Hi there. I was wondering if anyone has any advice for scheduling in Blender practice. Many times I have unrealistic goals of what to accomplish in a week, so I get daunted and don’t do anything. How do you all spend time practicing?
- See failure as a learning experience, see repeated failure as a pattern and investigate the cause.
- Be realistic about your abilities, and temper that notion with the amount of real effort you stick into the learning process.
- Get decent blocks of time without people disturbing you every 10 minutes (Turn off your phone and social media page)
- Collect inspiration, use BlendSwap to pick apart other people’s geometry/materials/textures.
- Ask questions, but google longer than you want to before asking the question.
- In Practice we tend to solve our problems by merely given the problem a verbal/written structure. (Yay NeuroScience)
http://www.gryllus.net/Blender/3D.html
Try this site. It breaks everything down in to small topics and then has a project to follow at the end of each section.
Thanks Rodders. But I have already done some of those tutorials and I am a little bit more advanced than that. What I really want is advice on a way to schedule learning from people like Blender Guru or Blender Cookie. What is a good goal to have in, say, a week? Should I aim at one tutorial and project? Six hours of blending? Three exercises per week? What works?
Rodders suggestion is good, but if you find the video tutorials too basic just hammer at the pdf tutorials, they are great. I personally think how many “hours” you devote to it is purely your concern.
Tutorials can be great, but it really depends on how you use them. My advice: give yourself a project… a small, manageable project. Then figure out the techniques you need to complete that project. You can use tutorials insomuch as you use the techniques in them and apply them to your project. The benefit here is that you produce something unique and original (no one wants to see tutorial work in your portfolio) while probably coming up with some solutions of your own.
That’s helpful, Fweeb. Thank you!
A while ago, I heard a psychologist on the radio, and he said some interesting things, but the main point was that; The more you do something, the better you get at it.
He said people don’t really have special talents for things, they just do them more than other people (usually due to enthusiasm) , and when someone seems to pick something up quite quickly, it’s probably because they have done something requiring similar skills. This is why musicians practise scales, because it simulates patterns / manoeuvres that they are likely to end up using at some point.
So to organise your blender work, just try to make sure you spend your time doing things you find hard, instead of just doing what you’re good at. In my case this was UV unwrapping, but it will vary between people.
Good luck.