For me personally, I prefer having the text all out there in the open, as long as there’s lot of paragraph breaks. That way I can quickly scan the text with 20-30% retention, formulate a general idea of what it says; and then read it more thoroughly while maintaining the general in my mind. Helps with my lovely ADHD.
That, of course, is entirely unimportant information, but I like to comment on this thread 
I enjoyed your anecdote very much by the way!
Yeah, that’s generally how I approach reading too. But I wonder a little whether it’s just what I am used to, and what I am good at (I read very fast). I remember how excited I was when Hypertext came along, I thought that was a great way to partition information into a basic overview and then separate elucidations that one could click on if one wanted them.
But I found that there was a real art to composing a piece of text for that purpose, and I got often annoyed by it being done badly (I am looking at you, Wikipedia). It’s probably also overkill for the context of this Sketchbook; if somebody is annoyed by my verbosity and rambling asides they’ll probably not stick around anyway.
And it’s not unimportant information, I appreciate knowing it. Since I don’t just talk to revel in the sound of my own voice 
it matters how you perceive the presentation.
I feel that. I love Wikipedia, the formatting gives me pain. One of these days I should replace their CSS with my own browser side, I did it with BlenderArtists a few months ago and it made my life so much easier. But I’m lazy
True, and my constant comments definitely aren’t helping I like it though, I enjoy your ramblings. We both ramble on our own and each others’ sketchbooks, and we both have a good time, so I call it a win 
Speeding up audio works for me in some contexts, but not (at this point) for learning Blender, which is pretty high bandwidth (there’s speech and movement on-screen and key presses all of which I have to process at once, and DO something in accordance with). Same for captions; I can’t handle additional info obscuring part of the screen, nagging at me from my peripheral vision. I’ll just suffer through BG’s rambling and get to moan about it afterwards. I’ve actually spent some effort on separating the good from the bad (for me), and have a solid list of teachers who work for me. Andrew is pretty much the only one with whom I do battle.
Zerobio’s stuff looks good! He has a nice voice (this matters more to me than it should). He knows how to teach well (this is remarkably difficult to find). I also like the objects he models – I am up to my neck in cutesy cartoony stuff now, but I don’t want to stick with that style, I want to branch out into somewhat higher realism, but still stay with game assets. And the level of zerobio’s models is something I can handle now. Very cool, many thanks!
I want to 
that part a few more times.
I’m 100% with @good_omen in feeling extremely thankful for having found this place (and in specific people such as you who like to help and who understand, the combination of which isn’t that easy to find); it’s making such a difference in my general state of mind – my partner has commented on how much more upbeat I’ve been lately.
I like to help and I try to understand I’m with you though, I wouldn’t be doing my sketchbook if it weren’t for you, good omen, and stray Billie. You’re motivated by us, and good omen is also motivated by us - it’s a happy circle of positive growth that I am delighted to be part of 
Origami was a fun thing to pass the time and great memories
Oh you’re right
Thanks for that memory, sometimes we miss a letter or two 
And I agree with @joseph about your writings, they’re actually quite fun to read (relatable on many parts too) 
Yeah, I’m a huge fan of his modeling tutorials. They’re easy to follow, but they don’t get caught up in re-explaining stuff you likely already know. He also attaches the reference images in the description, so you can follow along.
Do be warned that a lot of his texturing tutorials use substance instead of blender, but you should be able to replicate something similar with basic texturing knowledge. His “BLENDER BEGINNER” series is a good place to start, as it’s done entirely in blender and will give you knowledge on uv mapping and texturing that you can use on other projects.
Usually, I just watch his modeling stuff and figure out some simple materials myself. Ryan King has some really good tutorials on materials like metal and plastic, so you could probably apply those to Zerobio’s models.
2022-06-01 How to Make Ornaments Really Quickly
Grant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LNOLWgCkbw – 7 minutes of wheee!
This was thrilling. I had done a tiny bit of sculpting (the donut), but this felt like wizardry. Radial symmetry does all the work; I just have to touch the mesh with a brush. I’ve always looked at sculpting as something I had absolutely no natural aptitude for, and while this is a long, long way from the things I see people here do with that tool set, it feels like I’ve been given a gateway drug. Just hand me a couple of subdivs and the dyntopo spell, and I am ready.
Mine isn’t anywhere as intricate as the one Grant showed off (but he also admitted that that one took him 45 minutes). Even though it’s wizardry, or maybe because, using a mouse is very awkward; you obviously need a wand.
It looks like a finial – now I just need to make a fitting bed for it.
I did some extra work, namely a high-to-low poly normal bake, with cage this time. I watched another one of Grant’s videos for that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ0PM7m9TJc. It worked out much better than my previous bake without cage; came out relatively ok the first time. I can see there are a few problems where I should have probably added a couple of bevels to soften hard edges on the LP model. But even though this requires a bit more effort I felt I had more control over the process by fine tuning the cage. I like that.
As homework I picked this classic urn planter with somewhat less-than-classic decoration up top because I could not make my mouse draw a decent horseshoe curve, ^wobble^wobble^. There’s a way to draw a curve in Sculpt mode, but I was too intent on getting this done while everything was still fresh in my mind, so I didn’t experiment. I did this one with the Multires modifier, which resulted in a much nicer mesh, and it was way easier to deconstruct a low poly model from it. The Decimate modifier didn’t want to unsubd it, so I did it with the Edge version, which did a great job. Then I had to extrude some faces in the place where that lower bulge is, which was all brushwork, so that the cage could scale well.
And after the cage scaling and the bake:
I should probably also throw an AO node in there to squeeze out a bit more shadowing in the crevices. But overall this looks pretty good, and I think I have found a workflow for this sort of thing (important for the House Flipper assets). This is actually too high poly for that, still, even though I got it down from more than a mil tris to 6.6k, but I wanted it to still look smooth all around for now.
Cherry wood veneer texture from freepbr.com.
Yeah, I noticed he uses Substance a lot, and no way no how am I gonna throw money into Adobe’s gaping maw-for-rent. But I just tend to ignore that anyway – it’s 95% about the modeling for me, even though I do a little procedural exploration, and want to add more. But Blender can definitely do a lot there, more than enough for my needs right now. I’m studying a bit of texture coordinate math (Sam Bowman has a series of solid tutorials on that), and I am following Ryan here so I see all his procedural tutorials pop up.
Thanks for your advice!
This is very cool! Nice work! I feel your pain with mouse wobble. If you’re looking for a good, cheap, graphics tablet, I’d recommend an XP Pen Artist 15.6 Pro:
https://www.amazon.com/XP-PEN-Artist15-6-15-6-Graphics-Battery-Free/dp/B077PCCC7R/ref=sr_1_11?m=AABH22FTN87KM&marketplaceID=ATVPDKIKX0DER&qid=1663169572&s=merchant-items&sr=1-11
It’s currently on a huge sale, which is nice. I have one myself and I highly recommend it
Mmh, very nice; I’d love that. But even on sale, display graphics tablets are outside my budget. I can really only buy extras at all because I got a (hold on to your hat) free Nvidia RTX 3090, so don’t feel too sorry for me.
Where did you get a free 3090?? Are there more, by chance? I will be wherever those free 3090s are in between 1 and 8 hours if there’s a second one 
Answered in PM because… personal information.
If I had a magical RTX card tree, be assured I would share with y’all.
2022-06-02 Create a Space Mine in Blender 3
Grant Abbitt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-1LsdkmAIA
This was a little tutorial that I did because I was looking for something small, and it had just popped up on my subscription list – usually the tutorials I’ve been taking are not for the latest major version of Blender – and I thought it might be fun. It really doesn’t make a difference anymore though; I should see whether I can also handle tutorials for other 3D software and translate those to Blender.
Did you know that the protuberances on naval contact mines are called Hertz horns? I didn’t either, but Grant wondered about what those on a space mine would be called, and since space mines don’t exist I looked up the closest thing and learned this fine fact. I presume invented by a German dude, they contain sulfuric acid, and when cracked let the acid run into a battery which energizes that and detonates the charge. And still in use, the bastards. Humans suck. Well, it wouldn’t work like this in space, so there.
We also joked that you wouldn’t want a mine to actually have bright shiny lights advertising its presence, but Grant was quick on his feet with the retort that these were in maintenance mode to make it safer for the repair crew to approach.
Crab Nebula HDRI by [deleted] from Reddit
Beaten Metal PBR from freepbr.com
Homework: Figure out the bloody snapping. I’ll make a separate post for that.
Nice! I actually watched the tutorial and learned a few shortcuts!
In the part where he bevels the inner edges at 6:49, to make it sharper, you could alternatively activate Auto Smooth:
These small facts are very interesting, thx for the research! 
2022-06-02 Snapping
Doing the space mine tutorial reminded me that during modeling the cartoon tank I didn’t really figure out how snapping to faces with adjusted rotation to target works. Guess what? I still hadn’t, instead I had found ways around the problem (which is that all too often my object didn’t snap in the right orientation or with the right bits). Everything worked out in this tutorial, and I sorta kinda got why, but my general lack of understanding continued to nag at me. So I decided to figure things out. And kept notes.
Warning: ranty.
I do read the fine manual, always, first thing. However, the manual all too often does not help. At all. Here, have an example of &#%$* documentation:
Project Individual Elements Available for snap to Faces. Project individual elements on the surface of other objects.
Gee, thanks for telling me that “2+1” means adding 1 to 2. Mind telling me what “elements” these are? This does not do what I expected. What’s even worse, it goes nutso when that option is unchecked (by default). Then the to-be-snapped object sinks into the target with only a little circle and a normal (?) showing. Checking it works if the area to be snapped is flat, but not if it is at an angle. WHAT ELEMENTS?
Look at the red object, that’s without “Project Individual Elements”:
Closest point is also definitely not closest vertex. What then is a “point”?
Anyway, I figured out what options I have to set to get my tutorial objects to snap to where I want them: origin on the face I want to snap with, Snap To Face, Closest, Align Rotation to Target, and Project Individual Elements – that works with the UVcube and the simulated tank door.
But it doesn’t work with the turquoise thingie (thingie dreams of Platonic solids). Thingie sinks halfway in. I think I know why – the projective ray comes from the centre of that angled face, but it doesn’t take the angle into account. So now I have an inkling what “point” is. Lemme move the origin to see whether that makes a difference… yup, now it sinks in to the edge on which I put the origin. I think I see. Still not snapping with that angled face, of course; that seems to require extra gyrations.
(I have since found out about custom transform orientations, and I am a much happier camper, but this is how far I had gotten beginning of June.)
I have Auto Smooth Normals on my quick favourites. But it never hurts to mention something like that.
Not sure this can be re-phrased much better, since snap element definition depends on the context origins, vertices and control points for Object, Edit and Curve Edit modes respectively.
Not that I don’t appreciate the difficulty, but as somebody who used to write technical documentation, that’s no excuse, sorry. The explanation isn’t one at all, it doesn’t help. It needs examples, and not just examples for the obvious (which is another malaise, which could well be because the people writing documentation don’t necessarily use Blender comprehensively).
I don’t want to go off on an even longer rant about Blender documentation in general, it’s open source, it’s actually decent for what it is (I’ve seen much worse for commercial products), at least it’s complete and up-to-date – but it quite often doesn’t help me in the slightest in this and similar ways. I’m not casting blame. I’m just frustrated (and part of that is me, because I have such limited energy and can so easily be derailed by even small hurdles).
I have some thoughts on how to improve it, but that’s not really for here. And yeah, I ought to put my effort where my mouth is – it’s open source, I can improve it if I want it improved. But I don’t have the time and energy to do all the things I ought to do (which is also enormously frustrating). Ah bah. Done with moaning for the day. 
