I’m a slow learner and I’ve found I learn several times faster if I’m learning things alongside someone else. As I figure out things in Blender I want to share that with someone. As that someone figure out other things I wan them to share that with me. I want to see all their test renders (no matter how crappy) and give feedback and for them to do the same. If they’re on youtube in the middle of the night and see something interesting blender related, I want them so e-mail it me and talk about it. I want someone to spam my gmail chat or whatsapp with links to cool blender stuff all day long. I want someone who won’t be annoyed if I do the same to them.
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That’s a good way to learn! One on one sharing and support! What types of things are you wanting to model/animate?
I mainly got into 3d because I wanted to add a little extra “something” to 2d graphic design. http://portfolio.bahama.land/3d2019/ So I guess materials, lighting, and basic hard surface modeling is where my interest is at the moment… and a little basic animation for like motion-flyers 
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…know how you feel. I have A.D.D. and so with no attention span it’s difficult to learn
I can’t decide…can’t focus my mind long enough to follow through.
Great way to learn!
I have chosen to embrace the randomness. I have a ton of Blender videos in my youtube “watch later” playlist. I force myself to just wat those in the random order I added them. After 2 or 3 videos I get a feel for what I do or don’t want to watch more of. For a while I was into watching sculpting time lapses but now I’m watching people make advanced materials. I also watch tutorials long before attempting them. Some people call it mental indexing. Not watching to “learn” but watching to “know where the information is” for when you actually need it later. I have “finished” very few tutorials but I’ve used a lot of the information from those tutorials in other ways.
That’s interesting. Personally, I can’t to take the time to model, texture, or sculpt anything; just compose scenes for photorealistic renders from other’s creations. But being a Mac guy and getting the frustrations from crashes, slow computer operation etc. takes all the fun out of it.
Maybe finally some progress on real Improvements relevant to myself in the next 4 versions will help.
I had to make the sacrifice and get a windows laptop. It does cycles renders 2x or 3x faster than my 2014 macbook pro and it doesn’t crash when using eevee. There is this “embree” thing from intel that cinema 4d has been using for years to speed up their raytrace renderer. It may be added to Blender this year.
Why does your Mac crash with Blender? That should not be a Mac related issue. I used Blender a lot on different Macs (Macbook Pro 2013, Macbook Pro 16", iMac Pro) and hardly ever had Blender crash. There are some Blender builds which are more likely to crash than others, though. Sometimes I had a super stable Beta version, while the RC1 was crashing once in a while. (Like once a day, or so.) So it’s worth checking out different builds.
But, obviously, on newer Mac OS’s you can’t use the GPU which makes rendering much slower. And Eevee (and lookdev) gets hardly usable on complex scenes.
Yep, this is annoying. But this was, so far, the only drawback for me on a Mac. Apart of that I can use Blender perfectly well.
(Eevee not being able to use textures on volumes, was another missing feature on Mac. But I think that’s changing with 2.90)
Sorry to the OP for jumping into his topic. Just wanted to let Ingapambi know, that he does not have to settle for a bad Blender experience on Mac. 
If there are a lot of crashes, then something most be wrong with that specific machine.
Thanx for the notes guys. Yeah I’ve learned to expect it now whether 2.83, ecycles or 2.9 and I never know when it’s going to occur. Learning to save more often! 
Hi there, I’m ready. This would be great for my too!!
I too am a slow learner but I have worked with five (yes five) 3-d programs starting in 1984 with Cubicomp, Wavefront, Alias, 3dsMAX and now Blender.
I totally fine with criticism , got a good sense of humor and I work diligently on Blender about four hours a day.
I’m redoing my web site for now I’m focusing on creating high res prints which I’ve posted on Instagram here: rsher_digital
I use Skype because I’m living in Costa Rica this is my number: 650.614.1664
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I’ve been trying to get a graphic design friend of mine to try out blender. I taught him photoshop a decade ago. To entice him into trying it what I’ve been doing - for like a year now - is taking some of his designs and doing something with them in Blender. Most recently I took a print advertisment and made it into a little animated flyer or motion flyer or whatever it’s called.
www.bahama.land/junkan/pumpkin-spice/tmp/pumpkinspice03.2020-06-20-A.mp4
Somehow he completely forgot how much I had talked about Blender in the recent past and he assumed I had created it in Photoshop. He mentioned to me that this weekend he wanted to try to learn to make something like that in Photoshop. (Does anyone know if Photoshop is capable of such things these days?) I explained that I made it with Blender and I honestly thought he would actually download install Blender this time to at least look at the .blend file for this animation. He didn’t. 
Anyway, in my optimism that he’d really want to check out Blender I tried recording a walk though of the .blend file. Would anyone be interested in watching it (the audio is horrible and the video quality is bad) and let me know if you think the information I cover in it might be a bit too much for a complete beginner who has no interest in 3d and would only do 2d things with Blender?
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Sorry I don’t use skype. Do you use gmail and google chat / google hangouts?
Would anyone be interested in watching it (the audio is horrible and the video quality is bad) and let me know if you think the information I cover in it might be a bit too much for a complete beginner who has no interest in 3d and would only do 2d things with Blender?
Yes please! I would be happy to watch your video.
@Anthony_Forwood sorry for the delay. I somehow turned off notifications on this post and didn’t realize anyone had replied in weeks.
p1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onIMkkdTfKE
p2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5paFIONGMn0
p3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Zt3w3FPH7c?t=41
( Skip the first minute where I’m messing with livestream settings. )
The files are here: http://www.bahama.land/junkan/pumpkin-spice/
Skip the first few minutes where I’m messing with livestream settings.
I started watching the first video but the audio is very poor (like you said) and I can’t really understand what you’re showing. I think this would be too hard for a complete beginner to make use of.
Complete beginner means someone who has NO prior experience with any CGI software. They should only be learning the interface and familiarity with the tools and methods. Only after they have learned that they should be introduced to more advanced things, like texturing, procedural modelling, basic animation, etc.
I have struggled with Blender for 4 years because I didn’t understand certain basic concepts that are never properly taught in tutorials. They teach you HOW but not WHY.
Previous versions to 2.8 were harder to use because the process of doing something like texturing was very confusing to me. I didn’t understand the proper workflow for doing things. I heard about workflow a lot but didn’t know what was meant exactly. I spent a lot of wasted time getting deep into a project and then discovering that I made a crucial mistake early on and had to start all over again from scratch, and only my determination kept me from throwing my computer against the wall and giving up on Blender altogether. 
If you want to just show how you did a project, make a timelapse of it. If you want to show how to do something specific, then prepare ahead of time for what you’re going to show and stick to just showing that. So many videos go off on tangents about unimportant things or start explaining all the keypresses and methods that should already be known. I lose interest quickly if it goes slower than I’m ready for. If it’s too fast I can always go back and watch again.
As an example, I’m watching the first video you linked to and you’re explaining the node set-up you have, but even for me what you’re doing is confusing because you have a fairly complex set-up that is never explained, and yet you expect the student to understand what’s going on when you change certain settings (never mind that I can’t hear you very well).
Sorry if I sound critical. Just want to give my input and hope you can see value in it.
Thanks for the feedback. The 2nd and 3rd videos are much much shorter and have better audio.
In this case the student would have watched some basic UI tutorials from the official blender youtube channel before I go through the file based on his graphic design (add object, rotate/pan/zoom view, edit mode, verts, faces, edges, add material and change colors). I am also hoping to utilize what I know he knows already to speed up his progress. He’s a daily user of programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and others of similar complexity to Blender so I explain many things by comparing them to Photoshop and using terminology familiar to Adobe product users.