As someone who is fairly new to blender. I’m just curious for those who are well versed in the program, how long it took you to know it like the back of your hand?
take your time and you need three things
1 ) Practice patience
2 ) Practice patience
3 ) Practice patience
and ask questions on this forum
and ibne day you’ll become very good at it
Salutations
Blender has gotten so capable, and has so many functions, I don’t think anybody really knows it like the back of their hand.
How long it took to learn how to model well, otoh, is answerable. It took me, off and on about 6 months before I was really comfortable modeling. I do mainly organic modeling, there are still some things I wouldn’t be able to do fluently, like model a car, but that’s not really where my interests lie, so I haven’t spent much time doing cars or tanks or aircraft.
From being sort of intermediate level on Maya PLE (mainly in terms of mid to low poly mesh modelling for games etc), I switched to Blender about 4 months ago and it took perhaps only about 3 weeks to get to the level I was previously at in Maya. Now, 3 and a bit months later and my ability has increased exponentially, most of which I attribute to Blender.
If you’re entirely new to modelling it’ll obviously take you a bit longer, but put it this way - Blender’s got an unreasonably bad rep for being difficult to learn. With practise and time, in roughly the same amounts as you’d be looking for any other package, you’ll get the hang of it.
I am comfortable with Blender and it took me about 3 months but … my brain has lots of noise from years of software development and I sometimes think interfaces are more complicated than they are because they are not like something I’m used to. For me, Blender is worth the learning curve; the reason some models slip from my brain into Blender is because, like touch typing, my fingers have started making the proper associations.
I will argue with RickyBlender a little bit: there is a tutorial, document, or forum topic that describes almost any Blender issue you run into. (Almost!) If you can’t find the answer, ask in the forum. Don’t get stuck. Some of the coolest topics have been the ones that generate 12 different solutions to the same problem.
I will agree 100% with RickyBlender about patience.
It took me about a year to get to a point where I can use it for client work. I already had experience with Maya and Max and their programming counter parts (MEL and Maxscript).
I certainly don’t know it like the back of my hand and pop in here daily to see what is hanging up others and all the new developement that goes on.
It depends on what you want to do with Blender. Are you an animating programmer, a programming artist, a modeler, a texture artists or design freak who simply wants better 3D text? The program offers a lot of entry points for anyone who wants to produce a digital images.
I used Maya for about a year or two before I switched. Learning modeling took me about 6 months until I could produce decent things without trouble. As far as actually getting used to the differences in styles from Maya to Blender, probably a good 3 weeks to a month until I was fluent in it’s ways.
i was just like you, it seemed really complicated at first, but trust me, you pick it up VERY fast.