Reply To: CG Cookie as a Whole

[Kent Trammell]

Hi @Onionhead – First I want to affirm your frustration. 3D is a profoundly difficult artform and, as a beginner, you’re in the most difficult season of your 3D journey.

I like to tell the story of my first few months learning 3D as a teenager. Back in 2003 I created my first character with sub-d modeling and added my first rig. Many HOURS of work leading up to the big moment where I could finally animate my first 3D character. I set some keyframes then pressed play on the timeline. My heart sank as the viewport played back at maybe 10 fps. That was my breaking point and I called my father at work with a shaky voice and tears in my eyes to vent that my computer can’t handle 3D, I don’t know what I’m doing, and my dream is on life support. After the poor guy talked me off the ledge (not having a clue what I was talking about) I discovered that A) the viewport couldn’t playback a subdivided and rigged character (duh) and B) there’s this thing called “rendering” which is how we get final beauty frames into movie format (i.e. not viewport playback). My dream was saved!

I tell you that to say: You’re in good company to be frustrated. Everyone who has learned 3D has been exactly where you are. This art form is super hard with countless opportunities for things to go wrong. On top of that, the endless knowledge, skills, concepts, and tricks related to 3D take a long time to discover/learn/take root. It’s a perfect storm to frustrate a learning journey.

You’re right that we maintain old videos / courses. What’s less obvious is the courses we’ve retired over the years. We only keep courses that we believe maintain a genuine insight into a process or concept within CG.

Omar is exactly right about the problem of recording training for a software that updates every 4 months. My HUMAN course took me 2 years to record – so many versions came and went in that two years. Blender version is an easy criticism to apply to any instructor, whether here or elsewhere. But few seem to respect that it’s impossible to solve. Which is why no one does it in the entire Blender educational space. Unless you know someone who keeps every one of their tutorials updated with the latest version of blender – please send me a link!

The best we can do to mitigate the sea of Blender versions is to stick to LTS versions. This is a recommendation directly from the Blender foundation for educators. But beyond that, the best advice is to embrace a Blender-fluid posture, both for learning and for executing. For learning, it’s best to use the version of Blender any given course was recorded with. You can spot this in the bottom right corner of the Blender UI and all prior versions of Blender are available here. Trying to follow a course while using a new/different Blender version is begging for confusion (and frustration).

Again, Omar is right that, even though Blender updates are frequent, the art and technique of computer graphics is 99% unchanged in the past 20 years. If your goal is to [make awesome stuff] then the Blender version literally does not matter.

Frustration while learning 3D is entirely warranted! Just don’t let the frustration get the better of you. Keep developing your skills and adaptability and you will experience the deep satisfaction of 3D creation.

Two questions I have for you:

1. Which courses of ours have varying quality? We strive for the best educational quality possible, so it would be helpful for us to diagnose specific courses.
2. Can you share a bit about what you want to do with 3D / Blender? Perhaps we could point you to more relevant courses.