i wanted to make games!
yeah i still use gamemaker a little
crazy story,but i googled ‘how to make your own 3d game’ and found blender somehow. ive been using it for 3-4 years now!
i was using Amapi 3d which i got free with a computer magazine before i was using blender but was really held back by it, and i happened to come across blender 2.49b while making skins for Live for Speed on the PC i had downloaded a file with all the games car models ready for texturing and at that time i didn’t really know what i was doing in blender it was all really confusing and didn’t realize what it could do. but now i know and i won’t be looking for any other 3d program as blender is all i need and it improved my modelling skills what more can i ask for 
i still have some old renders kicking about if anyone wants a laugh ill put them up.
Love that reply. 
Personally, I mess about with loads of stuff and am pretty much addicted to learning. I did pretty good at school and went to uni, but dropped out after 2 years (pure chemistry masters :eek:). I never liked the formal learning environment where you get preached at far more than you get taught. I say preached at rather than preached to because for someone to preach to you, you need to be paying attention ;).
On a whim, I googled “free 3d CAD” a few years ago and got a load of hits for programs that I took a look at, messed about with for various timescales, from 1 minute to 2 weeks and then started looking for alternatives. I think I still have a version of Maya PLE (the only one I kept) and I messed about with that for about a month, but it bugged me.
I’m not sure exactly how I stumbled across Blender, but it was definately not in my list of results for “free 3d CAD”. Possibly I just searched for “open source 3d” or something. At the time, I didn’t really appreciate the difference between art-oriented 3d and technically-oriented 3d so this is possibly the reason I missed Blender for quite some time.
Eventually, I downloaded 2.45, worked through the entire of “Noob to Pro”,did some of Jonathon Williamson’s tutorials and read the entire thread on subdivisionmodeling about poles and loops and the associated thread here on blenderartists where mr_bomb (Jonathon) and toontje were discussing poly-by-poly modeling. I created a little green goblin dude that got named Plurdo and joined blenderartists (first forum I joined) to show the progress with him and to get some tips on stuff like particles bugs, etc.
I joined the Noobs2.0 game project thinking “What the hell, maybe I’ll make some props or something since I’m not good at much.” I ended up rigging and animating the main character and the Wolf and writing all the ai for the Wolf. It was messy, noobish, but very fun.
Since then, you’ll have to check out my “previous posts” to see what I’ve been up to. I’ve got over 1000 posts now, but most of those posts are helping others when my skills allow, most of the rest are asking for help when I really am stuck and the rest are just chatting like I am here.
I muck about with games, but have never actually finished one, however I’m now engaged in a personal game project that I can actually complete with my current skills. Here’s a world exclusive since my project is currently under wraps until it gets into a fully playable state (wip thread and downloads will be created when it’s actually worth it), but how does the concept of “4d Pool” hit you? In our 3d world, Pool is played on a 2d table and the third dimension only comes into play when you put topspin or backspin on the ball. In a 4d world, Pool can be played in a 3d volume and you can use HyperSpin. 
OMG!! Wall of text… I’ll stop now. 
It all started at home…
My brother rides motorbikes as a hobby (he is actually very good. Last year he came first in the pre '65 australian trials championships, although that doesn’t matter to the story.) And because this hobby takes him all over the place I get to go around with him to places in the bush, go camping, and have a good time for the weekends. I usually took my laptop because I had to do little bits of work and occasionally we would watch movies and stuff like that.
One time there was a really big event on and we went. And by complete chance I happenned to bring along a copy of CS : S to play with while he was doing the event (watching 5 seperate laps of the exact same thing, each lap taking 2 hours…gets boring sometimes.) and at the time I started to really get into modding games, and CS:S was very easy to mod (and still is) but I could only import models to put into the games, models that my friends had made. One f my brothers friends saw me plaiyng around with it and he said that he was a fellow game modder (The excitement overwhelmed me, as amongst the bogan community there aren’t many people into games AND motorbikes.) And he said that for a while he had been learning Blender but also that it was really difficult (I blame the 2.4x UI for that comment of his) but if I liked modding, that it could make things a lot more fun for me. And that it was free! When I got home that weekend I downloaded the latest version, and started playing around with it. Although I lost interest fairly soon because it was too hard to learn and at the time I had a lot of stuff going on and well…I didn’t have the time. BUT! A lot more recently I thought to myself “Hey, you know what? I have time now, and I still like modding games…maybe I should try Blender again?” And then I downloaded the latest version and HEY PRESTO! I was hooked. Since then it has been great and I don’t think I could go back. Of course, I have tried out other software and I still like blender the most. I don’t know why. It almost feels like an old friend. I couldn’t just walk away from it to go somewhere else with my mind.
Although I didn’t really get into 2.4x but as soon as I saw 2.5 I was on it like flies on a dog turd. (Why? Because I honestly hated the GUI. 2.5 GUI is epicawesomesauce.)
Thanks for reading my wall!
The main reason i started using blender was because i was trying to visually model a robot concept i had in mind, about a year ago, and wanted to eventually biuld a real robot to enter as my senior project. I started looking up tutorials and i was amazed at the ability of this free 3d program. Before Blender, i had tried using Anim8or but found it difficult to use and it was very limited compared to Blender. I never finished that 3d robot model and have loved and been using blender for about a year now.
\I have also tried using Unity 3.0 recently but found that program was basically just a game engine, as opposed to blender which was a renderer, game engine, compositor and modeler all in one. I dont think ill ever stop using Blender 
I wanted to get into 3d stuff, and the first program I tried I hated. I then looked at the Wikipedia list of 3d animation/modeling programs and picked the one that looked like it could do the most… I must have picked well…
i wanted to dive into 3d world also… there was many attempts to use Blender in my past (first was at the time when Blender was released, i think.) Managed to render default cube and got lost in ui more than once. (install-delete-install-delete)
I was interested in 3d art, so i kept looking pictures. I was amazed by some pictures, and those were made with Blender. So i thought if somebody was able to do pictures like that, the user interface must be something to overcome I grabbed noob to pro tutorials and started getting familiar with ui. I was surprised how intuitive it was (2.49).
Now i have used Blender 1 and ½ year, and i love it. Still learning to do those amazing pictures thought…
I’m broke and its free:p.
Hmmm I couldn’t find the “because I’m a masochist” option… 
just kidding.
@(jay): Surely anybody who wants to learn stuff has to be a masochist of sorts… Keep beating your head against it until it works the way you want, your head gives in or your head cracks open, lets the light shine in and all becomes clear.
Note: The above does not just apply to Blender, but all learning. I just love those moments when my head cracks and suddenly everything makes sense until I ask the next question. Gotta say I’m an addicted headbanger.
I gave the old 2.4x Blender a whirl some time ago and really hated the UI, then I worked with 3ds Max for about 1.6 years while trying out new apps every once in a while and when I heard about the UI overhaul in 2.5 I decided to test it out and fell in love with Blender, been using it as my main 3D app ever since.
I actually have always wanted to make animated shorts. When i first started doing anything with 3d graphics, I used a piece of software (that was already installed on the computer) that needed you to input math equations to make a specific shape. After a while my dad found blender and installed it on my computer. Since I have been installing it on my computer every time there was an update available.
I had been working with SketchUp for a while to make 3d models because I thought it was the only free 3d editor. One day I saw a youtube video with matchmoving done in Blender. I thought “that looks amazing, too bad good 3d editors are so expensive!” About a week later I learned that Blender was free! I have been using it for most of my computer work ever since. I even once wrote an essay for school in Blender 2.47 using the text editor! About the only thing I have never used it for is Web browsing. But there is the urllib module in Python…
Actually, I was just over at my friends house when he showed me a simple animation of blobs moving around the screen. Ever since then I’ve wanted to learn blender.
Ah, I can still remember the gold old days when I didn’t even know how to extrude. sigh
i start use blender in the first versions (when not had undo), leave, an use other time some months ago for make games with unity, here the 99% of the companies use 3dsmax but i like very much the open source software and blender is a masterpiece.
… it served as my anti-drug to WoW…
That’s the same beginning as my story! Actually, I started using POVRay exactly 20 years ago, before Moray was even around. My brother-in-law had it running on a couple of his computers and I started playing around with it and was absolutely mesmerized by the 3-D mirrored spheres that I could make (with of course the obligatory black-and-white checkerboard floor pattern beneath them).
Then Moray came along and I started using the beta versions of that software (while it was still free) and then eventually ponied up and bought the commercial version when he eventually came out with the first non-beta version.
After that I took a short break and when I came back I discovered TrueSpace. I really liked that software and used it through version 3.1.
Then a few years went by and I decided to take up 3-D modeling again and had a choice: Do I want to go back to true space or do I want to look for something else? I discovered at that time that true space had just become free software but that it was no longer being developed. I also discovered Blender at the same time and was forced to make a choice.
Do I go with true space which has a very smooth and intuitive user interface that I’m already familiar with but that will never move forward with any development from the point that it was currently at (version 7.6.1)? Or do I go with Blender that had as a terrible user interface (then version 2.49), I would have to relearn how to use the software, BUT it has has an incredible thriving community and extremely active development?
Since I always make decisions based on long-term outlook, I decided to go with Blender, and it was the best possible choice!
My answer might be an original one : I started to animate 3d workshops for the patients in the psychiatric clinic where I work as a nurse. I was used to other packages, and I even own licenses for ZBrush, Softimage 7.0, Modo etc…, but of course I couldn’t ask for such an investment from my employers. Thus Blender was the perfect solution for my workshop. Of course I had to follow a complete new training from blendercookie.com (thx alot Jon, Wes, David !). And I have to admit that this process led me to a far better understanding of the modelling, UVing, and so on than before.
Besides, the 2.5x development came in at the perfect time to make all this possible. I had tested 2.4x beforehand and left it quite fast !