If you've ever had a passing interest in Blender or 3d modeling I recommend checking out the donut tutorial, which is fast becoming the "hello world" of blender -
+1, I'd also recommend doing a low-poly lesson before attempting the donut tutorial. I did Imphenzia's low-poly tutorials after a few false starts with the donut tutorial, and found the low-poly approach to be much better at establishing a foundation for working with geometric primitives.
Imphenzia's channel is an incredible resource, even if you're not into low poly style he's just great at doing tutorials for both Blender and Unity. Plus just watching him do his modeling challenges teaches lots as you see all the little tricks he uses to get through them.
I've been helping add it to University curriculum because it's enabled us to contract and hire really talented and motivated people without the vendor tax of 3ds Max or Maya, and they usually have broader skill sets that we can apply elsewhere.
Not knocking all the amazing people who use other software, but if you want new opportunity, use Blender!
You probably didn't blink when MS Office was made mandatory at a high school near you. That's obvious, all the tools you need in the world of business. Obviously, that's all you need ...
I used to teach National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) level 1, 2 and a bit more, in IT, in the UK, back in the mid 1990s. The ones I worked with were RSA based which means that they were basically typewriter type exercises that were slightly sexed up to deal with word processors etc.
We had 12 modules to cover. Each student needed three pieces of "evidence" per module. So a module might be word processing or spreadsheet or database. We also had to cover fax (office equipment) and email (as was).
A folder of evidence would end up with roughly 50 sheets of paper, a few letters and prose, some spreadsheets and simple database reports. A few emails and so on.
You were allowed three mistakes. Yes three, across a lot of docs/body of evidence. An example of a mistake is a speling mistake. Another mistake would be not exactly two spaces after a full stop (period). It was awful and generally ended up with quite a lot of the trainers "truing up evidence".
On the other hand, I have an eye for noticing mistakes that is close to legendary.
Soz, waffled on a bit.
If your child was taught rudimentary Blender in school, I hope you'd be pleased.
We had a mandatory "informatics" class in all years (age 6 to 18).
At start we learned how to use computers and programming in logo.
Age 10 was HTML.
Then there was a year for OpenOffice, a year for 3D graphics in Blender (I think when we were like 14). We had some lessons on vector graphics in Inkscape. Some lessons on audio editing in Audacity.
We learned some Unix basics. Later we returned to HTML and learned CSS.
Age 13 we learned C, the more motivated ones continued with Allegro and later C++.
Age 15 PHP and SQL
There was also a semester on finite state machines, but that was much less popular among students.
I graduated in 2010 and I am very happy regarding the curiculum my teachers built (out of their own volition and motivation).
Nowadays I think they also do Python and focus more on generic internet researching / verifying information.
Wow, where's this school with such program? Back in my day, we had BASIC programming on TI calculators. Younger (french) children i meet don't even have programming lessons, they're just taught how to use Microsoft Office and laposte.net webmail... just enough tech proficiency to be efficient wage-slaves, but no political/technical reflections.
I went to an experimental public school in Slovakia. We were allowed to diverge somewhat from rules ministry of education prescribes for the ordinary schools. So the teachers had more freedom in doing whatever they wanted. Usually it worked well, but sometimes it didn't.
Oh experimental schools are so cool usually. Too bad after a few years the ministry usually comes in and tears down everything because the experiments were so successful [0].
If you ever write about your experiences there and what worked and what didn't, i'd be very interested in a link to the post! :)
[0] For example in France, the public ministry of Education has been running test programs with "Montessori" education techniques for several decades (the techniques are >100y old). All of these experiments have been strong successes, and that's precisely why they were never implemented globally. The government doesn't want people to get too smart.. they'd rather have docile wage-slaves who bow before the flag.
Is that an argument for making 3D graphics mandatory or the opposite?
I am suspicious of arguments of the form: “Here’s some stupid shit people do! Let’s do more.” Although I will grant there is a seductive consistency to the logic.
It’s not an argument for or against anything other than saying it’s no more or less absurd than having compulsory classes in badminton or years of a single foreign language
There are of course more generic ways to use the time to teach in that area — teach person so finance instead of quadratic equations, teach a wide selection of introduction to language and importantly culture from a variety of places around the world instead of a single foreign language for years on end, teach personal health instead of whatever PE is, teach more generic computer concepts (what a file is, what a network is, some form of programming) rather than specific tools (be it blender or powerpoint)
blender grew beyond words, but I'm still not sure if it does reactive DAG propagation for animated attributes (like Maya). I was a bit shocked to read that you need to setup propagators or controllers (forgot the term tbh) to get a similar effect. Maybe I need to RTFM.
Maya's API around the DAG is unmatched, which absolutely everything in Maya is built around. If Blender would have such a thing, it would become pretty hard to justify paying the price for Maya.
This might be an odd, or unpopular opinion, but I really wish there were more tutorials written down, in text, with separate images and instructions. I don't like searching YouTube videos for specific steps, but plain HTML documentation is greppable. Blender does have docs -- and they're usually very good, but often out of date. Creatives really shine on YouTube, and make amazing things, but hardly anyone seems to put together a page of instructions. I have memories of using an educational version of Cinema 4D, and one thing that struck me was the quality of the written, html-based documentation that was readable and educational.
I'm delighted Apple is helping blender, I think it's a fantastic amazing project, and I have huge respect for all who work with it and make tutorials. I just want to learn to get better at it, quickly. I've found that I've got an unexpected barrier to entry to get my brain to work with its UI -- probably because I'm conditioned by earlier experiences -- and I don't think that I've been helped by having to watch videos with frequent pausing to see what modifier keys were pressed, with little ability to quickly randomly access the material afterwards.
This is useful. I used to like, and went through lots of the "Blender Cookie" stuff; even got a paid subscription - but they pivoted to online courses and lots of their individual tutorials and previous work disappeared.
(Also available on YouTube, but on cgboost.com is the updated version for Blender 2.8).
I did the latter some time ago. No artistic talent, cannot find my way around even 2D software, and the result was really respectable. Zach is a really good teacher.
> If you've ever had a passing interest in Blender or 3d modeling I recommend checking out the donut tutorial, which is fast becoming the "hello world" of blender -
I would be interested in this answer. It seems the era of good paper-compatible tutorials may be on the way out in terms of popularity of video and monetization.
I went through the donut tutorial on 2x speed. If you’re interested in learning modern visual arts (computer graphics, photography, videography, etc.) you’re going to have to deal with video tutorials. Make them work for you.
There are official written docs (https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/) but they would be difficult to learn from by themselves. There isn't a more helpful answer because the fact is >99% of Blender content is video.
Yes, that's the problem. There needs to be more text/image guides as eddieh said. This used to be the norm. Now everything is a video. Worse, existing text/image guides are allowed to rot or removed outright in favor of video. Not everyone learns well from video.
Your genuine suggestion was that they do something they plainly said doesn't work for them. Doing something that doesn't work for them at 2x isn't going to help.
>>If you've ever had a passing interest in Blender or 3d modeling I recommend checking out the donut tutorial, which is fast becoming the "hello world" of blender -
I can attest to this. The donut tutorial is really good. It has all you need to know if you are starting from nothing.
I forget where I learned VSE, sadly, but came here to say that Blenders video editor is not so bad, if:
a) You want to assemble only rendered footage. If you have real footage, well the greenscreen node is actually good, but for color grading DaVinci or Premiere are more advanced (though you can get a lot done in Blender here as well if you fiddle with the right nodes compositor).
b) You can accept some limits wrt adding text overlays. There is no simple way of doing that like in P or DV. But: You can trick with preparing some .png's and fade these in and out (which works but limits you on the effects), or add the text during render, but that limits you on flexibility (someone needs a text change in last second, yay!).
But I think you can go with basically any tutorial you find, it is not complicated in general. And a lot of your general blender knowledge transfers to VSE, which is a huge bonus in comparison to learn DaVinci or Premiere (which are monsters, crashy monsters).
I recommend looking into the Power Sequencer addon [1] that makes editing in Blender's Video Sequence Editor (VSE) a better experience. However, it's still pretty clunky so might be even better to wait for the upcoming VSE overhaul [2]
Blender’s video editing capability is most useful as a replacement for After Effects. A free tool like Davinci Resolve is a better replacement for Premiere.
I used Blender to edit a bunch of my YouTube videos and can’t really recommend it. (Using Kdenlive now and it’s OK.)
Blender’s VSE is too unlike normal editing programs and the performance is bad as well. It makes your workflow more clunky for no gain unless you’re also mixing 3D scenes into your video.
There are ambitious proposals to overhaul the VSE so hope might be on the horizon.
I can only recommend Cinelerra. It's much faster and more intuitive than any other thing I've found, everything is keyframeable (...) and some forks found their way into common distros (my one: Fedora). The guy also did some video tuts in 2018 which are awesome!
I just went through this video earlier this week, and while it assumes a bit of knowledge, the modeling is as simple as possible and I found it to be a very good introduction:
https://www.blender.org/news/blender-by-the-numbers-2020/
If you've ever had a passing interest in Blender or 3d modeling I recommend checking out the donut tutorial, which is fast becoming the "hello world" of blender -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPrnSACiTJ4
And check out all the donuts -
https://www.reddit.com/r/BlenderDoughnuts/