Loop cutting and general advice

Good day all,

I’m the newest newbie on the blender scene. I’m not only new to blender but i’m new computer gfx generally. I don’t know the kind of skills i need but, I do program, the last time i won an art award was at the age of 10, i’m feeling like this is prerequisite. I haven’t done any course in design and the last CG app i used effectively was CorelDraw 5. I somehow left CG for programming but getting to program CG may not be the best option either, so a friend of mine needed me to do some animation and i stumbled across blender, and i think i totally like it. So any advice here on the quickest way to get productive would be appreciated.

Secondly, I was trying to go through the blender tutorial introduction to character animation, and I couldn’t get past the first lesson. I was able to mirror the mesh, transform the mesh vertices and add extrusion,(and that was no small deal) but when i try to loop cut over the extrusions it tells me ‘error could not order loop’. Help!

‘error could not order loop’

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Modeling/Meshes/Edge_Tools#Limitations_.26_Workarounds
Make sure you don’t have any double vertices, select all vertices (A) and press W / Remove Doubles.
You can easily get doubles if you start to extrude but try to cancel it incorrectly.

When it comes to problem and it’s new to you, it is best to practice with simple object. Just create a new file, and try cutting a cube up. Test what you can do. Get the workflow down and then go back to your more complex problem.

Character animation you say? Well I just found good tutorial on FK (Forward Kinematics) and IK (Inverse Kinematics). Take a look. FK is lot simpler than IK, master that first.