How did you learn Blender?

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
21

Three pieces of advice:

  1. The Noob to Pro Wikibook (as previously mentioned). Also - it’s very important as a new user to keep a list of keyboard shortcuts next to your computer. By the time the list starts to get unmanageably long (Blender has a ton of shorctuts), you’ll probably know them well enough to ditch the list. Blender was designed for use with one hand on the keyboard and one on the mouse (though I prefer my wacom). Take advantage of this, and you’ll be amazed how fast Blender can be.

  2. Pick a project. This will allow you to practice the skills you have, and give you reasons to look up (and then implement) new skills. To help with this, I often would just skim tutorial lists, the API, threads in this forum, etc. Doing this allowed me to relate exact feature names with their general function so when I didn’t know how to do something, I already had some keywords for the feature of Blender which might do it.

  3. Recognize Blender’s learning curve. Although it’s gotten a lot better since I started, new users should recognize it can be hard at first, but once you get the hang of things… learning a new feature is trivial.

22

I was tired of the high subscription fees by Cinema 4D, Maya and Max so was looking for other options. I found Blender but couldn’t stomach the UI of 2.49 and also thought it looked unprofessional, but when 2.5 was released I was really impressed with the professional look so I jumped into it and haven’t looked back.

To learn Blender I watched many tutorials and asked a lot of questions. I never thought I’d learn Blender but I did so by starting out on very simple projects and slowly taking on more advanced projects.

23

I have to agree with Paint Guy, the old blender UI reminded me of every other non-inviting cad program out there. I love the uniqueness it has now.

24

That was a long time ago. Now I’m 89 and exploring 2D Animation which is easier than 3D stuff. I’ve just run into a problem with adding a reference image but I’ll start a fresh message for this.
Time for a nap

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26

Mostly tinkering and picking up the odd tutorial on youtube, here etc.

I have been 3d modelling, rendering and animation as a hobby since my teens though.

I started with VU-3d on the sinclair spectrum 48k back in the late 1980s, sculpt-3d, Imagine and Vistapro on the Amiga before tinkering with 3ds max on the PC - so I already had a basic understanding many of the principles.

27

Long time modeller, working in vfx for almost 15 years now. (damn, time flies)

Got hooked after watching Jama’s grease pencil concepting tutorials and Gleb’s hard surface tutorial, been using Blender on a daily basis for almost a year now.

It’d be great to have a thread with the best sources/youtube tutorials, there’s so many I missed.