how's y'alls experience been lol

Pretty good. I always dread making textures/materials and yet another project sits untouched for weeks. (Any tips welcome)

Shork
- Don't you dare @sharkfucker420 His name is Stefan and he is my roommate.
blahaj
I got into vertex shading in lieu of doing anything UV-coordinate related.
For reference, that's what Mario Sunshine used to fake most of the game's shadows, and the original Homeworld used them to create the entire skybox back when 3d-dedicated hardware wasn't too common.
making materials/textures sucks
Don’t. In a production pipeline, that’s someone else’s job ;-)
- It's still good to know how to do.
I also made a shark one time! :)

Yeah this should have been done in a proper CAD software but fuck it, i love blender. I call it the "PCB squeezer 8000" and that is all the explanation i can give.

with the utmost respect, who hurt you?
- The proprietary enterprise software license landscape ;(
Damn, from what I can tell, that looks pretty good. How did you do that?
- The black lines in the middle are part of an imported pcb layout converted to curves with a .dxf importer plugin. Parts of those i used to knife project the shapes onto a plane to create cutouts. Then i extruded the planes and added pin holes afterwards. So far its only been 3D printed for testing but eventually it will be machined out of metal to be used to press out small flexible PCBs from a sheet.

Frustrating when I accidently switch something into another mode and cant figure out what the hell I did or how to get back to the state I am familiar with.

It is amazing that it is free and open source though, it feels like a gift so I dont get too tilted when I get frustrated.

There are well made OSS UIs and there are kludgey, unplanned OSS UIs. Blender is in the latter along with GIMP.
- Gimp is only kludgey if you're expecting it to respond exactly like Photoshop.
- blender has great design and it's very practical. needs getting used to but once you do it's really good, to the point that I wish graphic design softwares used some of its controls.
- Agreed but the difference is that blender is a powerhouse of capability whereas gimp is a decent enough raster image editor, so I give more slack to blender (though I love and use both).

My first experience with blender was my project being deleted because i forgot to save, my computer crashed and the folder where autosaves are in resets when you turn off the computer

the folder where autosaves are in resets when you turn off the computer
What? That might be the most obviously retarded programming decision I've ever heard of.
- Not deleting system temp files would probably become worse very quickly. Especially if they are big enough to fill up substantial amounts of space. Configuribg proper autosaving is the correct way.
im surprised autosave worked at all
in all the time i used blender, it never once worked, neither on windows nor linux

I made a donut and it took me like 13 effing hours lmao

Okay speed racer no need to show off

🤣 Her face on the monitor says it all

The Blender Guru doughnut tutorial is the winning starting tutorial IMHO.

EDIT: The one Ludrol linked to elsewhere in the comments.

The cables seem to have to few polygons and the monitor stand has a shape that's obviously created by subtracting two cylinder and a box from a bigger cylinder. Other than that, the wall and table texture and lighting looks realistic.
Is the reflection modeled or just a flat image? the fan looks 3D, but the face looks cut out.

I did this things like 3-5x

Modeling_a_Gingerbread_Man

In version 2.49!!! booya!

And watched a ton of youtube stuff.

Mostly fun actually, because I didn't really "need" to know anything, I just browsed around tried stuff.

Pre-2.5 UI flashback
But I keep Right-Click-Select control still.
- Yeah same. The ctrl shift alt mouse wheel hot keys are a dream, no idea how other people manage without them.

I made a game in Blender when it had the game engine built in. It worked great for a while. Then, when I updated to Windows 8.1 from 7, it stopped working entirely. Then, it started working again with Windows 10, but the colors were all messed up. And inexplicably, it works like new again. It's 4:3 ratio because that's what my monitor was at the time. Holy moly that was longer ago than I thought...

You shoot toxic waste at the sun by pressing space. You dodge it (you are the sun) with WASD. If the toxic waste collides, you get points. Risk-reward kinda thing. The more you press space, the more toxic waste is flying around, the more collisions, but harder to dodge.

There are three rounds that are exactly as long as the songs I chose as background music that I wrote years before I made the game. Haha!

There's an awesome secret level that I probably should have made easier to get to. Just play through the game and don't press space. Haha!

The Blender Game Engine was how I got my start making games! Were you active on the blenderartists forums back then?
Here's the best game I made in Blender (like 14 years ago)
- Your game looks cool! I vaguely remember getting help from the Blenderartists forums, but I wouldn't say I was active.

I made a base human model and gave it a moving animation

I thought for a first try of someone who's never touched the software before it was actually really good

My dad, supportive as shit man in almost every situation, told me it looked like shit. Tbf it did

His cousin, who works professionally in Blender (did work on RWBY actually) said the same thing, but also blamed Blender for it and chuckled

I'm not really an artist to begin with, let alone a 3D sculptor, so I only cry a little when I use it

The face of anguish 🤣

made this goobe's fur today

This is relevant to their struggle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Obms-x-J6uA

There have been a few times where I'll sit down and say, "today will finally be the day I learn blender"

Then I open Fusion 360 or OnShape or TonkerCad

Sometimes frustrating, sometimes fun, but it really depends on what I'm doing and if there are any tutorials available. Retopology has never been a good time but I do enjoy messing around with shaders.

#ItGetsBetter

I made karts for STK ;)

though they're horrible lol

What a legend

I keep trying to make that doughnut. And maybe someday I will succeed - or not.

Find a good beginner course on Udemy or one of the longer video series on YouTube.

https://www.udemy.com/course/blender-environments/

This was my first course. Got it on sale for 15$

There is one ~~ring~~ donut to rule them all
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjEaoINr3zgEPv5y--4MKpciLaoQYZB1Z
You really don't need to pay a dime to learn Blender. There are so many tutorials out there on just about everything it's insane.
- Yes but the free classes don’t have as much structure or often don’t come with supplemental learning materials like say assets or finished project files. Some classes come with active support from the teacher who will answer your questions if you are stick on a particular section. The comments on a YouTube video aren’t always as helpful.
  YouTube is great for learning specific features and techniques, but I think taking one of the bigger classes is a great starting point for a complete beginner who is ready to do more than just the donut tutorial.

Dark Wall-E?

Has no one caught that this is square hole? This is one of the most beautiful blender models I've ever seen.

Lmao I hadn't even thought of that

Made a 3D model of a specifically bent wire. Single Bezier curve with some thickness. Never touched it since (2019).

Why mess with perfection

The real frustrating part is when you understand that extending a geometry still creates the nodes but still work on the project having hundred if not thousands of duplicate nodes absolutely fking your work flow

I keep text files that list the hotkeys I use for each specific job in Blender.

Some of my hobby work:

https://m.youtube.com/shorts/fn2MytE9X8s

sounds like a VIM learning experience

I have a 3D printer and use blender for making or adapt models to print. While there is a bit of a learning threshold to overcome at the start, I've found blender really good to use.

I've been impressed with how powerful it is and the quality of YouTube tutorials. The vids from the 3d Printing Professor helped me to get over that initial hump with blender

yeah thats about right

You got this!

I thought this was a subtle joke - the letters under the monitor almost spell "blender" so it seemed like a clever subversion of your expectations.

However, I've never used Blender, so my new theory after reading the comments is that it's just hard.

It has a learning curve but I don't think it's that bad once you learn it.

They are crying cuz of windows ;(

honestly? that was my whole experience for the time i tried using blender (for over a year) biggest reasons out fo the many why i stopped was i just suck at it, there was little to no improvement for what i did want to do and the expanding knowledge even further required even more expertise in topics that separately needed years of experience as well