GETTING THE MOST OUT OF BLENDER – FROM BEGINNER TO EXPERT

Whether you’re just starting in Blender or are already a power user, industrial designer Brennan Letkeman outlines helpful ways of getting the most out of the software If you’re just starting in Blender, what do you think is a good way to learn more? Tutorials are great, of course, but I’ve always approached tutorials as a small stepping stone for a bigger project. I’ve always had something in my head that I wanted to achieve, and then pieced together different tutorials on how to achieve individual details and components rather than just following “Oh, today we’re going to learn about this thing you probably don’t care about” blindly.And then once you’re more experienced?You’ll pick up hotkeys, you’ll pick up methodologies as you go (and realistically, just make up your own) and they’ll become increasingly comfortable and efficient with time.Blender usually has fi ve ways to do basically any single task, so you’ll arrive at the ones you prefer and link up nicely with each other.What are the core parts of Blender you think an experienced artist should master?Learn lighting, texturing and rendering. If you ever watch VFX breakdown videos – the ones about how they made your favorite big budget Hollywood movies–you’ll notice that the model sand geometry are actually really basic. Around 80 percent of what makes a movie animation cool and realistic is lighting,materials,particles,getting depth of field and physical  camera effects right. A bad model with great rendering is better than a great model with terrible rendering.