Recently I’ve been thinking about the completely zig-zaged path I took learning blender. Starting at 26 with no artistic background or knowledge of even fundamental art concepts. I had no idea why things like lighting, composition, and story mattered.
So having started as a blank canvas, I obviously grew a blender bubble. Everything I learned had to be about blender. I only used FOSS and, because no tutorial ever really taught it, I never learned the ‘why’ of art and therefore 3D only the blender ‘how’. This insular thinking is, from what I can see, actually pretty common in the community. Which sucks, because we should not just be learning 3D or even blender, but learning art.
I almost completely stopped using blender for two or three years, because the immediacy of other art forms like photography, 2d compositing and graphic design was far more attractive than the endless uphill battle that 3D seemed to require. But it turned out what was actually happening was that I was learning the whys of art and 3D. Photography taught me the absolute joys of lighting and fundamentals of composition. 2D compositing / photo bashing taught me more about blender’s node editor than any tutorial on it could. And graphic design (now my FT job) taught me colour theory, the importance of planning, and most importantly, opened the gate to the full world of visual art.
So so finally I get to my point. We need to foster a better and more comprehensive art-first approach to learning in this community. I can count on one hand the times I’ve heard a tutorial’s author explain what their looking for when performing a task and what the broader artistic fundamentals and implications are behind the decision. Or even what can artistically be achieved through performing a job one way over another. One prominent author routinely tries to haphazardly explain the reasoning behind something but ends up dismissing it as ultimately unimportant, which just reveals that they didn’t research their topic at all and only had a superficial idea of the concept to begin with. (The same author also has a habit of parroting other authors work verbatim, but that’s a whole other thing)
Tutorials in the blender community seem mainly aimed at raising the authors profile rather than actually educating the learner. And the recent ‘add disguised as a tutorial’ trend is more worrying. I get that people need to make that money, but I’m certain that if there was a less blender-centric approach to learning, there’d be more chance of blender users being able to make a living from it.
Dont get me wrong, I love blender as much as the next guy, I just don’t see as fervent an insulation in any other 3D communities. And that needs to be discussed.
sincerely
some guy who wants to be an artist.