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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  13hr ago (text post)   90 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for May 6, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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After years of modelling with a lightweight 3d package, I'm making a burn-the-ships switch to Blender. I've spent the last week in tutorial hell in the evenings, getting the basic workspace setup finished and digging into the modifiers and shaders systems. Current goals:

  • overview of the node-based shader system - done
  • basic setup and general modelling tools and modifiers - in progress
  • rigging basics - barely started.
  • UV/Texturing - just started, probably going to need to learn a secondary software package for this as well
  • node-based geometry modifiers - no idea how deep this well is, but the goal is to use it to generate terrain and environments at first.

We'll see how it goes.

I was never that good with 3D art, but I dicked around a bit. Don't know what it is about Blender, it's obviously quite powerful, but working with it always made me want claw my eyes out. Seems to basically be the GIMP of 3D modeling.

So, my sympathies, and I hope it goes well.

thanks much!

The thing about blender is that it's a fully-general tool, and there's a straight tradeoff between power and generality and ease-of-use. Think of the difference between a dollar store calculator and a ti-85. the basic calculator is very straightforward: six or so function buttons, ten number buttons, a clear button and that's it. the graphing calculator is completely covered in obscure buttons, many with multiple functions, and these are in turn connected to nested submenus. The calculator is a physical bottleneck to a vast ocean of capabilities, and it's so complicated because the designers are trying to surface as much of the functionality as possible.

Blender is like that but possibly worse, because the functionality is broader and much more divergent. From a user standpoint, it would probably be better to be split into a suite of ten or so different programs with strong interoperability, but probably that would create other problems. And since it's such a broad generalist program, the default interface is kinda trash for specific jobs, especially if you have prior experience with other packages. I'm working through a tutorial that puts a strong emphasis on hotkeys and custom keymapping to optimize the actual modelling workflow, and blender gets a lot more usable once you've got it set up properly and build up the necessary muscle memory.

The downside was spending two nights after the kids were down working on setup, only to realize that the folder blender was saving the settings changes to wasn't write-enabled, so all my setup was lost when I restarted my computer. not a good feel.

For those interested, this is a pretty good place to start for Blender specifically. Best advice is to open a google doc or similar and take step-by-step notes as well, and certainly write down all the hotkeys he covers.

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