I am a self-learning beginner and start to struggle: advice needed

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Hi guys,

so as mentioned in the title: I am learning 3d on my own and watched so many youtube tutorials, bought some online courses, tried things out. But the more I learn the more I feel overwhelmed and disabled at the moment. I made some modelling and scultping, I’ve learned about texturing (shader edtior in Blender, Substance Painter), last week I’ve learned much about lighting, I tried out some animation as well…

The point is: I watched out for some project ideas to go further (by looking for references on Pinterest, Google image search, works of other artists) but whatever I look at I start to think “uuuh… look at object XY… I’m sure I will not manage to get the proportions / overall form right” or “look at this pattern on the sofa - I don’t know if I’ll manage to create this pattern or if I’ll find a fitting texture somewhere in the internet”. I constantly limit myself as I already have an idea what work it is to create something I see on an image but I also know that I still lack so much skill and experience.

Additionally I have the problem that I still don’t know what I want: creating environments? Creating props and objects? Animations? Characters? Abstract art? I don’t know…

I know that in general I am my strictest critic and if I do not achieve the level of accuracy that I demand I judge myself quite unfair. This is for sure stopping me at the moment as I fear I will fail and I fear my critic then :slight_smile: But as I can imagine that there are people like me out there in this 3d world… how did you manage to go through this? If you have no project in mind (or way too many) how do you manage to simply go on and to find a focus project again?

Any suggestion / idea / thinking about this would be highly appreciated.

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I think this is step one.

It’s perfectly normal for a lot of people, and I think the more you try, the quicker you’ll be able to cross things off the list. Try and consider what specifically made you want to get into Blender and 3D in the first place, as it may give you a hint at what you want to work towards.

For me, many years ago, I watched a movie called Shrek, and it blew my little mind. I had an interest in 3D from that point on, and it was the idea of creating characters and such that made me want to get into Blender. But at the start, I wasn’t partocularly good, so abandoned that particular idea for stuff that was more approachable. But eventually, I circled back, and characters and portraits are kinda my bread and butter now. Not many other things interest me, but I’ll dip my toe outside of my niche from time to time.

If nothing else, just ask yourself what you actually want to create. Don’t just follow tutorials because you think it’s knowledge you require – instead, try and create things you’re passionate about, or at the very least, things that you are interested in.

I think a common problem is that people feel like they need to know everything, but it’s just too overwhelming in the beginning, and it leads to burnout, or a general feeling that you’re not good enough, or it’s too hard etc…

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Adding to what magnavis said, go slow but not too fast in the beginning, start developing a piece of work without pause but no hurry. Avoid tunnel vision in regards of focusing in too much in specific detail of an object, character creation, etc for example when a character artist does a character it doesn’t begin creating the head, feet, or arms first as separate pieces it does the whole visible parts as a whole body (in a low res model, to make it easier to adjust the proportions and primary shapes) and the subdividing or adding localized brush detail if you are using something like dyntopo or sculptris area by area adjusting and adding more secondary details as you get to define the others first, and always at last the terciary details (such as skin pores, tiny or medium wrinkles, etc) likewise not focusing only a in single area all the time.

And taking into account retopology after sculpting for either characters, hard surface or anything else, always retopologize (for subdivision modelling) the smallest details first but depending size (because there is certain small details that are bakeable to a normal map/displacement instead of keeping them embedded into the topology) then curved surfaces need to be defined first and flat surfaces at last (they are more easier to re adjust topology unlike curves surfaces topology)

And as well don’t stay too attached to one only thing of the 3d design specialties but don’t either get too overwhelmed learning about everything about them and everything technical about 3d/2d graphics. Like if you want to be “one man army” (that’s a 3d generalist) which you would have to dominate everything about poly modelling anything, including cad/Nurbs, sculpting, texturing/procedural texturing, shading/lookdev, lighting, compositing, character rigging and rigid object rigging, character animation, animation workflow in general, simulation of fluid, smoke, fire, rigid and soft bodies, cloth, vfx effects etc, programming (usually c++, java and python), and graphic design, video editing, color, etc…

Ofc that is an exaggeration (but there is certain companies that look for those kind of generalists :skull:) I don’t do personally every single thing of that but a little or more or so, currently my specialties are modeling/sculpting for hard surface and characters, pbr texturing, character rigging and rigging in general, character and general animation, also learning cad/nurbs modelling, and general things as lightning, shading and else related and proper usage of the software and OS and know about PC hardware and software stuff, graphic design and basic illustration and some compositing and video editing…

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I’m in a similar boat as you. My thoughts - you won’t ever be good at this without creating a lot of things. Avoid the trap of thinking more about creating (this includes watching tutorials) than actually doing it. This is something I struggle with myself.

You’re nothing special - the first hundred things you’ll create will suck in some way or another, just as it did for all the accomplished pros out there when they started out. How many of these first hundred have you created yet? Maybe time to stop reading this forum and go make something. It will look way worse than you’d like. Swallow your pride and submit it for feedback wherever you can. Then immediately start on creating the next thing.

EDIT: Keep in mind, this is not expert advice, just my thoughts, for what it’s worth.

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Just… do it… :wink:

Yes… when you do not know what to do first simply type “random 3D model” in any search engine… and then try the first one…

Only skip the first one when you can’t really see what it is… it is properly a beginner model… or realistic humans…

Have a look at it… and find the the standard cube in it… yes it will be there… :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: …then cylinders etc…

Take some paper (YES) and make a simple sketch without looking at the reference… compare with reference and look at it…… make adjustments, close the ref and now you can start blender… work for an hour… take a break, compare the WIP with the ref…think about what you have missed and do another half hour…

You do not have to finish this… you can even delete it…

Do this for the next month on an almost daily basis…

And if you ever thougth “but” while reading any of this… → forget this word… there is no but…
:grin:

Happy blending…

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You need to find a way (dont know how tho) to pick your area. Characters, props, enviroment, etc.

Or, alternatively, you can pick any of them except the most complicated one (characters are one of the most complicated area). The goal of this is to find something where you can grow as fast as possible, because the fastest you can grow, the more often you will find yourself in situation where you solve the problem/task, and solving problem/task = positive emotions which fuels your next moves.
In my opinion its really important because when you spend some times without results which you/others can appreciate its kind of exhausted.
3d art is hard. A lot of stuff to learn, a lot of mistakes would be maded any way, but there should be a balance between “i spend time, work hard and get nothing” and “i spend time and get some results”.

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Try doing the weekend challenge on here, 3 days to make an image based on a theme.

Helped me.

Hope that helps

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Sounds like you’re looking for the ‘fastest path to success’. There isn’t one. Learning and mastering 3D takes years. So don’t despair, but don’t expect to become a master on some sort of fast track. It takes a huge amount of practice.

Sounds like you just need to go back to basics and build your skillset and experience up with smaller projects. Trying to create projects way over your skill/experience level will of course lead to frustration and stagnation. Start simple, with simple projects and build from there with every project.

You don’t have to know now. And you won’t know until you’ve done enough of all of these disciplines to know what you have a passion for.

This is an essential attribute later on when you’ve become a lot more skilled and experienced. It’s what drives you to continually improve your work. But in the beginning it will slow you down and lead to - again - frustration and stagnation. Have fun with it. You have to love doing this to really succeed, and loving it means you actually enjoy creating your projects rather than dreading it as a chore.

Through many years of practice, a deep passion for 3D creation, and many, many ups and downs. As I said, it takes years to learn and master this stuff. There is no quick route if you want to achieve your goals.

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Another skill to develop is the ability to "see analytically." To look at a render – or a real photograph – whether yours or someone else’s – and visually take it apart. Considering “what seems to work and what doesn’t, and maybe why.” For your own work, to think about what might now be done to bring it closer to your vision for it. (And: “never question nor judge that ‘vision.’”)

One thing that I use a lot is … a project journal. (I call it the [Star Trek …] “Captain’s Log.”) Which, for me, is a loose-leaf notebook(!) and a number-two pencil(!!). I keep it close at hand and write things down immediately when I think of them. Maybe it’s a “to-do list.” Maybe it’s something else. But really, what I’m trying to do is “to capture it.” Once I have captured it, it can no longer “get away.” My musings about “what to do next?” Those go into the project journal, too. (And then, every now and then, you re-read “the writings of a perfect stranger.”)

I also make it a point to capture many versions of whatever-it-is. “External [SSD] disk drives” are dirt-cheap these days and by now I have a lot of them. Because you never know when “what you threw away a few days or weeks ago” turns out to be exactly what you need now.

Simply don’t expect “quick gratification.” I remember a columnist in an early computer magazine who titled his very popular piece, “Taking A Sip From The Fire-Hose.” :slight_smile: This is what you should “expect.” And, trust me: “you are not alone.” CG is, by now, “a vast topic.” Practitioners just “make it look easy!”

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It sounds like you have put a lot of effort into learning the workflows, now it is time to put this to practice.

I agree you now you have to gain experience using what you have learnt, without tutorials.

Totally start simple, try to get simple objects looking good, once you feel confident with simple things, move on to larger projects. If you do not know what to model just look at you desk, your kitchen etc

Progressively choose objects that are a little more challenging curvy bits etc.

Keep in mind that complex models are often a sum of simple ones.

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Thank you all, guys, for your feedback and your ideas. Honestly… today I felt a little bit exhausted and alone but getting all this helpful advice and the feedback that there are others facing the same struggles was really good. :innocent:

@VbyMK
thank you for your thoughts… I think you’re totally right, I really need to get into creating instead of thinking of creating something. It’s just hard for me to find something I really want to work on because it feels like then I decide against something else… when I decide to model a chair I decide against animating a character. And when I model a chair I only have a chair so then I think I would like to build up a fully furnished kitchen…

@Okidoki
Honestly, THANK YOU… I think this was the kick behind I needed :grinning: I like your suggestion to search for some random 3d model and simply try to create it in a hour on a daily base. I just overthought everything: I always thought about what I could create which may already be used for one of my many project ideas. Your idea completely removes all these super-efficiency expecations and all the “what do I really want to create” questions (which I cannot answer yet) and offers me to simply practice… I promise I forget about my “but…” and simply do it this way :rofl:

Thank you for this idea… I’ll have a look at it

@Musashidan
Yes, actually you’re fully right… I am looking for the ‘fastest path to success’. And yes, you’re right, I think… I’ll need to take a step back and practice more on small projects. Thank you for your feedback. I think the idea described above to find some random model on a daily base to work on might be a good strategy to get into this “it’s just practice” mood without my own demands on myself to create the next masterpiece.

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Reading this particular bit, it seems to me that you’re afraid of the big picture. Sooner or later, we have to come to terms with the fact that an artwork is almost always the result of a long-ish iterative process. It can be discouraging. It is also often composed of many parts, and if the whole thing seems insurmountable, each one of its parts taken on its own is suddenly much more, hmmm I mean much less… imposing.

This is common among artists, you should feel at home. Know that this can be mitigated… work on your imposter syndrome. Posts WIPs to the forum, hear critique… that’s a good thing to do

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Don’t get overly attached to the end results you produce right now, they are side-effects of “the process” and that’s what you want to learn.
It’s training - there might be all kinds of emotions, mental states, inner conflicts, doubt, fear, whatever else coming up while doing it. Don’t get distracted, just keep on doing it…
The struggle is part of the process, it is to be expected.
Have trust in yourself and the process of learning and doing, be open but cautious towards the opinions of your ego and your inner critic.

There is nothing to fear, failure is normal and a great teacher.
Replace fear of failure with acceptance of its teachings, fail hard and often,
laugh about your inadequacies and how spectacular things went sideways, then try again.
Negotiate with your inner critic on the basis of sober realism, reject his lofty idealism.
Don’t let the ego mess with your head via pride/shame whatever else.
Compare your achievements of today with the ones of yesterday, not necessarily with your aspirations or the work of others.
I would recommend to look into Stoicism, Taoism and Zen as inspiration for guiding principles for how to deal with internal mental conditions.

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Just remember the firs sentence you wrote on paper…
…properly not the start of an award winning bestseller…

Nonetheless needed to maybe once writing a short story… ( which is worth reading… :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes: ).

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This. And this again.

Don’t get precious with pieces. Even think of them as ‘thowaway pieces’. Don’t become attached and don’t be afraid to just throw something out halfway and start again, or scrap the last 4 hours of work and redo it from scratch.

If work with this in mind then it can help to ease any sort of pressure you may feel.
I do this all the time with sculpting. I do daily anatomy study practices that I don’t save. Some are from memory and some are from refs. They are not supposed to be anything other than tools for practice. The only thing I want from them is the practice, and to help build the visual shape library in my brain.

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I believe that it must be pretty hard as a self-taught beginner. Back then I learned 3D in university. So I might not entirely know what you are going through. But the first thing that comes to my mind would be this:

Do not care.

It sounds simple, but the moment you stop to give a fck, 3D becomes more and more fun! You are still a beginner, so you are allowed to make mistakes. Don’t try to polish everything into perfection, you’re just going to make yourself unhappy. Work on your projects as long as you want, but at some point, just stop and start something new. Nothing in the beginning can be perfect, and that is totally okay! Back then in University, my Professor told us: You need to really mess up 5 projects first, in order to learn how to properly set up a project. It’s only when you mess things up and try to understand why your approach was wrong, it’s when you really learn something

My advice: Keep your scope small for the start. Try to do a small project each day, something you can finish in one day. For the beginning: put quantity over quality. In this time you will learn a lot about: Shortcuts, Pipelines, etc. You will also start to memerize better How to set up different parts of your models. Like muscle memory!

To your other problem: I’d maybe try to look into all different parts of 3D art as your daily projects. Make a PBR Material on Monday… Rig something on Tuesday… Sculpt something on Wednesday… do RE-TOPO and UV on Thursday… ANimate something on Friday and so on. You will poke your nose in all different branches of CGI, and the more often you do them, the more you will find out what you’re good at and what you enjoy the most :slight_smile:
(Also, when you want to try out rigging/Animating etc and have no character: take a free model from the internet. You don’t always have to do everything yourself. If you go on to post it tho, always credit what you did not make. Very important)

If you then found something you want to pursue professionally, I’d suggest you search yourself a mentor and/or a community that specializes in that topic!

And also: Don’t feel discouraged. 3D art is a very big pool of different skills, that all take time to develop. You are doing great! ^^ Good luck!

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Oh wow… thank you all guys again. I think I will go through this thread again and again. There are so many good tips and helpful words, I cannot tell you how much I appreciate it :hugs:

@Hadriscus
Yes, I agree. I fear “the big picture” and honestly - what makes it even worse - is that I usually create the big picture in mind before even start. It feels so useless to create simply a cup of coffee (for example) when I don’t feel like it will be part of an overall morning scene in a kitchen. But as you wrote: this scene would be made out of many small parts and I should start to seperate the small parts… or even concentrate on the small projects and forget about complex scene for now. And yeah, I’ll work on my imposer syndrome :grinning:

@Romanji

I think, I’ll write this sentence on a postit and put it on my monitor. I think this is one of my problems: part of the learning - as you wrote - is to struggle and to create just for learning, not for impressing / telling / making money… Rationally I know that failure is part of the learning and for every one else I totally accept this… but for myself I don’t. And when I failure I start to struggle and think that I’ll never be able to create something valueable… man… this is so stupid. :grinning: So thank you!!!

@Okidoki - how dare you!!! My first sentence was like a mind-blowing epic poem :rofl:

@Musashidan
Thank you as well… I always want every piece I am working on to become a masterpiece and when it’s not I become angry and disappointed. I will keep your words in mind and try to get into the habit of creating little things every day just for learning!

@PolyPigeon
Thank you for your tips. I can also relate to what you write. I already started to create big projects in my mind but obviously I am not at this level. Esspecially your tip to stop working on projects and don’t polish everything into perfection - a little bit it always feels like a failure to me to not finish something but I should loose this guilty feelling. Just stop and create the next. I also can relate to your professor - I worked 15 years as a web developer and I’ve learnt the most from projects that I (or colleagues) really messed up. Yes… but I wished it would be possible to learn without going through this hell… :joy:
Also it’s a good advice from you to allow me to do all the different parts of the 3d world… another result of my perfection is that I think “you did a tutorial yesterday about shader editor so go on with it! Concentrate on one topic!” … but maybe today I’d like to experiment with animations… I should allow that to myself.
One factor in 3D which makes it so hard is that if you want to animate you need a character and maybe a rig. So I feel the urge to learn scultping for making a character and rigging. But to have a good looking character you also need texturing… your point to simply use some character I can find on the internet (certainly respecting copyrights) is soemthing I learn to accept more and more: I don’t need to do everything on my own, esspecially not at this point on my learning curve… so thank you very much for your tips!

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This again. I’ve been doing 3D for 20-odd years. I’m self-taught too(from the time when you had to learn from HUGE books and there was no such thing as video tutorials :rofl:) It’s my job. I get paid for it, but I do my anatomy practice not because I have to, but because I love to. 3D is not just my job, it’s my hobby, it’s one of my passions. I’d still be doing it even if I wasn’t being paid to do it.

It’s the love of learning for the sake of learning. Think of learning the guitar. You have to build a really solid base through constant, repetitive, and SLOW practice if you really want to improve. It takes years of dedicated practice of the fundamentals before you can begin to tackle real music. Same for 3D. Patience and practice is key.

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I’m glad I could help in some way ^^
A thing I forgot to mention that is pretty important: Tutorials are nice. But you should also try to look into articles that come from the film and game industry! Learning how to do things in a professional industry setting can help to understand stuff on a technical level before going over to a practical.

I’d suggest https://80.lv/

Don’t worry, we have all been there! :slight_smile: It takes years to perfect a skill. And 3D Art consists of multiple of those. If there was a button to skip all of that, we would all have pressed it XD but in my opinion: this makes this skill all the more precious. To one day look back and see how far you’ve come.

In your luck, I am an Animator and Rigger for games. So if you meet a dead end and need help you can message me. ('M not very active on this site but I’ll try to be more in the future)
I learned most of it from Pierrick Picaut. He makes awesome YouTube videos but also Paid Courses on his website! If you start your journey on Rigging and Animation, I would definitely check him out! https://www.youtube.com/c/PierrickPicaut_P2DESIGN

Good luck!

(PS you don’t need to sculpt a character. You can also model a very lowpoly one)

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thank you for offer… and for the tip about Pierrick Picaut… actually I’ve bought his course already and went through the first lessons. Good to know that I’ve picked a good course :+1: