Please Recommend Good Blender Instructional Material

[Wug]

Does anyone have recommendations for books or DVDs to learn Blender?

I'm interested in hard surface modeling with the intention of printing models. I'm not interested in rendering or animation.

Initially, Youtube was a great source for learning the basics. Now I waste a lot of time with videos that aren't helpful. Youtube seems like a poor place to learn best practices.

The material needs to be reasonably up to date. Recently, I watched a video on precision modeling someone made on an older version of Blender. I couldn't find any of the menus used in the video and entering the names on the menus into the search produced no results.

A while back someone (I think it was here) recommended a course that was modeling a Vette. I wondering if it's still current.

Hopefully I can get the local library to buy this.

Thanks

Mike

[widget]

On YouTube,search for Grant Abbitt.
"Blender 2.0 for Beginners Full Course"

[Bellerophon]

Widget, I take it you use Blender. Is it easier to learn now?

The word on it years ago was that it was designed for productivity at the expense of learnability. I tried it about 8-10 years ago but cut my losses early, because it was clearly going to take a huge investment in time and I already knew Autocad. But I would give it another try.

[widget]

, I'm fiddling around with it myself. Trying to work up meshes to go with pepakura
.But from the two lessons I've seen so far, he knows what
he's talking about .

[Zubie]

The thing I think with Blender is you got to have a clear sense of exactly what it is you want to do with it. I say this from the opinion that Blender is actually too powerful; meaning there are so many features and plug-ins that trying to master it all would indeed be too time consuming. I use it pretty much exclusively for card modeling so I've been able to master most of what I needed to do with it fairly quickly - making and editing figures made up of flat polygons. Still I will agree that getting good tutorials can be hard since unfortunately not everybody who puts stuff up are really that good at teaching the stuff. Drawing up an object in 10 or so minutes can easily make many details fall by the wayside. I have yet to successfully understand how to get textures on these things

At a con sometime back, I brought up the complexity of Blender up as an issue with a game developer. The response was that indeed it is very difficult to do all the Blender work with one person, and for development purposes the tasks of backgrounds, textures, and modeling was often broken up with several people. Now that is for game development, not just creating objects which seems to be your (the OP) objective. The point is Blender could do that. If your intent is solely generating digital objects for 3d printing, you might also want to look in on freeware CAD (or at least much cheaper than Autocad license+subscription) software which is out there. I know that some of these use more solid modeling techniques that may be more intuitively obvious to use than Blender's whose origins are really in digital graphics.

One thing that may not be as critical as it used to be is that Blender has evolved immensely over the last 10 years. By the same toke it has inherited a lot of methods and features that date back to it's earlier non-windows-type implementation. By this I mean it does still make a lot of use of key bindings, rc file-type settings, scripts, mode context, etc which are probably familiar to anyone using applications on Unix/X11 c. 2000. Of course Blender has moved on quite a bit from there, but as a result old documentation and some people's tutorials might be a bit dated if it's over 10yo

[Wug]

Thanks

[brt]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccOk5JW ... x=2&t=459s

Blender 2.9 for beginners. I have watched part of it and it seems like a good introduction.