my daily hour in and be done with it, so don’t expect to enjoy every minute of it but always try to finish your daily countdown and your countdown doesn’t have to be a hour like me, it can be 45 minutes 30 minutes or even 10 minutes the point is to stick with it and have a timer so you don’t drift away into boredom

The reason I recommend doing a course is because courses have structure, goals, a line to follow and clear progress

Once i finished the course I started watching random YouTube videos about tips and tricks on making fun stuff in blender. here’s a screenshot of the people I follow on YouTube it’s an RSS feed because I don’t like having a YouTube account. obviously I don’t watch all their videos, I just check the feed from time to time to see if there’s anything that interests me.

So it took me around 4 months to finish the course and now I was slightly more comfortable using blender and I started sharing my basic creations online on reddit r/Simulated and this is my first ever post on reddit

having feedback and showing people what you made is very addictive and can help you find motivation to continue making stuff and learning, you might be a bit embarrassed about your stuff not looking as good as other people but remember it’s just the start

I also like to keep in touch with the blender community on blenderartists.org from time to time. It’s a great place to ask questions and follow the Blender development and everything related with the Blender community. although I’m more active on the Twitter blender community #b3d @arc4g

in closing, I wasn’t efficient in my learning. I just did a course then started playing around with blender making whatever I can using the skills I had everyday or every a few days I would try making something fun. I still struggle with modeling a simple house and I can’t model anything organic at all so yeah I just personally focused on making abstract stuff and simulations because it’s easier and more fun for me to do than spending a few weeks modeling a realistic house.

but everyone is different so you might like doing something else, some people enjoy sculpting characters and some people like realistic modeling and some people like doing animations etc, blender has a lot of different things to do so do what you find fun, good luck!