This is about the tenth time I’ve tried to learn Blender. Judging by the notes I’ve accumulated so far, I’ve been at it this time for about a month and a half. From what I remember, what spurred me to try this time was either known-Blender-guru Craig from Hive13 mentioning Voodoo Camera Tracker (which can output to a Blender-readable format), or my search for something that would make it easier to do the 2D visualizations and algorithmic art I always end up doing (and I heard Blender had some crazy node-based texturing system…
Having a goal for what I want to render has been working out much better than just trying to learn the program and hope the inspiration falls into place (like it would appear all of my previous attempts involved). This really has nothing to do with Blender specifically, but really anything that is suitably complex and powerful. I have just had this dumb tendency in the past few years to try to learn all of the little details of a system without first having a motivation to use them, despite this being completely at odds with nearly all things I consider myself to have learned well. I’m seeing pretty clearly how that approach is rather backwards, for me at least.
I took a lot of notes early on where I tried to map out a lot of its features at a very high level, but most of this simply didn’t matter - what mattered mostly fell into place when I actually tried to make something in Blender. However, knowing some of the fundamental limitations and capabilities did help.
The interface is quirky for sure, but I am finding it to be pretty intuitive after some practice. Most of my issues came from the big UI overhaul after 2.4, as I’m currently using 2.55/2.56 but many of the tutorials refer to the old version, and even official documentation for 2.5 is sometimes nonexistent - but can I really complain? They pretty clearly note that it is still in beta.
However, I’m starting to make sense of it. Visions and concepts that I previously felt I had no idea how to even approach in Blender suddenly are starting to feel easy or at least straightforward (what I’m talking about more specifically here is how many things became trivial once I knew my way around Bezier splines). This is good, because I’ve got pages and pages of ideas waiting to be made. Some look like they’ll be more suited to Processing (like the 2nd image down below) or OpenFrameworks or one of the too-many-completely-different-versions of Acidity I wrote.
Processing sketch
This was made directly from some equations. I don't know how I'd do this in Blender.
POV-Ray was the last program that I 3D-rendered extensively in (this was mostly 2004-2005, as my much-neglected DeviantArt shows, and it probably stress-tested the Athlon64 in the first new machine I built more than any other program did). It’s quite different from Blender in most ways possible. POV-Ray makes it easy to do clean, elegant, mathematical things, many of which would be either impossible or extremely ugly in Blender. It’s a raytracer; it deals with neat, clean analytic surfaces, and tons of other things come for free (speed is not one of them). However, I never really found a modeler for POV-Ray that could integrate well with the full spectrum of features the language offered, and a lot of things just felt really kludgey. Seeing almost no progress made to the program, and being too lazy to look into MegaPOV, I decided to give up on it at some point. My attempts to learn something that implemented RenderMan resulted mostly in me seeing how ingeniously optimized and streamlined RenderMan is and not actually making anything in it.
Blender feels really “impure” in comparison. It deals with ugly things like triangle meshes and scanline rendering… ugly things that make it vastly more efficient to accomplish many tasks. I’m quickly finding better replacements for a lot of the techniques I relied on with POV-Ray. For instance, for many repetitive or recursive structures, I would rely on some simple looping or recursion in POV-Ray (as its scene language was Turing-complete); this worked fairly well, but it also meant that no modeler I tried would be able to grok the scene. In Blender, I discovered the Array modifier; while it’s much simpler, it is still very powerful. On top of this, I have the interactivity of the modeler still present. I’ve built some things interactively with all the precision that I would have had in POV-Ray, but I built them in probably 1/10 the time. That’s the case for the two work-in-progress Blender images here:
