Avoid getting stuck watching endless tutorials and discover how to rapidly accelerate your learning.
As a freely available tool, Blender is astonishingly powerful and it can genuinely compete with highly expensive, industry standard, alternatives.
The problem is, this power comes with a high degree of complexity and it can be hard to master.
When you also add the frequent Blender updates into the mix, many of which come with new features, it can seem like a never ending challenge.
As someone who’s been using 3D software for over 25 years now, I’m still learning new things on a constant basis.
When learning a complex piece of software like Blender I think there are two main stages that everyone typically goes through.
The first stage of learning is mastering the basics. This involves understanding the essential elements which are required to even get started.
In the case of Blender, this includes understanding the interface, basic navigation, the creation and manipulation of objects, and learning the language and workflows of the software.
The second stage of learning involves diving deeper into specific topics.
You might start out with modelling simple objects before exploring 3D sculpting, animation, or lighting.
For both of these stages, it’s very hard to progress by trial and error alone. Most people will scour YouTube for beginner tutorials or those who wish to progress faster may look for dedicated courses.
Either way, these stages typically involve watching someone make something, or explain a principle, whilst you follow along and create your own version of their project.
Whilst everyone will usually start out in this same way, there’s a very real risk of falling into the tutorial trap.
This occurs when we keep following courses or tutorials, tying to build up a comprehensive knowledge without ever putting it into practice on our own projects.
The reality is, when we follow a step-by-step tutorial, there’s a high likelihood that we’ll come out with a good finished product because we’ve been told which steps to follow.
As soon as we try to create something original we quickly start hitting the limitations of our knowledge and our results fall short of our expectations.
This situation can quickly lead us back into following yet more step-by-step tutorials.
So how do you break the cycle and avoid the tutorial trap?
Whilst everyone needs to build a base level of knowledge by following the first two stages of learning, I believe that the faster you can move on to stage three, the better.
So, what is stage three?
This is the stage where you start to create projects of your own.
The real trick here is not to simply create a variation of a tutorial that you’ve watched. Instead, your aim should be to start a project that you have no idea how to finish!
The truth is, even if you watch an endless stream of tutorials, when you finally start to create something original of your own, you WILL encounter things that you don’t know how to do.
Real projects will lead you in unexpected directions and force you to search for answers which no course or tutorial can ever prepare you for.
It’s in searching for these answers that you’ll start to see exponential growth in your knowledge.
Now I don’t want to suggest that tutorials or courses aren’t valuable. They can be an excellent way to build a base level of knowledge or to deepen that knowledge in specific areas. But, it’s only through putting things into practice on your own projects that you’ll really test the limits of your knowledge and start to improve.
To this day, this is exactly the approach that I apply to my own projects. For my recent honeybee animation, I had no idea how to tackle the hair for the character before I started.
Rather than allowing this to become a limitation which restricted the style or type of project I created, I simply got going, working on the elements I knew how to achieve, whilst researching how to create the hair that I would need to complete the project.
To provide some more insight into my process for creating this animation, I’ve put together a breakdown video of the project. This is different to my last video about this project but obviously I need to stress here that this isn’t a tutorial!
Instead, I hope it simply provides a more detailed look at my workflow as well as a bit of inspiration to get you started with your own projects.
