Even though I have been using Blender for a few weeks now, I found the tutorial very helpful and wish I had seen it before I started trying to learn Blender. IMO, it covers a lot of good information about using the basic items. I think you will find it very informative.
The author is Ryan King, and I plan to watch more of his videos to learn more about how to get some things done in Blender. Even though he created the tutorials with an earlier version of Blender that what I am using (currently 5.1), all of the things he showed still worked for me.
One last comment, I watched the video on YouTube, and I had Blender opened in another window. One of the things that I did was to watch part of the video, pause it, then us the F key to reduce the window for the video, then go to Blender and practice the things Bryan showed in the video. Hope I remember all of the things I learned (I think most of them were pretty basic so will be fairly easy to remember). I plan to move on to the next video where he is going to discuss the Blender UI.
Blender’s user interface has evolved enormously. It is now very powerful, and easy to use (and customize!) once you get the hang of it.
One thing to bear in mind when looking at tutorials is the age of the tutorial, and the version of Blender that it was built for. Blender is undergoing very active and constant development. (Usually, for the better.) Such that some features described in an earlier video might no longer be fully applicable. (Or, not at all.) Just be aware of this.
By all means, take advantage of this web site as you continue your learning journey! You’ll find lots of helpful people here who have, shall I say, “been there before.” Your forehead will thank you.
Well, I have found another tutorial by Ryan King that I highly recommend. Outliner and Collections
This is a separate one that is (at least part of it) part of another of Ryan’s tutorials (actually part of part 3 of his tutorials). But again, for those of you who are just getting started with Blender, this one contains a good set of things to know. I will warn you that (as of the time I posted this while watching his tutorials) I did see one thing that did not work (actually was not present in my Blender 5.1). In his video he clicked on a + sign in the upper right section of the outliner to create a new collection.
It always has been and still is there unless you have accidentally hidden the header.
If you hide the header you need to click this little drop-down arrow (V shape) and the header will come back.
The other possibility is that you have flipped the header to show at the bottom instead of the top.
If that is the case then that little dropdown arrow will also be at the bottom (drop up ).
Yes that has changed, the texture panel is now hidden unless you are using a texture. If you use a texture it will appear.
This does not refer to materials (image and procedural textures used in the shader editor.)
The texture panel is for the old texture system from the days when shader nodes were not used.
There are still a few things that use the old texture system, if you use something that needs it the panel will show up.
For example a particle system that uses the old textures.
If you add a particle system there is a panel for textures.
There are other things that use the old system like the displacement modifier, again when you need a texture the panel will show up. As soon as you add a displacement modifier the texture panel shows up because it always needs one of the old textures (particles do not always need one)
Thanks for the reply. Now to try to explain what I was trying to do. If you look at this video Modeling a Snowman at about the 30th minute, you will see that Ryan King was trying to show how to “roughen up” the texture of the snowman. That is what I was trying to accomplish so any help you can give me to achieve what he is showing would be appreciated.
In general, his tutorials are excellent. He covers a lot of very basic things and I think I have learned a lot from them about how to use Blender. In this case, since things have changed between when he created the video and now (I am using Blender 5.1).
Maybe I have missed something in your reply, and I should be able to do this without having to ask how to accomplish it.
Well, I just have run into another problem that I think might happen to a lot of us newbies. I have been following this video Modeling a Snowman and at about the 16:00 minute of the video he talks about drawing the sticks that will be the snowman’s arms. I have tried a bundh of things but do not seem to be able to create the sticks/arms. I really need to understand how to draw lines to create the arms. I have tried multiple things and have not been able to move forward.
I understand I created this thread to be able to recommend things (or have others recommend things) to newbies to improve/help them in the learning process. Now I need some real advice on how to move on in this process.
A menu will appear (all this in YouTube not Blender) and one of the options is “Playback Speed”.
If you click that there is a slider to set the speed of the video. You can set it to 0.5 (instead of 1 which is normal speed)
It will be slower and easier for you to follow. Pause the video any where where you get lost and skip back a bit.
Thanks for your response. I did go back and watch the video again and I think I have figured out what my problem was. I played around in another blank model and think I now know what to do. I will give it another try.
OK, I did some more work today and resolved the issue I was having and can now move on to the next steps in creating the snowman and it’s various parts.
However, I have another silly question. I would like to be able to control the sequence of the objects in a collection. I have posted an image below (yes, it is pretty simple and not an exciting example).
In this simple example, I would like to be able to move the Top Snowball to the top of the list in the collection (or maybe below the Hat). I tried just dragging the Bottom Snowball to the bottom of the list but it did not work. I also tried to look for this on this forum and saw a similar question dated back in 2020 but could not really see and answer. I also could not find an answer when I did me research on the internet. Maybe it cannot be done but I would like to be able to manage the list of objects with a collection but cannot find a way to do it.
OK, I am back to having a problem. I am working on the snowman again. When I try to draw an arm, I am not getting the right results. At about 17:00 in this video Modeling a Snowman he describes how to add a modifier to the arm he drew. I can get that, but then when I add the Skin modifier if I hit the A key before applying the modifier, I am not seeing the arm anymore. In particular look at what he shows at 17:56.
Yes I am doing this in a blank file to try to figure out what I am doing wrong. I thought I had done this correctly once before but after multiple tries today, I cannot get it to work correctly.
I don’t think it’s possible, you can order collections but objects are sorted alphabetically, or maybe there is an unknown button somewhere !
In edit mode you can scale down the radius of the skin modifier by selecting points and doing ctrl-A…
A side note, if you’re beginning I suggest you don’t pay too much importance if you are stuck at some point. Personally I started a long time ago but in the first weeks I didn’t managed to finish any tutorials. But at some point I found missing bits going from one resource to another and eventually I managed to finish them all.
Nowadays there is more stuff, and it’s easier when following a video, but you can always get stuck for various reasons.
In the beginning really the most important is to grasp the concept. So even if you didn’t finish anything, if you learn a notion that you can reuse it’s more than enough.
It’s a bit similar with doing images, at first it’s very hard to make something that looks very good, but there are really two process in parallel : 1/ learning the tools 2/ using those to express yourself.
It can take a while to really get out of phase 1 and to be completely free in phase 2. But if you give it some time you’ll get there !
So no worry if some stuff is abstract or you get stuck, for a tutor it’s not always easy to think about every possible detail a beginner might need. But from one tutorial to another those missing bits will be found !
That is what I thought after trying to do some research. You can turn off the alphabetic option in the preferences, but it still will not allow you to control the sequence. I gues the real answer, it you want to do that, is to set up multiple collections and then arrange them the way you want.
I have not been having much success when using the ctrl-A keys.
I understand your comments completely and agree with them. However, I can see using this feature a good bit. I do not understand why after applying the skin modifier I am not longer able to see the lines that the modifier was applied to.
As I said, I have done this before but for some reason can no longer get the process to work. I feel like Ryan’s tutorials have been really great and I have learned a lot from what I have watched. The snowman project is really interesting to me and has a bunch of things that I think I would use a lot. I wish there was a way I could contact Ryan and see if he could resolve the issue for me.
Yeah I wasn’t implying to give up with the feature, but just when you are stuck you can step aside, follow another tutorial and go back to it later !
But what you can also do in that case is to create an empty scene, and look for quick tutorial that focuses only on the skin modifier. Once you have a good understanding of the functionalities you go back to the snowman and it should be simple to resume that part !
You can try to reach out to Ryan, but it’s not really appropriate as it’s probably impossible for him to look in all every small issue like this for all users and all videos he made.
At some point you have to figure things out either by looking at the documentation, tutorials or asking here. 3D is far from being straightforward, asking for help is totally ok but trying to manage by yourself to find the solution (by using google basically) is mandatory to survive. Especially for simple stuff like this, the time it would take to actually get an answer from someone else is much longer than probably the hour it takes to figure that out. And generally you end up learning more by yourself.
I’m not saying we should never ask, but it’s better to ask when all the other solutions failed !
).
