Learning Blender
Posted: Tue Feb 17, 2009 4:49 am
For those of you who have had trouble learning Blender, here is some useful schtuff:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro
Work through the tutorials in sequence. Do NOT try to rush through them. You will learn next to nothing if you try to get it all done in one pass.
Be advised, Blender gives you anywhere from three to five ways to do any one thing. This is both a blessing and a curse. You will understand why I say that after you tackle this package.
Be advised that Blender is not like the other graphics packages you have used. Most graphics packages are designed to let you do nearly everything with a mouse. Blender expects you to do most of your work from the keyboard. After having worked with it a little while now, I have concluded that the programmers who wrote Blender made a wise choice. If in the past you have done a lot of work with Photoshop or the GIMP, you need to be ready to develop a very different set of reflexes. Blender will seem to have come from another planet when you first start working with it.
Another thing I can say from personal experience with it is that you should be prepared to work through each tutorial at least three times before moving on to the next one. You will find yourself gaining confidence in your ability to use the program and in the utility of the program itself. The package really does work well.
The link I provided will lead you to what are likely to be the best tutorials on Blender that are available. You will encounter some errors in them, depending upon which version of Blender you have installed on your machine. I can help with that to some degree, feel free to post questions here and I will do what I can to help.
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro
Work through the tutorials in sequence. Do NOT try to rush through them. You will learn next to nothing if you try to get it all done in one pass.
Be advised, Blender gives you anywhere from three to five ways to do any one thing. This is both a blessing and a curse. You will understand why I say that after you tackle this package.
Be advised that Blender is not like the other graphics packages you have used. Most graphics packages are designed to let you do nearly everything with a mouse. Blender expects you to do most of your work from the keyboard. After having worked with it a little while now, I have concluded that the programmers who wrote Blender made a wise choice. If in the past you have done a lot of work with Photoshop or the GIMP, you need to be ready to develop a very different set of reflexes. Blender will seem to have come from another planet when you first start working with it.
Another thing I can say from personal experience with it is that you should be prepared to work through each tutorial at least three times before moving on to the next one. You will find yourself gaining confidence in your ability to use the program and in the utility of the program itself. The package really does work well.
The link I provided will lead you to what are likely to be the best tutorials on Blender that are available. You will encounter some errors in them, depending upon which version of Blender you have installed on your machine. I can help with that to some degree, feel free to post questions here and I will do what I can to help.