151–160 of 211 posts
I love that Blender exists and I donate to it at a high-ish $$$ level monthly. That said, I can't help but feel something is wrong with 3D asset creation in that becoming an expert at Blender or 3DSMax, Maya or literally any other 3D creation software, it's a multi-month if not multi-year project. There are 1000s upon 1000s of options buried all over in nested upon nested options. Maybe AI will solve this. You ask fo…
What's the ideal route for someone familiar with 3ds Max to learn Blender? I feel a bit stuck with my proprietary skillset.
Were the concepts basic? Yup. But watching a 5 minute video on 1.5x speed gets through it pretty quick and covers some edge cases for the topic at hand, which can be surprising even at a basic level.
THEN MOST IMPORTANTLY you need to practice using the keyboard shortcut keys which are pretty essential to feeling like a native in Blender.
After the first X number of videos, if you can predict what is coming.. well, then you are bored and you are ready to step onto the next thing and explore that instead.
(edit: stick to points rather than rave on)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A quick AI Google search and some fact-checking later, and yeah. At least as of 2 years ago, Thunderbird was getting 3x the contributions that Blender was. It just goes to show you how badly managed Thunderbird is, since Blender is doing so much more with the money. I'm more and more disappointed with Mozilla all the time.
Thunderbird did manage to buy out K-9.
I love that Blender exists and I donate to it at a high-ish $$$ level monthly. That said, I can't help but feel something is wrong with 3D asset creation in that becoming an expert at Blender or 3DSMax, Maya or literally any other 3D creation software, it's a multi-month if not multi-year project. There are 1000s upon 1000s of options buried all over in nested upon nested options. Maybe AI will solve this. You ask fo…
Why cant it just spontaneously generate it as soon as the egg and sperm meet?
Take the Same question but replace calf with priest, surgeon, weather forecaster, chartered accountant, musician, chef etc. What is going on in these processes that requires so much time?
I love that Blender exists and I donate to it at a high-ish $$$ level monthly. That said, I can't help but feel something is wrong with 3D asset creation in that becoming an expert at Blender or 3DSMax, Maya or literally any other 3D creation software, it's a multi-month if not multi-year project. There are 1000s upon 1000s of options buried all over in nested upon nested options. Maybe AI will solve this. You ask fo…
I'm glad it's not just me - I do game modding in my spare time and I figured out how to use Hammer to make maps - it took a day or two but I figured it out. I wanted to make some models too but when I downloaded Blender and looked at a tutorial to create a cube and I just thought... why is this so complicated? It looks easier now (I was probably looking at doing it close to 20 years ago) but back then it seemed crazy…
Meanwhile, I can't get anything substantially done in Blender in a week. I just gave up.
Look at that wow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqfLYIJMv7I
Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO it’s probably better to start following at least one tutorial video which will walk you through most of the common actions and UI.
Different minds learn best different ways I suppose, I could never go through a "tutorial video" for any visual programs, always done it "the hard way" by basically looking up action by action. But again, YMMV of course.
Just pushing through one end to end tutorial will introduce all the main concepts than asking gemini for bits and pieces won't get. It's not as satisfying as doing your own project but pushing through at least one of them is well worth it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Three buttons mice have been the standard for well over 20 years. I'll give you that when blender was first released, three button mice were not common. Those assumptions are only crazy if you're an Apple user or a laptop user who uses a touchpad to 3d model.
Laptops have been outselling desktops for decades, and the idea that Apple users are some quirky tiny minority has been false for just as long. Blender’s UI just makes bad assumptions.
Plus, Blender has an "Emulate Numpad" option that lets you map the numpad controls onto your regular numeric keys (making it harder to use them for their normal purpose, so I wouldn't recommend it unless an external numpad is not an option for some reason). And they have an "Emulate 3 Button Mouse" option, where the middle mouse button can be emulated by holding down Alt while clicking the left mouse button. (Which means that some Alt+LMB shortcuts become unavailable, so again, the best option is to plug in a USB or Bluetooth mouse).
They've thought of it. Their defaults remain the default for a good reason, because the hardware to properly use the default shortcuts is cheap. But they've also accommodated the people who don't want to buy an external numpad or mouse.
I don't use Blender, so my admiration is from a distance but: Wow - what an impressive project. At least if I understand it correctly, this is a real pro-level piece of free and open software that's equivalent to thousands and thousands of dollars in closed-source commercial software.
I love that Blender exists and I donate to it at a high-ish $$$ level monthly. That said, I can't help but feel something is wrong with 3D asset creation in that becoming an expert at Blender or 3DSMax, Maya or literally any other 3D creation software, it's a multi-month if not multi-year project. There are 1000s upon 1000s of options buried all over in nested upon nested options. Maybe AI will solve this. You ask fo…
That being said, I have a correlate here for music production and you could definitely make a lot of the same arguments about it, and they'd be true -- really high learning curve to make something halfway decent even assuming you have the taste part sorted. Some of it is the ability to just creatively think in another language once you become fluent in it.
I think AI can give you leverage when it does stuff you could actually do it manually yourself because you can manually evaluate it and correct it competently. The hard part is how would you evaluate work that is beyond your current competence level?
If that isn't easy, if it's incompressible relative to your current skill level, then that's the very human part that will always be a bottleneck. And that's fascinating to me because if there were better AI tools for music production when I picked it up a few decades ago, I don't know that I would have developed the same fundamentals.
What will fundamentals look like in a post-agentic world? If a lot of the manual gruntwork disappears or is more heavily abstracted, I believe that will matter a lot more.