Do I Really Have To Climb That Mountain?
There was a mountain to climb, but I was ignoring it.
I had already made a few attempts, down there in the foothills, but I hadn't made it very far up.
The mountain was Blender. An application I didn't know very well, with its weird and unfamiliar ways. I watched videos on YouTube, where people used alien finger dances to perform the most basic tasks. With no gizmos on screen as a visual guide, every operation looked like the work of a blind man waving a stick around randomly.
So I bought some paid training, to try and make some more serious progress. It didn't really help, because the workflow was not familiar enough to me. I could follow the demonstrations well enough, but the methods the instructors used were not the ones I would have chosen.
Why? Well, if I had been working in Modo, I would make use of features like the Workplane, Falloffs, and Action Centres. In Blender training videos you rarely see these approaches, people tend to model with very conventional techniques.
So this piqued my curiosity. Is it even possible to use these kinds of approaches in Blender? Can you model at an offset angle? Can you set pivot points and action centres?
It turns out you can. So I set about researching all the workflows that were familiar to me in Modo, and tried to replicate them in Blender as closely as I could. Of course I didn't achieve complete parity, but I came very close.
And what that did was to open Blender up to me as a much more approachable app. I finally felt comfortable using it. Without realising it, I was now a good way up that mountain.
Because I could now model much more freely and competently, I wasn't frustrated by the unfamiliar workflow, I was using a Modo-like approach in Blender and it both worked and made sense.
You see, the problem I had when watching generic tutorials on YouTube was that the instructors were not working the way I would have worked. They didn't use the efficient modelling tricks that Modo had taught me, and so their methods were just too alien to me.
But once I figured that my workflows were in fact perfectly achievable in Blender, everything changed. Blender opened up, and finally became useful.
And so now the mountain was far less intimidating. I could climb this thing after all, and it wouldn't even be that painful. In fact it was exciting. I was having fun learning now that I had found a way in that made sense to me.
Blender is a huge app, with a massive community. I thought at first that this would be a big benefit, since there would be so much information out there. But there is too much information available, and what I needed was to find the right focus. I needed to find a way to make Blender work for me, that was the challenge.
But once I started to find my way, the rest of the application opened up.
The mountain wasn't so high after all.
You might think the mountain is too high for you, but I can help show you the way. Check out my Blender training here.