KenneyCan we appreciate for a minute that at some point great people came together and created top tier free software that in the past would cost you thousands of dollars?
Leon@kenney every time i use blender i love it more
MacBalance@leon I’m very much still a Blender novice but I feel like I often hate it when I’m trying to do something, then love it and want to do more when I’m not.
Oddly about the same way I feel about exercising.
@MacBalance I know how you feel, it takes a *long* time to build up a good baseline where if you have a goal you can figure out how to get there.
My personal recommendation to novices (which I would definitely count myself among still) is once you have the basics of putting stuff in the scene down, to invest time in learning the procedural tools, namely modifiers, material nodes and geometry nodes. Because they’re fully non-destructive I find it a lot easier to get into a playful+experimental flow that helps me break down the work into steps and get where I'm going.
@leon Part of my Blender frustration is occasional unexplained weirdness. For OSS it’s pretty well made, but it has occasional rough edges.
The other part is that it’s a very huge Swiss Army knife. My use case is making wargame terrain: I’m skipping a lot of animation tools and even shaders.
I should be sketching more ideas to rough them out so I can try creating them.
@MacBalance totally. It’s crazy how frequently you have to apply transforms for example. They could do a way better job visually communicating transforms hierarchy I think.
But every tool I use has rough spots and for the complexity of the space blender is pretty astonishing even for commercial software. Like I use JetBrains IDEs which are very good and fairly expensive. But they just, when it comes down to it, edit text and I still get issues cropping up on the reg.