Slow Progress...

I continue to progress into the Blender For Dummies book. I'm finding that it's hard for me to stay focused on the content. I feel like I want to get to something more concrete. Still, I feel like this is the path that I should probably be taking.

As expected the book is focused on basics, such as understanding the various windows and where tools/features can be found. Unfortunately, some of the features that are referred too are still foreign at this point.

I just completed an exercise that taught the 'extrusion' function. That's a function where you take an object and stretch it. The exercise also showed other functions like sub-divide, scale, and how to constrain movement to specific axis too. It was pretty cool. I started with a simple box and ended up with skyscraper.

At this point the comments I've read about keeping one hand on the mouse and the other hand on the keyboard are proving to be true. There are a lot of good shortcut key combinations in Blender.

It looks like the book is going to get into some more interesting things in Chapter 5. It just introduced what is referred to as a 'generic semi-complex primitive' which it says every 3-D modeling program appears to have. In this case, the generic primitive is the model of a monkey head. The monkey even has a name, Suzanne.

It turns out that there is an annual Blender conference where they give out awards across a variety of categories, similar to Emmy awards or Tony Awards, but in the case of Blender they call them the Suzanne awards.

I did a Google search on the Suzanne Awards and found a link to the nominations for the Suzanne awards over the past several years. The nominee videos are available for download so I checked a few of them out. Once again, I am truly amazed at what can be done with this tool.

At this point it's hard for me to fathom gaining enough skill to be able to use Blender well enough to be able to create anything like the videos that I've just viewed, but I suppose if I just stay at it and I can get through this book. It will then just become a matter of continuing to practice. I can say with confidence that while this tool is very capable, the magnitude of new terms and concepts makes it pretty difficult to learn. I think the word for this month is 'patience'. :)