Reply To: [ENDED] BC1-1801 – January Class Homepage – Getting Started with 3D Modeling & Blender

Haven’t taken time yet to do this last homework.. .though finding something that could be done in a relatively short time frame that would push me might be a challenge… Most of my better stuff I find take several weeks (or more) of work before I like them… outside of the abstracts that are more exploration anyway.

But as this week comes to a close, I wanted to pass on one more nugget of wisdom by sharing my biggest mistake when it comes to Blender.

Believe it or not, it’s not anything to do with anything inside Blender itself.

No, my biggest mistake the first 5 or 6 years of learning Blender… Was simply not opening Blender for long stretches at a time.  I’d pull it up to do a project, do a few tutorials.. then abandon it for months at a time.

The problem with this approach is that you don’t get any consistency.

Even after I took Jonathan Williamson’s “Mastering Modeling in Blender Workshop” (a lot of the stuff we learned in Week 2, but with a little more detail… an old thing they did here at CG Cookies several years back), I would go weeks at times without opening Blender.  I was more consistent, but still didn’t use it as much as I intended.

It wasn’t until I made a conscious effort to spend time at the least every week but more often on a daily basis before I began seeing big improvements in my work. Now, I’m not perfect with this effort even now. But I’m far more consistent than I was.

Judging by the work I’ve seen this week, many are at least where I was 3 or 4 years ago.  Keep learning. Keep pushing.  If not daily, try to learn something new every week. Try to work on something at least 3-4 times a week. More if you can.

While this course instruction can teach you the how to, you won’t acquire the skill at a deeper level unless you keep practicing. Kent (and the others at CG Cookie… or any other person who makes a tutorial) can only tell you how to do so much.  The best way to learn is by doing, and the more you do (and the more often you do), the more (and faster) you learn.

I mentioned in week 3 my 30 day sculpting challenge I did. One of the reasons that was such a big boost for me at the time wasn’t just the sheer quantity of stuff that I did, but the daily effort of trying to do something. My ability to sculpt was vastly improved just in 30 days by that daily effort.

Looking back, if I had started this quest of daily learning and daily practicing in Blender way back when I started 10 years ago, I would be so much further along in my own journey and way closer to being able to produce the kinds of things I want to do.

Now that you have a model, if you haven’t already, I’d recommend looking at the Fundamentals of Texturing, Shading, and Lighting courses. These will show you how to add materials to your objects and prepare them for rendering.  And Kent’s Shading Forge series is another great set of lessons on making the materials for your objects.

Or you could dive into creating characters and rigging, another fun area to explore.

Either way, find something. Take the next step. Keep learning and growing. And someday, we just might be seeing your work featured!