Oh and btw Quollism, I was using Logic in the late 90s and remember seeing a friend who was using a mod tracker, it looked completely alien to me but he swore by it! 
Good advice. Also try #blender, a bit more active usually (at least when I’m looking).
I think from a new user perspective the guy that started this thread is 100% right…learning blender is an insane persons undertaking…you either need to be too broke to get a commercial package or a masochist …and the changeable key map’s are still nowhere to be seen…I hope that Nathan Vengalandalgala(can’t remember his last name)gets his proposal in soon…while I personally know most every hot key, it has taken me years to do so…it really should be easier, and any advice here on how to learn it is nonsense( although I have respect for most who propose methods) that is just not the answer…the answer is an improved key map like Nathan suggests.
Ahh! All my extra cubase plugins have a jazzy tilted knob feature, and at it looks nice, but don’t kill yourself over it!
check this:
The knobs look 3d, but not tilted… tbh, most of my soft synths look nice with little circles and dots:
Wow. Three pages of ranting since yesterday. Imagine all the stuff you could have learned in the time it took you to write all that.
I look at Max or Maya tutorials on the net and I cringe when people miss selections, hunt-and-peck tiny buttons on the screen, laboriously move the transform widget with the mouse, or open sub-sub-sub-sub-dialogues to get to a well-hidden button. Give me Blender’s gloriously fast if slightly odd UI any day. It’s a wonderful feeling to just maximize your mesh window and work on your model with no pesky buttons anywhere in sight.
Casio, if there’s one thing I truly know inside out, it’s music so I’m fully aware of nearly every plugin ever created. I know where you’re coming from saying don’t sweat it but it’s an avenue I thought I’d explore and I got bored of knobman (a program created specifically for making knobs). Blender is just a little alien and nonsensical to me at times. I think I’m making some progress though, please check my post in Focused Critique if you get chance. Thanks though.
And MadMinstrel
Wow. What a snide little comment. If that’s directed at me then you obviously haven’t read the whole thread, the only ranting was in the first post and served it’s purpose but thanks for taking the opportunity to be an ahole.
+1
If Blender is not intuitive, Maya is worse.
I wanted to come back to this too, it’s a good point. Blender is a lot of different things to alot of different people, from cartoony animation to photorealistic photographic renders, from recreating the mudane to imagining the impossible. As a program it has to wear a lot of different hats.
For what it is and what is costs Blender is amazing but I feel that if the control system was shaken up a bit it could be better than everything else.
It probably took me 2 days to get something usuable and after that I was butting up against limitations I didn’t understand. I still feel like a decent ‘do’s and don’ts’ video would go a long way, yunno, for the noobs 
Well that’s where the rub is. It’s hard for old farts (that don’t usually train other people) to make videos for newbs. Experienced users no longer see the limitations that new users encounter. The newbies have to help themselves here, and just ask. I can’t imagine a single clear ‘do’ or ‘don’t’ for modelling, it all depends on a number of factors. Even no-brainers like “don’t make non-manifold meshes” can sometimes be false if you’re, say, making low-poly vegetation.
In menys, yes. So is 3DS. Imo. But in keyboard shortcuts and mouse handling? No, Blender is the worst on that, hehe…
But in regard to learning a 3D app from scratch, I’d say Blender is absolutely among the easier to learn. No question about that. 
I think Houdini is the worst to learn. It’s the worst I encountered at least. I love nodes, but in Houdini it’s just taken to it’s most ridicoulus point, hehe… In Houdini you can have a full node setup. Inside a node. In a full node setup… ;D (though you can do absolutely ANYTHING, and then some)
Personally I agree about Right-click being the default is absolutely crazy, however today I taught a friend how to use Blender since it was her first time ever opening the software, I gave her the links to BlenderCookie’s “Getting started” series and took a break until she had finished watching them (:P)
I then told her that she could change the default to be left-click instead since it is the standard in all 3D packages but to my surprise both she and her boyfriend thought that right-clicking is easier and more intuitive and so they continued using that.
For the rest of the post, well… I don’t understand how someone can expect to learn a 3D software in just two weeks, especially not if you don’t watch tutorials for that software. Almost every modeling tutorial on BlenderCookie and BlenderGuru adresses all your problems in your first post.
(And I’m not defending Blender or anything like that, what I said is true for all 3D packages)
It’s a fair point, experienced users can’t see things afresh, for the first time. What I liked about the 3d buzz videos over the blender cookie videos is that there is a ‘because’ every now and again, whereas I think for JW et al it’s completely second nature and they’re simply showing the steps in order to reach a goal.
Those little explanations of why to do something a certain way are valuable to a new user.
Case in point is my ‘corner indent’ thread, I’d seen quite a few videos, coupled with some common sense and a goal I set about doing something which, to my mind, was relatively simple. Basically I wanted to cut a cube out of an external corner. What I didn’t realise is that the way I was trying to do it was ‘breaking’ my mesh so when I tried to subsurf it all went wrong. Now I didn’t know how or why my mesh was broken, just that it didn’t work.
After a few helpful members posted screenshots of the way they’d drawn it I was able to copy that and at least get something that worked.
- A triangle will break an edge loop - I think that’s really important but have only seen it mentioned a few times, usually right in the middle of an hour long tutorial about scuplting a human head (I’m not interested in scuplting human heads) so it has meant watching hours worth of tutorials to glean little nuggets like that.
- If you have two overlapping lines of different lengths they will not merge, again another biggie when it comes to maintaining the integrity of a mesh but I’ve not seen that mentioned once, I had to track that one down myself. Again, now I’m further on with things it seems obvious but at the time it tripped me up.
- Creases don’t render
…and so on. Like you said though a veteran wouldn’t even think of these things because they’re either second nature or they wouldn’t do them because they mess things up.
If the keycommand/shortcut page (input) was sorted out then it would be much easier to make custom assignments but I gave up because commands are littered all over the place.
All this is moot now as I’ve already got pretty much where I need to be, I just need to work out how to cast a shadow on an invisible plane in cycles and then look into basic animation but I’ll make a thread for those when the time comes.
Does anyone know where to make feature requests? The links on the blender site seem to be broken.
Just think how lucky you are. There has never been so much learning resources and so many excellent tutorials as there are now, all in nice high definition so you can see all of the tutors desktop. No longer are the days watching low resolution video of a part of someones desktop as it hurtles from one part of the interface to another, and having to fathom the ‘logic’ of the blender 2.4 interface with buttons seemingly placed purely because there was a gap available.
To LGC:
I’m not gonna lie, I’m fast losing patience with Blender, you shouldn’t have to look up every single thing you want to do. It really is the most unintuituve program I have ever used in my entire life.
3D software is never easy to learn!
I appreciate it is an ongoing development and also free, plus you’re able to get similar results to software costing thousands but still, it’s like usability isn’t even on the list.
Disagree. Once you learn the unique Blender-workflow you will work blazingly fast!
And the main select is right click?!!! I know you can change it but who thought it was a good idea to have the main select as right click?
The first time i opened Blender i was like; The f*ck! Right click for select?
But i never changed to leftclick, and now it’s just habit.
That’s my point, it’s like no thought at all has gone into making the program usable.
Try downloading a 2.4x build
Now, like I said, I know there’s alot of very clever people working hard to make this free program as good as the majors and that it’s a work in progress but having to stop at every step and start googling is wearing thin.
This has already been said, but seriously the best way to learn blender is to follow tutorials. Check out blendercookie.com.
Get yourself together and do a couple of tutorials, you will learn the workflow in no time! Learn from the professionals.
Honestly if it wasn’t for some great members on this board I would have given up a long time ago.
Blender community rocks!
Ok I think that feels better. Did any of you guys have similar frustrations when starting out?
You have no idea!
Every day someone is complain about the interface. i’d really like all programs have it like Blender, it’s extremely useful part the screen as you want.
When I started out with 3D in the mid 90s, there was no such thing as video tutorials. Not only weren’t there any Youtube, there was actually no internet to speak of at all, hehe… But I had the SI3D manual. 3000 pages of it… ;D
So yes. HD tutorials is way nicer.
Especially using the Vimeo app in the Iphone and then Airplay it onto the TV through an Xtreamer mediaplayer. Then I lay down in my sofa allowing myself to be really, really lazy while studying really, really hard. This is the future. And it makes me fat. But also knowledgeable. ;D
Hi Richard,
I had to laugh at that. My analogy is when I started doing music there was no internet (well hardly), no tutorials, you had to travel to a cd jukebox to audition sample sets on CD, if you wanted a particular sound you had to make it. Now it’s a case of someone posting ‘how do you make the sound from deadmau5 - xyz?’ and there’s a ready made preset or advice on exactly how to get there. There’s ready made percussion, live instruments, basically everything under the sun, on tap.
I agree things have changed a lot and that’s what I love about technology in general. I decide, ‘hey, I want to make some 3d knobs for my guis’ and a few days later I’m able to do it.
Good times, albeit with a few headaches along the way.
Thanks again for all your help
Not sure what you mean there. Creases are meant to be used with the subsurf modifier, they alter the vertex weights for the Catmull-Clark SDS algorithm. If you want a ‘crease’ like you get with Max’s smoothing groups, you need to use the EdgeSplit modifier and either use the angle based setting or mark sharp edges on your mesh yourself (with Ctrl-E, mark sharp). But that isn’t a crease, that’s just a vertex normal discontinuity.
Thanks for that Guiseppe. I know, I see some of the older tutorials and think ‘woah, thank goodness it’s not like that anymore!’ 
Oh sweet, people have finally stopped asking about how to make their voices sound like that Cher song/T-Pain?
And +1 for the remark about pre-2.4 Blender - Blender’s user-friendliness has improved so much beginning with Durian/2.5. Good to see you’re getting up to speed too.