Blender Tutorials ARE Getting Better, Though
The first 3D model I made in [tp no_translate=”y”]Blender[/tp] was the snow man in this comic. It’s literally 5 spheres, a cone, a light(included in default scene) and a plane. It shouldn’t have been as difficult as it was to build, but the tutorial wasn’t written well for somebody just starting with the software. Tutorials for Blender have gotten a lot better over time, although they still seem stuck on using key combinations and they don’t always say what the key combination does. Just press O. Right. I knew that I’d eventually start using key combos eventually, since they are faster, but until I can remember if I press shift, control, alt, or some combination of those before I press the letter, I’m using the menus. Blender originally didn’t even have menus. I’d hate to have learned it at that point. Oh, and NO UNDO function in the original version!
And on the subject of nobody pronouncing Z as “Zee” in tutorials, with such a low percentage of tutorials made in the United States, I get the feeling Blender isn’t used very much here. That’s a shame, because it’s really a great program, albeit with a large learning curve. If you want to learn Blender, I recommend this page on CG Cookie to overcome the largest curve within 6 minutes(Interface and navigation video). Then head over to Blender’s tutorials list for more. The list was nowhere near as good as that when I tried to start using it in either 2007 or 2008. I didn’t return to Blender until 2011 starting with this comic(with another short try in 2009 where I used it for perspective).
Transcript:
My experience when I first started watching tutorials for the Blender 3D software suite…
Voice: Greetings, folks, today we’re going to be making a simple cartoon face.
Voice: First, you want to delete the default cube*.
Ferret: Nobody likes you, cube.
Voice: Now, press shift+A and select UV sphere. Set the diffuse to whatever color you want.
Ferret: Diffuse? Huh?
Note: *Beginning of every tutorial, even if the next step is to insert a cube.
Voice: Now move the cursor over here, do this, press S, R twice, let’s edit the specularity, make these rings blue (I won’t explain how I selected those), duplicate, R, E, 4, Shift+Ctrl+plus, Alt Gr, F5, a href {}, tilde, ctrl+ñ, shift+Ä, alt+®, ¥, ¬, Þ…
Ferret: What do these commands even do? I won’t remember these! Are they in the menus anywhere???*
Note: *They’re all in the menus, except the fake ones.
Voice: And now ctrl+zed, ctrl+zed, ctrl+zed, ctrl+zed…
Ferret: What in blimey is a zed?!
Note: *It’s nice that Blender has such an international community, but really, is BlenderCookie the ONLY source of tutorials in my dialect? (Zed is how the letter Z is pronounced in Canada, England and Australia)
A tutorial that doesn’t explain what it’s telling you to do isn’t a tutorial. It’s a… thing. But it misses the whole point of tutorialness. It amazes me that people can invest half an hour to do this without stopping for two seconds to think about what it’s actually meant to accomplish.