Blender (Tips and Tricks for Beginners?)

[DragonMage156]

So I want to get into using Blender but I have no idea how to start. Any tips or tricks? Should I start small/simple or try to create a character model right off the bat? And how does rigging and animation even work with this program?

I once used a couple creators for MMD but I never got far with that for multiple reasons (one being lack of parts and knowledge to create my own persona).

[CarlZalph]

Whenever I touched Blender I said to myself: "Forget learning the program from the ground up, there are way too many features to learn for what I want to do."

 

What followed was me using it haphazardly while googling every functionality I wanted to do and following an image tutorial on how to access said feature.  Over and over.

I'd wager I saved a lot of time not learning everything and getting what I wanted to do done.  However, I couldn't reproduce any of it now without consulting google again, so the knowledge was temporary.

 

If you're wanting to really get into Blender and use it on a daily basis, then start with primitives and learn features as you go.  It will probably take a long while to get fully used to everything as there are a lot of functions and even more hotkeys to learn.  Hotkeys everywhere.  So many hotkeys.

[ButterStuffed]

Make a specific goal and try to achieve it. Even if it’s far beyond your ability I think it’s a good idea to try anyways. If you end up failing you’ll more than likely figure out what you need to learn before trying again.

Personally when I first started I tried making Robot from Nuclear Throne. I remade the model literally dozens of times through trial and error and using YouTube videos and never actually was able to finish it. Eventually I gave up because my skill was not sufficient to make the quality level of model I wanted. However I ended up becoming somewhat proficient after all those failed attempts and was able to progress smoothly with simpler models after that.

Anyways, here's a playlist of some videos that explain the basics of 3D. They aren't really tutorials for  but just some short videos explaining the terminology of things most tutorials tend to skip over because it's so fundamental.

After that checking this video out about the basics of controls would be a good idea.

[DragonMage156]

I'm aware it's gonna take a while. I want to get to a good level of animation and character modeling at some point. Could be this year or even next year but I know it's gonna take a lot of time. Even some losses and frustration but it'll all click one day.