Over the past few years I’ve tried getting started on 3D design, with marginal success. 3D design packages are generally prohibitively expensive, or require some form of subscription service (at least the ones that I could find). So I was very excited to find Blender, a piece of software that was free to use and seemed to have a large community of users and developers behind it. Of course I immediately jumped to the YouTube tutorials to learn how to use it, but I came away disillusioned. The user interface felt unintuitive, the movement of objects was not as I expected or desired and the sheer amount of keyboard shortcuts was overwhelming. So that was that for Blender.
At least until I randomly stumbled on CG Fast Track a few years later. Again, wanting to try Blender and looking if any updated tutorials were available, the Sword In The Stone tutorial popped up. The calmness and step-by-stepness of the teacher made Blender easy to use for the first time. I actually understood what I was doing and why. When I finished the tutorial I went over to the website and saw there was another treasure trove of tutorials available, seemingly for a bit of a high price, but if the quality of teaching stayed the same then it was worth it.
And it was.
So far I have followed a few of the courses there and I have learned more than I ever could from following tedious or way too fast YouTube tutorials. There is an excellent system in place where each video is accompanied by a series of step-by-step screenshots, together with a very active Discord community. So if at any point you get stuck, it is very easy to retrace your steps or to ask for help. Next to that it has given me a good foundation to be able to follow the YouTube tutorials now and understand enough to implement the concept in my own designs.
This is not meant as a sales pitch or anything related, simply a show of appreciation for the system that was created there. I can only say, if you are interested in learning Blender (or 3D design workflow in general) and recognize anything of what I have written above, check out the Sword In The Stone series on YouTube. And hopefully it will be just as effective.
The main reason for writing this is to give some context to the rest of the blog posts in this category. I would like to post some progress of what I have created and possibly share some interesting things I figure out.
For now, here is a sneak preview of my version of the Sword In The Stone.
