3D. I know what I’m doing. I’ve been doing in since the mid-90’s. I have a degree/certificate/whatever-they-call-it-nowadays in 3D character animation, using Maya, 3DS MAX and (my fave) Softimage. I know what I’m doing (or at least I can fake it… ).
I need a tutorial that is Intermediate to Advanced for modeling, but doesn’t assume I know Blender. I need a tutorial ‘series’ that has me modeling a complex shape using Blenders tools…but it also needs to say “For adding an Edge Loop, the hot key is Ctrl-R, or you can find it under the TOOLS tab on the left. It’s called ‘Loop Cut & Slide’ in blender. You can add more/less loops by using the mouse wheel, or the -/+ keys on the NUMPAD if you are using a tablet”. I don’t need it to say “Add, oh, 3 loops here” and then move on, making the assumption that if I’m an Intermediate/Advanced modeler then I “obviously” know how to use Blender. I don’t. I have been trying for almost as long as I’ve been doing 3D. Started fiddling with Blender back when it was still proprietary to NaN. I have never been able to successfully wrap my head around it’s…“quirkiness”. Now, 20’ish years later, I’m old and set in my ways. I’ve made my own Hotkeys and stuff for Blender that I use for virtually all my 3D software packages (or as much as I can find in Blenders tools)…hence why I need to know the tool Name and where it is found via mouse-clicks…blurting out “Now hit Ctrl-Alt-J to do OpperationX” is totally useless to me.
Is there any such animal? I don’t care if it’s free or paid.
I need a tutorial that is Intermediate to Advanced for modeling, but doesn’t assume I know Blender
Hard to find, people that know Blender a bit better tend to use Shortcuts a lot.
When I switched from 3DS MAX to Blender nearly a decade ago I read Blender - Noob to Pro, it was a very good start. The Book explains very good the key concept of Blender as a tool and its concepts of work, which differed sometimes drastically form 3DS MAX. The tutorials in this book cover the mayor ways to create xyx very detailed.
Learning this Shortcut-rule was important:
Combinations that involve holding down a key while performing another action are written with a plus sign (+). Thus:
SHIFT + TAB means to TAB while holding down SHIFT
and
SHIFT + CTRL + F9 means to F9 while holding down both CTRL and SHIFT .
Edit: Ehh.. you can not see clearly what I mean check out [the section here(with color code)!](https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/Keystroke,_Button,_and_Menu_Notation)
It helped me a lot to read the book(personally preferred the printed pdf version), skipped the general 3d knowledge areas, done the tuts, finished the book, kept shortcuts as default. Started over again made my changes to shortcuts, windows, etc…
Some workflows and shortcuts form 3DS MAX, had been spinning around in my head for a long time after the switch. But viewed from today it was, all in all, a smooth transition between the two Tools.
I’m not a blender native either, switched to it 3 years ago I guess. I had similar mentality that I know the drill when it comes to 3D, yet every time I opened Blender everything was frustratingly different and I ran back to max/maya. One day out of “what the heck, i’ll try it” just went through CgCookies UI intro tutorial for Blender. It changed everything for me. That’s exactly what I needed - explains the foundation, how things are structured and very importantly how to customize it for your own workflow. After that it goes naturally. I also had their 15$ membership, some good material there. In general I watch tutorials at 2-5x performance to skip the parts i know (there’s a addon for browser for that). Must also say that Andrew Price is absolutely amazing as he keeps things simple to follow yet results are undeniably awesome.
I’m pretty sure it won’t take you long to grasp it and instead of focusing what to press as indeed there more hotkeys than other apps (for me it’s absolutely perfect), first learn how things are structured and then make it work like you want - in my case mixture of hotkeys from max/maya/houdini and a few even from modo.
).