alt Hacker NewsI "grew up" using Cinema 4D. Likewise I just find that the UI of blender is for whatever reason _incredibly_ not intuitive for me. I also don't really like the fact that everything is a youtube video nowadays; I guess it's easier to monetise for the kind people who make tutorials but when I learnt 3D modelling as a teenager (in ~2005 with a desire for 3D printing!) C4D just intuitively "clicked" and they had a lot of hugely detailed, technical information with a lot of physics in it. One of my dad's friends had a license for it, and I was somehow able to just internalise its various primitives and object based workflow.
I've tried many times to get to grips with Blender but for whatever reason I've found doing the simplest things very tiring. If there's a big, illustrated PDF manual out there for a recent version, I'd love to know of a link to it...or even better yet a conversion guide from C4D (!)
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Maybe this'll get me torched but one of the more useful things I've had an LLM do is generate a little tutorial for Blender. Though I'm coming in with zero 3D modeling experience, and the tutorial was for the basics, what I got (and this was with a local quantized Qwen, I'm sure the big boys would've done a better job) was fairly workable.
My issue was yes, it's always a YouTube video, and also always for shit I didn't want to do. I don't want to make a donut. I don't want to model a coffee cup, I want to make something else.
It was full of little errors here and there (the human crafted ones are too because the Blender UI changes so often), but since it had gotten me started and "in" the UI I could usually figure it out myself or use a search engine to find what I was looking for.
I'm the same. What helps me is Blender MCP. Then you can ask it how to do things and it will either do it or explain how to do it.
Maybe you're biased by children's ease of learning - neural plasticity?
I also spent a while looking for non-video resources recently. This one is a couple of versions behind but I don't think it's outdated: https://studio.blender.org/training/blender-fundamentals-45-...
The official manual is more readable than you'd think. It actually switches back and forth between "tutorial" and "reference" style. The intro sections are often in tutorial style and the detailed sub-sections are more reference style. It worked well for me for intros to specific topics. https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/index.html