So tutorials are the equivalent to classes, except you get to choose the content that interest you. Following tutorials seems bland and dumb, as obviously you don’t want to model a donut, or a teddy bear, or any other gimmicky shit, however it introduces you to the tools of the program and teaches you how they function, how to use them, and the little hidden bells and whistles within each function.
It’s kind like, you don’t know what you don’t know. How can you learn which tools you need to achieve your goal if you’ve never actually used them before. Tutorials show you that, step by step.
The only other ways to learn are getting a book that gives you structured tutorials, finding a good video set (such as someone from YouTube), or self-learning through interaction with the software…so not really sure what sort of answer you’re looking for.
I'll repeat myself here - these renders just look so tasty and tangible. Really great job on the texture details, and I love your explanations for your design choices.
We have a new icon! Thank you for this tasty render, really nice job on the colors.
Gonna have to agree on the ortho view... It's a stylistic choice but realism matters, too.
In case anyone's wondering why it's rendered with slight perspective instead of using an orthographic camera: that way the light streaks and reflections can have a nice fall off instead of every flat surface being lit similarly. Plus, I don't really like the feel of realistic objects being 100% orthographic, it has a weird vibe to me.
For me it was sheer stubbornness that got me through. Realistically, it's important to know that a model is made up of a series of very different kinds of tasks. When I was learning, I focused on only one of those tasks at a time. For instance, I would just sculpt for a while and became familiar with those tools. Then, when I felt I had a good handle on that, I asked "What's next?"
Sculpting, Hard surface modeling, retopology, UV unwrapping, texturing, shaders, rigging, renders... Pick one thing and forget the rest for the time being. It becomes a lot easier to handle and learn when you're looking at Blender with blinders on. You can't really get around using tutorials because learning this software is like climbing a vertical wall for someone that hasn't used modeling software before. But it can be a lot easier finding tutorials and answers you need when your scope is narrowed down to doing one specific thing at a time.
So, figure out the steps for whatever pipeline you're interested in. Then break those steps down and work to understand them one at a time.
Pick one thing and forget the rest for the time being
This helped me out a lot. As I wrote before: I wanted to create low poly models. Not having much success with that, I ended up trying sculpting and loving it. Now I have my own MyMiniFactory store and patreon.
I'm the exact same as you and I don't really enjoy plainly following tutorials. What might work for you is to keep doing what you're doing, and let that shape your growth.
Using your experience with the donut tutorial as an example, you went through the effort of doing something different, but all your textures are stretched out. You might ask a beginner 3d/blender community why, and they might tell you about how uv mapping and texturing works. You can take that information and follow up by watching a tutorial on texturing.
3d art is definitely hard to get into, and the biggest challenge when growing your skill is keeping your motivation and practicing as frequently as possible. Every issue you can see with your models is an opportunity to grow, and you can become amazing if you keep it up!
For blender it's the tradition (and expectation) of using youtube tutorials. There are also quite a few courses available for cheap on Udemy and the like, which means they might also be available on less legitimate places . These courses will teach more theory rather than having you copy steps.
The best advice I can give is to keep trucking, and make things you are interested in, and which look interesting - but keep it within your scope of skill. Find artists you enjoy on Artstation/Youtube/Sketchfab, and try and replicate what they do. Knowing why/how things work is better than learning how to do the same trick everyone is doing.
Blender is great to learn box modeling in, so perhaps start with that and learn by doing a bit every day. I myself taught myself Blender by creating low-poly versions of my DnD characters, inspired by the-regressor on tumblr/sketchfab.
Skills are transferable, so once you've got the hang of that, step it up and go for more complicated subjects.
Share your 3D modeling thoughts and renders
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