When you’re new to Blender, you may (okay, most definitely will) face some common “beginner obstacles”. That’s to be expected with such a swiss army knife of features. However, a lot of these are the same for everyone. So here’s a list of what I think are the most common issues when starting off in Blender. And how to overcome them, of course!
1) Getting overwhelmed. Yes, it’s cool that you can do modeling, sculpting, texturing, animation, video editing, etc all in one package. But won’t it take forever to learn all these things? What if you only have one hour per day, after you come home tired from work?
Well, nobody says you have to learn it all. If you look at some of the more famous creators in the Blender community, they really focus on one specific thing. Whether it be sculpting like Zach from CG Boost, making real-time Eevee materials like Ducky3D, stop-motion style animation like SouthernShotty, Photorealism like Polyfjord, low-poly game assets like Grant Abbitt… they all have their specific focus.
In fact, I highly doubt you could find someone inside the Blender Foundation itself, who could explain all the tools to you.
So just relax: Pick something that genuinely interests you and focus on getting good at that.
2) Feeling discouraged by seeing other people’s work. Good news: this means you have good taste. If you didn’t feel this way as an artist, something would be wrong. Unfortunately, this is part of what it’s like to be a creative person. There will ALWAYS be someone out there, who’s better. Even great artists still feel this way.
Okay, maybe that’s not really good news. But it’s true… and the only solution is to compare yourself today, with yourself from the past. Is your work now better than it used to be? Great! You’ve got this.
Don’t worry about what some Blender master like Ian Hubert is doing. He’s just been doing this for a long, long time. And (see point one) he’s been focusing on very specific things all that time (modeling, photo-texturing and compositing).
3) I only have so much time. There’s another new version of Blender? I can’t keep up with this stuff! Yes, they’re working hard over there at the Blender Foundation. Sometimes it can be frustrating (also for tutorial creators - I often have to spend hours changing screenshots in my e-Book just because a button or function was changed to a different location in the UI, or a keyboard shortcut was changed, instantly making several old tutorial videos outdated).
But, you don’t really have to keep up with this. Whenever there’s a new release, people ask me about my e-Book if it’s still compatible. Blender really doesn't change that much between versions.
It’s mostly speed improvements, and here and there some new functions. Only when they released Blender 2.8 did I have to basically completely re-write my book. Luckily it wasn’t as big yet at that time. Took a while though!
Maybe people have some kind of 'update PTSD' from that big 2.79 to 2.8 change, and they now think it’s like that for every release. But compare Blender 3.6 to Blender 4.1, you’d have to look really hard to spot the differences.
So while it can be fun to try out “experimental builds”, which sometimes contain really cool new features (by the way, don’t use them in important projects, as they may crash), you don’t have to.
I’d recommend in fact, staying with the LTS versions (Long Term Support). These are specifically aimed at studios working with Blender, who are not keen on changes but prefer to have a reliable, stable version of Blender.
So don’t feel obligated to keep up with all that stuff. SouthernShotty does nice update videos so you can at least know if there’s anything new that peaks your interest.
4) Remembering the keyboard shortcuts. Blender is optimized for use with keyboard shortcuts. That’s actually a good thing, as it lets you work faster. But for new users, this can be challenging.
The solution, is to simply use the UI instead of shortcuts. Everything can be found in the user interface. This also gives you the chance to see other options adjacent to the thing you were looking for, and maybe discover some features you didn’t know about.
If you want to have a nice keyboard shortcut overview, CG Boost has a free PDF that you can print out.
So my advice would be, start with just finding things in the user interface. Print out that PDF, and then over time learn keyboard shortcuts at your own pace. You’ll be a keyboard master before you know it! And to be honest, it’s mostly the same shortcuts you use, over and over again.
5) My computer is too slow! It may seem that way, but that’s actually because of a different, common issue which a lot of beginners face. And that is actually that it’s easy to bog down a scene with loads of geometry or inefficient workflows.
Most computers, even really cheap ones, are pretty good at 3D these days. Even your smartphone can probably run a 3D app like Nomad sculpt pretty well.
If you’re sculpting, you may just not be doing it in a the most optimal way. You really need to follow the right workflow (keep things separate, use voxel remeshing at first, then quad remesh it and continue with a Multires modifier, etc - for more sculpting tips check out my video course).
For scenes with many models, it’s important to know the difference between duplicates and linked duplicates. In the latter case, you’re just re-using the same data over and over again.
You can create an enormous forest of trees with literally trillions of Faces on your crappy old laptop with this technique. For your laptop, it's all just one tree. But if they were all unique duplicated trees, at some point while duplicating them your computer would freeze up.
So it’s important to know the right workflows and keep your scenes as light and efficient as possible. Trust me, that cheap laptop can go pretty far!
(To be continued in part 2…)
