The worst thing about learning it is accidentally clicking something before you know how to un-click it. Fucking up a viewport and derailing a fun tutorial sucks ass.
this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2024
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Blender has a reputation for being difficult to learn, but the UI has actually improved a lot these last few years and its much more user friendly.
It's very fun and rewarding
It's a little tricky but people learn it all the time. The Blender Guru "donut tutorial" is a good starting point.t
Unfortunately the guy who made it kinda sucks, but I looked around a few months ago and it seems like it still is the best intro.
It turns out that you can be good at explaining how to use Blender and still be bad enough at everything else to think that NFTs are a good idea.
Late to the party but Blenderguru is a right wing POS
And a grifter too, fuck him.
As others have said, learning 3d modeling is kind of a pain in the ass in general, but Blender is so incredibly well documented, and there are so many tutorials out there for it, that I would say that it's incredibly accessible.
It's really not that bad, it used to be worse. There's plenty of tutorials, and while Blender is a bit complicated, you don't need to learn all of it to get good at it.
It is complex, but there are more resources and tutorials than ever today.
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I can't wait til 3d dancing beanins 
Do it, it's good
I casually began looking into 3d sculpting a while ago and ended up listening something a pro artist said on this topic. This was him comparing zbrush and blender, mind you, so he wasn't talking about the medium in general. But he said that while there are some areas where zbrush might be better, blender is at the least perfectly adequate. Biggest advantage of blender is that by virtue of it being free it has the most community resources (tutorials, documentation, forums, etc.). Moreover, the fundamentals of sculpting translate between different software. So he highly recommended blender for newcomers between the two.
It also seemed like you really need something like a graphic tablet if you wanna do it somewhat seriously.
So I had zero expirence in art 2 years ago and I now I spend more time in blender daily now than I sleep. I love blender and will not go back to other cad tools. Because it does everything. Make a mech and bam I can render it in same tool and manifold it for 3d print.
If just trying to 3d model for art and if like me have 0 talent then 3 things I recommend:
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watch a tutorial video on making a human model. It's not important you know everything as much as seeing all the methods available and tricks. Took me 2 days following it before I moved on to my own stuff.
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watch a 15 min video on booleans. Learning to use that was a game changer for me. I use them all the time now in everything I make.
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now this is the hardest and longest to learn for me; lighting and color. This is the money maker for art. Mastering Shader nodes is currently beyond me but it makes a difference. Don't forget HDRI and textured materials can go a long way. Blender has a bunch of free ones to play with.
It took about 6 months to get gud. After 2 years, im now going back to projects that I couldn't handle before and it's sooo satisfying. Don't give up! It's like souls game you just get better.
Thanks, that's really motivating advice! Makes me want to give it a proper go 👍
jus make sure the lid is locked before you press the button
blender is pretty miserable, maybe working in 3d is just shit no matter what and it's not blender's fault, but if 2d art tools were as bad as blender nobody would make digital art.
maybe the process is better in a classroom setting?
Working in 3D is hard no matter the program. Learning how to do it well requires a good grasp of geometry, boundary logic, extrusion and cuts. Basically if you know how to look at a block and what cuts you need to make from it to create something, you can make anything, but if you are thinking of it as a drawing program, it is significantly different.
Animation is awful though and I am very bad at it.
my math fundamentals are decent, it's the gulf between what i expect to be able to do and what i'm able to look up and figure out how to do that's a lot of my problem.
the subdivisions and patterns i can see as a human are meaningless to the machine and functions like select similar, shrinkwrap and select edge loop are so dumb it's frequently faster to drag select hundreds of edges two at a time to fill a gap with faces, or vertices one by one to remove part of something
Yup, sometimes it works fine, sometimes it doesn't can only experience can kinda tell the two conditions apart.
I feel like I clicked way better with parametric 3d software than with blender.
I still want to learn blender though, I bought myself hard surface stuff and printed out shortcuts. I just need some life stability. (Also, sometimes I butt up against something where I'm like "this would be trivial in solidworks!", very frustrating)
Absolutely. As much of a pain in the ass the software is, I also prefer Solidworks.
Learning how to do it well requires a good grasp of geometry, boundary logic, extrusion and cuts. Basically if you know how to look at a block and what cuts you need to make from it to create something, you can make anything
Is there a way I can study/learn about this stuff aside from trial and error?
I've always felt like I should understand the basic theory of how to do 3D modeling (and why it's done that way), but tutorials are always crash courses in how to navigate the UI.
Not sure. I learned how to do it through school, where we basically had about 3 months of class that was UI crash course, and from there it was about a year of theory, particularly focused in assembly and CAD.
I think Blender's UI is pretty good these days but there are still some things that are needlessly convoluted. often times you will have to enable some obscure setting to make things work. also stuff changes a lot so older tutorials might be outdated
I'd say 3D art is pretty complicated in general so there's a lot to learn if you're just starting out, but it can be very rewarding
It's quite easy to get started (see the generic "donut" tutorial series) but sculpting/modeling is never going to be easy
blenders ui sucks ass but it's super powerful and good
once you're over the initial "how do i interact with this" it's easier
If you're approaching it casually and don't mind doing everything very slowly in the beginning it should be pretty fun. It gets hard if you're aiming to do things efficiently because there's a ton to learn in that case
Make sure whatever tutorial you use is for a recent version (I think 4+) because it changes a lot
I did the donut and it was a lot easier than I expected.
I took a 3d modeling class using blender in highschool ten years ago (holy shit) and yeah I'm totally lost in blender today. It's definitely very different.
I found it really hard to learn. I get the basic concepts of 3D models but I don't know how to make them happen in the UI. Thank god for infinite youtube tutorials on literally any precise topic you can think of
I have a theory that nothing outside of extremely specialized fields like quantum physics is actually hard to learn. What is hard is the self discipline to keep at it and be consistent.