Best workflow when starting/learning

I started learning Blender few weeks ago and I was wondering if expert users could suggest me what’s the best workflow during the first months of learning.

In particular I am not sure which one of the 2 following approaches I should follow:

  • Spending a lot of time on every project trying to make it as good and as complex as I can.
  • Spending enough time on every projects to get things nice and then move to something new.

To give you a practical example, I finished a model of a Greek temple last night and I am pretty happy with the result, but I could spend another month working on it just adding the surrounding environment (grass, trees, mountains, sky, other ruins, etc…) and minor details.
Should I do it or should I move to something new?

Look.
Every part of entourage surrounding a temple is another project (to link or append) :wink: which you’ll revisit and use over & over & over…

It really is nothing new, just grinding… panta rhei, wabi-sabi

More work you do the more you learn and more you learn how to learn more. :wink:

Mistakes may be even more educational than success.

He he, thanks, it makes sense and after all it would be silly to limit myself to A or B only.

Is that both then? :stuck_out_tongue:

I would try to recreate a scene from a movie or a photograph that you really like. Get it as close as you possibly can, then post it for people to critique, use the advice to make changes and then call it done. Then repeat 10 more times, after you are done with the 10, pick 5 or 6 or the best ones and throw those in your portfolio. From reading about all of the great artist from Disney to Marvel there seems to be a few common themes.

  1. Practice a lot (push yourself to do things that you have no clue how to do, an interesting read http://www.pavelsiska.com/making-of-saurora/)

  2. Scale - I was surprised this comes up so much. Make sure all your objects in the scene make sense with scale. The sizing of objects needs to make sense with other objects. (Just keep this in the back of your mind when working on your scene)

  3. Get critiqued a lot - The best and most “talented” artist tend to ask for the most feedback.

The way I think it is aim really high and that way you can also fall back higher. I’ve done a lot of stuff that I thought I could never do and then I did them. Some things I couldn’t, some things I was slightly in disbelief when I actually achieved.

It seems the common suggestion is do as much as you can and beyond… I will keep that in mind, thanks. :slight_smile:

I’m still in the early stages of learning, so this likely isn’t the best advice, but I’m finding I’m sometimes making mistakes early on in projects that it would then take more time than is worth it to fix by the time I realise. I’m therefore moving on from projects fairly quickly and not making the same mistake again.

Mistakes, make them early and make them often, followed by that I would suggest not falling in love with any of your works, either the work as a whole or any part of it.

Normally for people just starting out, I advise them to make a scene using only object mode to block out while adding materials to objects to color them, the goal of this is to first learn the editor’s object mode and how to move, translate rotate and scale objects there. And if you can make a scene look right from a distance then that goes a LONG way to making it look good from any vantage point within the scene.

From here, I tend to get people to branch into using the modifers and uv unwraping for texturing and basic material production, the point of all of this thus far is not to teach someone how to use some by rote mechanic, but o teach them to build a scene from the top down.

Now when it comes from working on the individual objects that are in the scene, I am an advocate of making each one its own blend and appending them in, now if you say had cobbled together a house in your block-in modeling that you just did, you can select all of the parts that make up the house and export them and reimport them into the new blend you are working from, this way you will have the dimensions of the house preserved and can build a more detailed interpretation of it.

I think of it like this. Art is communication. And to communicate something you need to think in terms of concepts. For example the look, feel etc. And we are human. Not robots. So we have tolerances. And practical things like energy, and interest. So how much time and effort can you tolerate? At what point will you say, “this is too hard”? But I mean this from the point of focus and inspiration. I mean at what point do all of the tutorials and web searches and forum posts become too distracting from the main goal?

So you have to ask is your main goal to create a work of art, or learn? For me while I learn a lot while making art am not good at doing both at the same time.

I like to do learning projects separately. And I don’t care what those look like. They are also usually smaller doodles. Nothing large. And the and goal is learning not creating.

For me I like to do larger projects with skills I already have. My main focus is on the creative process. And nothing kills my mojo more than technical issues that I have to solve. This is always going to happen. The nature of computers. But add to that things I don’t understand. That I have not figured out how to do or make work right. It can be taxing.

On a practical level you wake up, eat, drink coffe. Whatever it is you do to get your mojo. You feel great. You have wonderful ideas. Enthusiasm. 4 hours later you are hungry and exasperated. Energy gone. And what did you do? Spent the entire morning trying to get constraints and modifiers working in the middle of your masterpiece. Or just trying to hook up nodes. Whatever. But your inspiration is zapped.

How many days of this can you take? For me not many.

By contrast I can tolerate days understanding something with the goal to learn.

So I guess in the end it comes down to intent. Not the size of the project.

I mean are you starting out the day to make beautiful grass or just understand how particles work?

I think it just comes down to managing your time and intent as well as goals.

On a large project you could simply set days aside to learn a new skill before getting creative with it.

For example knowing your scales before trying to improvise.

That’s why I create a new blend file every time I move to a next step of a project. Worst case I have to fix only the last part (and so far it happened many times…).

Yeah, just recently I started to realize I am far from being able to handle more objects in a single scene/file (unless it’s something simple like the donuts tutorial).

Working on them separately and eventually put stuff together makes much more sense, probably when you are more experienced too.

That is a perspective I didn’t consider before, but thinking about it I have to totally agree with you.

I will still try to get nice things done, but for now I have to accept I am still learning and there’s a very long way to go before getting “professional” results.

Well there is a difference between artistic skill level and technical skill level. You could be a great artist but spend a year learning how to be a great modeler. Longer to be real exceptional.

I am an advocate of project-based learning. Where the goal is creating something awesome.

Before I started learning Blender I had already been a modeler for a good number of years. So when I started learning Blender I had no need to work on projects right away. I just spent the first month learning and doodling.

Then once I had the tool under my control I started doing creative projects.

When I first started modeling a good number of years ago. I pretty much approached it the same way. I got in there and learned the technical basics first. Then I started creating - like crazy.

And for me it is the combination of being competent at what I do, understanding the fundamentals of what I am doing before I get creative. And if I have to learn something new, or run into a catch, I immediately shut down the creative project, open a new file and first just start to understand the thing from its basics. Then once I have it, I go back to the creative file and apply what I know.

This is what I mean about managing your time and objectives.

As far as project size or scope. I don’t think it really matters. You could take a year to make an open world if you want.

Every project no matter the size is going to be broken up into smaller tasks. Team or one guy. Same thing.

I think you will be OK as long as you are creatively happy. And if you want to take on a magnificent project with an awesome scope. Go for it.

Just make sure and understand there will be a constant balance with learning (not being creative) and creating. And I think it is best to manage your time likewise.

For instance, for the next two or three days I am going to learn everything there is to know about particles and physics. Then when I am done, I am going to go and make some awesome grass.

But lets say you have not learned how to use Cycles yet. Well that grass is never going to look awesome until you can render it. So, go off and spend a week or two playing around with cycles. Then come back to your master piece grass project for your temple.

I am just tossing things out there. But you know what I mean I think.

Yes, I totally got your point and I still agree 100%.

Part of why I teach block in the way I do is because people who use game engines already understand the blockin workflow from that perspective.

But the other reason is art like richard said, is a form of communication, and with art what tends to work very well is getting the major forms in first and then refining, and yeah there are addons that can generate things like trees and floor tiles, you can do some magic with the modifier stack to generate content, but at the end of the day those are only tools.

Honestly, I would tell you to spend a weekend occasionally just playing with modifier stacks, or material editors, and then go back and research to find some written content to go along with what it is you just taught yourself.

Yeah the basic concept behind an animaric and a storyboard is to get to the point of telling the story without technical barriers.

In fact the whole concept of art is a matter of overcomming technical barriers in order to communicate.

Too many technical barriers means no communication.

A balance of great skill (which is in itself to a large degree overcoming texhnical barrriers) and mastering broader difficult texhnical barriers but also maintaining a message and emotional impact is what makes great art.