No Disrespect indended to anyone here who can easily used the program but it’s been nothing but total frustration for me.
After hours of trying to use the program and reading up help files on line (most reminded me of Star Trek Technobabble and went over my head) all I got out of it was a Headache. I’m sorry, I don’t care what anyone thinks, as far as I’m concerned unless you have some experience in 3D modeling (Daz Studio and Poser does not count) You are not going to know how to use this program.
It’s very easy to get started if you’ve never used any other 3D softwere before. In fact the transition form anything else to Blender (or vice-versa) is the tricky part. You just gotta know where to look for a good stating point.
actually, blender was the first program i learned and i loved it from the start, ive tried other programs but i find them very frustrating, but the question is do you have any previous experience in 3d programs? i think that because blenders ui is quite a bit different from other programs that people that didnt learn it first have a harder time
As soon as someone says “I don’t care what anyone thinks”, it kind of takes the point out of posting on a public forum. Maybe if you were take a little bit of time to list some of the problems you have been having, I’m sure someone would be more than happy to try and help.
Get past the steep learning curve and you will see how great it is.
I had your experience when trying v2.4x, but hen 2.5 came out and it was pretty easy to get into. Quad view worked as a transition for me since I came from 3ds max, but at the same time it was like starting over since I hadn’t touched a 3d modeler for a decade, which probably helped.
Also the plethora of free video tutorials out there is a real help.
i’m sorry that you’re having trouble with it; but i didn’t have any experience in 3D at all when i started using blender, and i’ve gotten along just fine. so that’s not just a bold statement you’re making, it’s an untrue one
it is hard to get started, but that’s true of literally any 3D content creation package. after using blender for about 6 or 9 months, i dabbled in maya and then lightwave, and my reaction to both can be best summarized as “…whaaaa?..” the UI, the naming conventions, the workflow, the various modes, the hotkeys - virtually everything is different from one package to another, and you can’t expect to step into one from another (or into one with no experience at all) and expect to just pick it up immediately. it’s a complex software, so it takes a lot of learning, patience, and practice. don’t give up now, you’ve just begun and you’ve hit the steepest part of the learning curve!
when i started using blender, i read literally almost the entire wiki. that’s a great resource, and i don’t think enough new blender users take advantage of it: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual
Why did I post it? To see if anyone else had the same frustrations with this Program. Oh God, you want a list of my problems? Okay, but it’s going to make me look like an idiot.
Where do I begin. Hmmm, How about zooming in and out, rotateing the camera so you can see more than just one side of the model, poseing a model that already rigged, Applying texture, Importing and exporting, trying to make sense at what I’m looking at, Pretty much everything.
With Daz Studio, I pretty much had the basic stuff figured out in an hour, that’s without looking up any online help. If I wanted to Zoom or rotate or pose a loaded figure the buttons are in plain sight. With Blender I was no closer to understanding it an hour into it than I was when I started. The steep learning curve is the biggest issue about this program, if it’s such a great program to use and you want people to use it than there shouldn’t have be a steep learning curve. The average joe should be able to download it and use it with minimal frustration.
I don’t think this program is for me, unfortunately.
Yes It’s a free program and I’m glad for that but it’s been a real nightmare for me to figure out.
Not my case (I’ve passed that phase), but this is the problem.
http://cgcookie.com/blender/get-started-with-blender/
I’m not sure it is a good idea to suggest looking at commercial sites, even if they offer free tutorials.
This is something that should be provided by the Blender Foundation itself in an easily accessible and discoverable way.
By the way, the Blender.org website at the moment is still pointing to tutorials for the 2.4 version
in the Quickstart page:
It’s a common critique that Blender is pretty tough to grasp at first. It breaks just about every common interaction convention, so in addition to learning 3D you have to also learn how to do basic things like select something. There is an effort to improve it going on right now though so we’ll see.
If you still want to give Blender a shot, 3DBuzz has probably the best beginner tutorials I know of. It starts off explaining the basics of the UI and moves all the way up to modeling and texturing a character.
Sorry, I’ll keep it on my computer for now, and I may go back to some day but as of now just the thought of starting it up and trying to figure any of it out is enough to make my head pound. Useing Blender has not been a plessant experience.
Do you have any experience with another 3d app?
I would agree with you if you were using 2.49 but the current stable release is 2.62.
Watch Blender Cookie’s getting started tutorials.
I get really frustrated using Maya because I’m so used to using Blender.
Ok, since you posted my best guess is you expect some attention to say the least. Not caring about other peoples oppinion is…fair enough. You have the right to state your view on the subject. Let me share mine.
Im a person that never studied arts, design, programming, animation and so forth. English is not my native language. The thing is I have a passion for games since I was little. 10 years ago I had some very brief expirience with 3d studio max, I saw some books on it but still I found the program not so intuitive and I was quite overwhelmed by it. Then I had a go at Maya for a very short time. Didnt find anything to make me stick with it. 6 or so months ago I found Blender and I can clearly say that it has the most sexiest UI, the most spoon-feeding tools I have ever seen. Very straight forward, very easy to learn.
My adise to you is to watch tutorials, lots and lots of tutorials. Also taking notes is a good thing to do. I had a headache like yourself when I started to read the blender notes. There are some irreplacable info there but the best way for me to learn it was trough tutorials.
I think a good practise is to focus on a subject and stick with it for a period of time. For example sculpting in Blender…or animation, keyframes, using the NLA/Dopesheet etc. When you feel bored just switch the focus of your study.
Apart from beeing free, in my humble oppinion, Blender is one of the easiest programs I ever used. EVER.
Dont try and rush yourself to learn it in one day. Start from the ground up. Learn to navigate trough the menus and sub-menus, try to use the most common key-binds. There are a lot of things that you will learn by yourself on the way and also you might find things that work for you better than explained on a certain tutorial. Just dont expect to learn the program in a week or a month.
Try to ignore that a previous expirience in another program is needed. IT IS NOT needed nor required. Yes, I used 3dmax briefly but the gap between using 3dmax and Blender is roughly 10-11 years. Instead, ask yourself do you have the time and drive to dedicate to Blender.
3D is hard to get into, some programs being a bit less hard, some a bit more. Blender in my opinion ranks in the middle. But Daz3D? Come on, that doesn’t really compare to Blender at all. Maybe it’s more straightforward in the few things it does, but it only does these few things in the first place.
The average joe should be able to download it and use it with minimal frustration.
No. Anything that requires dedication to get into, will likely cause frustration. There’s a lot of good introduction materials, I must assume you have used none of those.
I don’t think this program is for me, unfortunately.
Maybe no 3d program is for you then. I suggest you try Cinema4D, which is in my opinion the “easiest” program to get into (because the design is very straightforward, but it’s still a complex topic)
Yes It’s a free program and I’m glad for that but it’s been a real nightmare for me to figure out.
You can’t expect to fire up blender and figure it out on your own. It’s not that kind of a program. It can’t be that kind of program.
If blender isn’t for you, your travels with it end here. If however you wish to improve things, you can document your learning process and share it, so we can see where things might be able to be improved. But please, use at least one established piece of introductory material (cgcookie, 3dbuzz etc.) along the way.
I do not know of any capable 3D application that is easy to learn, it’s a vast field and a lot to learn to get good results. And the easier it is to use, the more constrained an application like this have to be. Try creating an explosion in FumeFX or Maya Fluids compared to creating one in Blender’s smoke simulator and you’ll get what I mean… So Blender is in many things way easier than many other apps.
DAZ 3D, compared to Blender, it’s extreamly simplified and straight forward. And if I can’t even figure out the most basic mechanics of it on my own, then I guess thats it for me. Maybe later on down the road I might give it a try, but for now I just can’t bring myself to do anything with it. That’s how fustrateing I’ve found it. And Yes, I have tried tutorials. Everyone has suggsted them, I thank you all for the help, but they haven’t helped much. Maybe I’m just too frustrated right now to make sense out of any of it.
The only reason why I even downloaded Blender is because I’ve been looking for a model rigging program and everybody recomends Blender, no matter where I go or who I ask. And from what I can see and from what you just told me, those un-rigged models I have are going to stay Un-rigged. At least for the immediate future.
3d programs like Blender, Maya, Modo, Lightwave and Max are difficult and complex programs because the do difficult and complex things. There is no way you can pick up Blender and expect it to just make sense especially if you are new to learning 3d.
Use Google and search for some introductory videos on the UI. Learn how to navigate; zoom, rotate and pan. Than move on to simple transform grab, rotate scale etc. You should know how to split windows, join them, change window types and have some basic of what which window do.
Once you have learned the basics becoming a good artist is going to be even longer journey. This is not the kind of hobby that you pick up if at the first sign of frustration you want to bail. You are going to have to learn to stick it out if you want to go some where.
The are lots of good free resources on learning Blender make use of them.
Well, that is logical as you’re comparing a single engine Cessna to a Fighter Jet. And this is not about status, it’s about DAZ 3D not being a complete 3D system. Blender is a modeller, an animation package, contain several simulators, a video editor, an image and video compositor and probably stuff I missed. It has a different purpose than Daz 3D. And, as a Fighter Jet, it’s just not possible to make it easy, hehe… I’ve been doing graphics for 20 years and I still study this crap on a daily basis, it’s just that much to learn. ;D
Knight, I totally relate to your frustration. I had never done any kind of animation before I started using Blender, heck I can’t draw by hand. I was always more given to language and music.
When I first started playing with Blender, I remember being completely baffled, and very often angrily annoyed. Nothing made any SENSE! It was like trying to learn to fly the Space Shuttle! Harder even!
And then, long before I found out there was such a thing as Blender Artists, I realized that there was an ocean of very basic video tutorials about how to use Blender on YouTube. Any topic you can imagine, from beginner things like just figuring out to move things around and beginning modelling, to everything else far more complex.
THEN I found Andrew Price’s BlenderGuru site (he also has a YouTube channel where he posts his tutorials…) Andrew made a huge difference for me. He has a very chatty style, and often tells entertaining stories as he works. The nice thing is that he approaches it all from the standpoint of an artist, not a technogeek. His vids, even if they get into very advanced things, are much like watching a painter paint while he discusses the finer points, all while he does it. So, go to BlenderGuru.com and browse through the tutorials there. Go back to the earliest ones, since they are a little simpler and based on Blender Internal (before the Fabulous Cycles Craze of the past 8 months or so…) You’ll pick up a lot of very valuable skill from Andrew Price.
Most of all, DON’T GIVE UP!
I’ve never bothered with other animation software, and it shows when I roll around on the ground (probably way too often for anyone’s taste…) defending Blender’s honor and virtue here in BA with the more Pro guys who have 12 computers and all the really expensive animation software. Damnit there’s something to be said for the poor young animator who starts it as a curious hobby and didn’t study under James Cameron!
Blender is like learning a musical instrument. I probably would have given up long ago if I didn’t play French Horn in highschool. It’s all about practice. Practice every day. Practice all the time. Just jump into Blender and try to bring to life whatever goofy idea you come up with. You’ll fail a lot. But failing, you’ll scratch your head and try to understand WHY you failed.
And THAT’s where Blender excels. Because what makes Blender so amazing is that it has a certain internal consistency, a certain kind of rationality, a kind of logic that I’ve never seen in any other medium. Starting with basic keyboard commands like Scale and Rotate, etc, it turns out that so many other things in Blender use the same types of commands. When you figure that out, that’s when you’ll find that you’re onto something. That’s when it will all start making SENSE.
I know this is rambly, but the Blender learning curve pays off at a certain point. There comes a time when it just clicks. And that’s a beautiful moment.
The great thing is that the people who make Blender, the devs, all seem to get that, and all seem to stick to that Internal Consistency and logic. So, learning anything in Blender is not a waste of time.
Practice. Practice practice practice. You’ll get it.
