I have the sudden urge to try my hand at 3D art.
I'll make something 3D and post it here hehe.
OOOH I could make us some crusty emotes!
Is blender hard?
It's a little tricky but people learn it all the time. The Blender Guru "donut tutorial" is a good starting point.t
jus make sure the lid is locked before you press the button
The worst thing about learning it is accidentally clicking something before you know how to un-click it. Fucking up a viewport and derailing a fun tutorial sucks ass.
As others have said, learning 3d modeling is kind of a pain in the ass in general, but Blender is so incredibly well documented, and there are so many tutorials out there for it, that I would say that it's incredibly accessible.
If you're approaching it casually and don't mind doing everything very slowly in the beginning it should be pretty fun. It gets hard if you're aiming to do things efficiently because there's a ton to learn in that case
It's quite easy to get started (see the generic "donut" tutorial series) but sculpting/modeling is never going to be easy
I casually began looking into 3d sculpting a while ago and ended up listening something a pro artist said on this topic. This was him comparing zbrush and blender, mind you, so he wasn't talking about the medium in general. But he said that while there are some areas where zbrush might be better, blender is at the least perfectly adequate. Biggest advantage of blender is that by virtue of it being free it has the most community resources (tutorials, documentation, forums, etc.). Moreover, the fundamentals of sculpting translate between different software. So he highly recommended blender for newcomers between the two.
It also seemed like you really need something like a graphic tablet if you wanna do it somewhat seriously.
It's really not that bad, it used to be worse. There's plenty of tutorials, and while Blender is a bit complicated, you don't need to learn all of it to get good at it.
blender is pretty miserable, maybe working in 3d is just shit no matter what and it's not blender's fault, but if 2d art tools were as bad as blender nobody would make digital art.
maybe the process is better in a classroom setting?
Working in 3D is hard no matter the program. Learning how to do it well requires a good grasp of geometry, boundary logic, extrusion and cuts. Basically if you know how to look at a block and what cuts you need to make from it to create something, you can make anything, but if you are thinking of it as a drawing program, it is significantly different.
Animation is awful though and I am very bad at it.
my math fundamentals are decent, it's the gulf between what i expect to be able to do and what i'm able to look up and figure out how to do that's a lot of my problem.
the subdivisions and patterns i can see as a human are meaningless to the machine and functions like select similar, shrinkwrap and select edge loop are so dumb it's frequently faster to drag select hundreds of edges two at a time to fill a gap with faces, or vertices one by one to remove part of something
Yup, sometimes it works fine, sometimes it doesn't can only experience can kinda tell the two conditions apart.
Blender has a reputation for being difficult to learn, but the UI has actually improved a lot these last few years and its much more user friendly.
It's very fun and rewarding
It is complex, but there are more resources and tutorials than ever today.
Animated shitpost emojis
:mystery-emote:
:sicko-pog:
I think it depends on what / how much you want to do with it.
For me, I consider myself to have no particular artistic talent, but I can still entertain myself by making interesting shapes just with box-modeling and the subdivision-surface modifier. Hell, election night I was trashed and making plaid patterns all night in the procedural texture thing they have. That shit was great.
If you wanted to do something like a fully animated 3d character or something, that will obviously be harder, with 3d sculpting and animation being their own whole skill-sets. Also "re-topology" is a thing (if you make a 3d sculpt it's a wad of triangles that you can't really use, so you have to re-create the shape on top of the existing shape, but with good topology), and that shit looks miserable to do.
There are loads of blender tutorials on youtube as well, including short and sweet tutorials on how to achieve specific effects / techniques. Keep in mind some of it is tied to annoying "hustle grindset" kinds of content, so it may stink up the algo a little.
I think Blender's UI is pretty good these days but there are still some things that are needlessly convoluted. often times you will have to enable some obscure setting to make things work. also stuff changes a lot so older tutorials might be outdated
I'd say 3D art is pretty complicated in general so there's a lot to learn if you're just starting out, but it can be very rewarding
