diamondtea

Blender - or any super successful FOSS - feels to me like stumbling upon amazing vehicles and technology left behind in the fields in a post-war environment.

Who knows who made this thing, or where it was made. I discovered it, let’s see how it works.

You start twisting knobs and the damn thing turns on! You fly it around a bit, you get a ton of use out of it, maybe you reverse engineer it, fork it, make your own version.

Eventually a corporate knock-off hits the market and you buy one. They solved all the little problems and painted it with clear coat.

But there’s something missing, and I come crawling back to the field - where I keep finding all these interesting machines

As both a Photoshop and Blender expert (used both professionally for many years), almost all of it is heuristic/technique (memorizing what/where things are) not unlike learning kitchen utensils and the locations of the drawers they’re in.

So it’s

1) knowing what you even need to do in the first place to make the sphere, or swap the texture, or delete the lights, or etc.

2) where that tool is and how it works

Then later you can get into hotkeys and what your workspace looks like, and you can develop more of a command of things. Just start very goal oriented and pretend you’re staying in an Airbnb in a foreign country - you just need to figure out how the stuff works and where they are.

Hope that helps! Oh yeah and then there’s the typical OS level menus like saving, exporting - you probably natively know how to do that stuff already. So you can also use Blender to convert say glb to fbx and so-on, while making little edits you might need.

Be obsessed with your project so you have to use these things.

An A for an I makes the whole world dumb