I‘ve spent countless hours learning Blender over the past few months (being completely oblivious of other 3D software to that point), mostly through many excellent Youtube videos like from BlenderGuru, and I think it is the most wicket piece of software I have tried to learn in decades. It makes learning the fundamentals of vi a piece of cake. It has hundreds of features, dozens of property dialogs, and most of all it requires a very peculiar interaction style that is very different from 2D editors like the ones found in Office/Google docs. The difference is similar to switching from a notepad/Word paradigm of being in edit mode by default to switching to the command mode in vim.
The most important learnings so far have been:
- Instead of creating objects from scratch, the paradigm is to modify shapes, starting from a number of primitives. That’s why you get the “default cube” when you start it. An important operation is extrude, which copies the selected parts of a mesh and connects the copies to their original. So if you want to draw a curve, you place a default curve and then use an operation like extrude or subdivide to add new points.
- There is a heavy interaction between mouse and keyboard. Depending on the task, it is vital to learn the keyboard shortcuts by heart. Those are often single keystrokes - e.g. tab for switching between object and mesh edit mode, 1/2/3 for switching between vertex/edge/face selection mode, g for moving the selected item, x/y/z to lock to an axis, x for delete, f for filling edges or faces into the mesh, e for extrude etc. while all of this is also possible to do with the mouse, there is a 10x productivity boost from learning the 10, 20 keystrokes that are used all the time.
- It is highly extensible through plugins, mostly written in Python, though, unfortunately, lower layer operations are only exposed in C++. All of the youtube videos use one of the many screencasting plugins, which display the recent mouse buttons or key presses
- it is a good idea to use a numpad, mainly to switch between different views
The benefit: even with minimal manipulations in the lighting settings and the materials of the created objects, the renderer can already create raytraces that are absolutely jaw-dropping.
But: Even after several months I still often ask myself “how do I tell it the computer”. I feel like I have barely scratched the surface of what the tool can do. Rendering pipelines? Sculpting mode? Probably 2022.
Curious about the hottest tips from the HN users :-)