Hello,
I am Ryan K. Clark, a 19 year-old student from Fullsail University. I was born in the backwoods of no-where Tennessee.
I have been modeling the since month with Autodesk Maya on my Macbook. Unfortunately it’s a student version so I remember coming this freeware software application a few years ago called Blender… back then it looked very daunting because I had no modeling experience at all.
The other night I decided to download it since I want to make commercialized products with it and plus I want to branch out to other modeling software. I am seeking to become an advanced user with Blender.
The user interface of Blender looks like an alien software if you know what I mean… Blender has gotten easier to me since I have modeling experience now. I am proud to be a member of this board. =)
I came from 3dstudio max and I think the best thing for a newbie is to do things only using the menus. Then step by step you will remember the hotkey instead of having to go to the menus. Don’t try memorize all the hotkeys first.
You will find strange select objects with right mouse, or rotate the view with middle button and pan the view with shift+middle. These three options are changed by probably 70% of people using blender that knew it could be configured before they get acustomed. I tried several times to use right mouse to select things and no way. I forced myself an entire day and no way. You better find your way and change it in user preferences. You can do this with everything but I don’t recommend it. Except these three. I have them: left mouse to select objects, right mouse to place the cursor, middle mouse to pan the view, shift+middle mouse to pan the view.
You will find you lack this or that tool. Ask because you will find that all you thought lacked is probably there. And blender is yet in hard reform, a lot of internal changes to the code and coders that have not yet in hard stone some things so if really is there something that you lack, probably will be there in some months.
Blender is a lot of fun. The weak point at the moment is the internal renderer (Ton wants to change it to a real renderer instead the bunch of tricks as he said). But you have luxrender and yafray that will be fully ported to 2.5 soon. At the moment you can use them in 2.49 fully.
Blender has gotten easier to me since I have modeling experience now. I am proud to be a member of this board. =)