I’m asking why did you start using blender and what did you intend to do with it because when i first started blender I wanted to do renders but through boredom I got drawn to the game engine.
So now I make games I’m still trying to do renders tho but I only started that recently.
I started using blender because I was tired of lightwave, and havent looked back- I started out doing graphic design, manipulating images and creating photo montages in photoshop, and decided that 3d would be a good way to add realism/elements to the images. This then evolved to the stage where I do 3d almost exclusively and am now using this medium to create comedy/animated shorts
I started out using POV-RAY and got hooked on rendering pictures that I create myself. Then I started using MORAY to model things and got frustrated with it’s limitations. Then about a month ago I downloaded Blender and started playing around with it. It’s a whole new world. And this forum is excellent to inspire me to do more and more complicated things. I’m learning all the time about which keypress does what and how to do things. It’s a blast.
I started using blender because I wanted to make animations, but I am very much into the game engine now.
I barely ever make animations with it.
I wanted to make a logo for my company.
i started using it because 3dsmax won’t run on linux… but then i realized blender has its own set of great features that are more than enough to produce good renders…
i just do it for fun, i don’t have a specific project in mind that i want to do…
I did not found a job, and Blender gave me a possibility to try myself, start from scratch, express myself, to do things the way I feel right.
I started looking into 3d because every idiot sports “Photoshop knowledge”, “being pretty good with Photoshop” in his CV just like it were MS Office. So whenever you say “I’m a Photoshop pro” you get “Oh, I’m pretty good with Photoshop, too. I put my Grandma’s face on Super Mario and everybody at work laughed his ass off.”. That really pissed me off, so I decided it was time to get to what I was starting in '98 - 3d, a field practically untouched by the guys knowing how to create a PS layer or people who visited a “graphic design college” and, to “show off their talent”, create their CVs in Photoshop that look like utter n00b crap. Photoshop, a serious and expensive professional tool has become lesser than Excel (because there you actually need a brain to compose a formula) outside the CG “scene”. So practically I feel like someone professionally playing Gameboy when asked for what I do.
My financial limitations (3.5k for 3dsMax…) led me to research Open Source software and after quite extensive research I thought it was at least SOME good to learn Blender, so I could later on apply it to other packages and learn these more quickly. Right now I’m hoping Blender will make it into the industry during the next years that I’ll have to spend learning it 
At least at some point I’ll be able to create useable 3d graphics to expand my portfolio out of the apparent Mickey Mouse range…
I started with Bryse. I switched to Blender because I wanted to make everything, and because upgrades were frenquent and free.
The reason I first started using Blender was as a rendering tool for Wings3d. I originally used Cinema4d for the task but my version was slowly getting outdated and I both couldn’t afford a newer version and was getting tired of dualbooting and that jazz. After a while I got familiar with the program and discovered small hidden treasures here and there that were way better tools for the job than c4d could offer. It took me some time to adapt, since I felt Wings was much more intuitive in the modelling departement, but the amount of tools available made me do a total switch once I grasped the layout and got familiar with the mesh editing. The last couple of years I’ve done all my modelling in Blender abandoning both c4d and Wings. The best part is; It’s getting better and better every day and the willingness of the community to share their techniques + Open Source philosophy makes it one of the best choices I’ve ever done.
I was going to create the ultimate prerendered rpg 
I spent a couple of years in film school in the early 80s (Film in The Cities, in St Paul, MN, if anybody knows of it) and did some old-school hand-drawn animation there. Graduated from U of MN in '86 with an art degree, mainly photography and sculpture. Been interested in animation for years, and a few years ago came across Anim8or. Had plenty of fun with that, then heard about Blender about the same time I was starting to experiment with Linux, so in 2006 when I spent 6 months on a temporary work assignment away from my family I built my PC, loaded Fedora, and started learning Blender. I can’t draw worth crap, but have a good enough ability to visualize stuff in 3D that Blender lets me get ideas out of my head and into some sort of visible medium. I’ve done a few graphic things for work with Blender (and GIMP, for that matter) but the vast majority of it is personal expression. And I’m still learning every day.
I wanted some place to channel my creative talents that was well away from pencil and paper, and my interest in computers and all things mechanical and maths minded lead me to 3D-MAX and blender shortly afterwards.
I want to make weird little films and play around with lowpoly stuff.
Someday I might actually have something to show that isn’t embarrassing or unfinished 
It sounds nerdy but…
I was making a website for a guild in the MMORPG Guild Wars, and I ran across a couple renders from a 3d modelling program, and I looked it up typed in google: Free 3d Modelling Program, and Blender popped up.
End of story.
I wanted to use blender to create backgrounds and settings for my comics. I hate perspective work and that scut, so I figured I could hash it out with blender and then trace and embellish to my heart’s content.
i needed a life. Before i just watched tv all the time and played video games. Then my dad introduced to blender. After playing around with it for a about 2 minutes i got addicted.
Plus it was open source!
I was a complete n00b to animation, and after giving up on a plasticine animation I started looking into CGI. I found anim8or but didn’t like it’s lack of features. eventually I cam across blender and was addicted after about a month. Since I have had time that I take away from blender to do other things but blender is definitely a recurring theme in my day to day life.
I found blender in a 3D magazine when it was in it’s shareware version. Couldn’t use it.
A few years later, I found it again. Still couldn’t figure it out. Went to pirate version of Cinema 4D instead and finally learned 3D.
Somewhere inbetween I lost my creativity/achieved eternal artists block.
Right now I’m under pressure to make something of my life instead of working at the local shop forever. So I figured, why not try 3D again. I thought learning animation seemed a good idea so I opened C4D to check out the MOCCA module. And holy shit it’s got no detailed explanation at all and is only confusing.
That and the combination of knowing I’d eventually have to pay for the program if I did make a career of it, I tried out blender again. This time I could do it… And I was impressed. It’s mostly on par with the commercial software and it’s free. Also it can link scenes together in a heartbeat which C4D can’t (xref is awkward).
Some day I hope to get my imagination back. Reading fiction, inspirational speeches, reverse psychology, theories on the mind and self confidence and aaaall that other stuff hasn’t helped one bit. But if the solution comes knocking, probably 10 years later when I finally snap and end up in intensive therapy, I’ll have a go at making animations with Blender. : )
For now I’m keeping up to date with the program and experimenting with the tools.
It was in 2001, if I remember correctly. I wanted to do 3-D because I had a friend who had Bryce, which seemed like the coolest thing ever. The only free program I’d found was something called Anfy 3-D which was far from ideal (it was designed to output Java applets) so I was pleased to have found Blender, which was much closer to what I was looking for. I can’t even remember the last time I heard about Bryce, and I don’t even want it anymore.