Old Dog's Blender Diary

15-16 July 2025
Holy begeezees. The things I’ve forgotten. I don’t remember “collections” having that much stuff available to them. Very interesting (and confusing) stuff. 

17 July 2025
I’m sorry. Did you just say “K” for K-nife for the Knife tool. Rofl. I had to replay that to be sure. hee hee hee

Can’t subdivide a point - try telling that to the folks at CERN :)

From the “Modifiers” portion: tried doing that “bevel, array, mirror (oh my)” without using the tut. Spent WAY too much time trying to figure out hot to move the little widget so it wasn’t overlapping itself. Realized I needed to be in “edit” mode to accomplish said task. I guess that’s how you learn (by making mistakes) - but must it take so long to figure stuff (cencored) like that out? 

Yes, right now taking a relaxed approach to going through these. I’d like to think I’ll build up my tolerance to time spent going through these and doing outside playing with the info “learned”.

18 July 2025

As I go through the “lighting and materials” portion there are definitely differences in the properties editor from 4.0 to 4.4. Kind of threw me for a loop there.
Frustrating is taking over an hour to go through a 14 minute tut. Dear lawd, is it all going to be like that? And there’s a lot to unpack there (going through and experimenting). I can see myself needing to set aside at least three to four hours a day in order to get comfortable with all the different things that are gone over.

20 July 2025

Well, the ratio of tut time to spent time is still staggering, but it’s becoming understandable: doesn’t mean I like it. Admittedly, I’ve puttered ahead a bit just try and do something different within CGCookie. Keep the mind fresh - as it were.

Had a bit of a scare during the 3D animation tut. I clicked on the camera to size up the scene and couldn’t for the life of me figure where the hell all my keyframes disappeared to. Five minutes of undoing my steps multiple times until I realized - the keyframes are per object. Once I chose the camera, no more keyframes. They belonged to the cube. Another hard lesson learned.

Lots of time spent trying to find features in 4.4 that should have been left alone in 4.0. Namely, the ability to change layer names. Seemed like it would be easy in 4.0. Not so much in 4.4 - in fairness, it is easy in 4.4 IF YOU KNOW WHERE TO LOOK. 

21 July 2025

Finally made my way through the 2D disaster I started last evening. I guess I’m feeling a little better about it all. Practice. Practice. Practice.

Now, it’s all about motivating myself to get at this before the evening and it winds up getting too late.
... and thank you Martin for the information. I appreciate it.

24 July 2025

Well, yesterday was a bust. Spent only the evening “watching” a number of tuts just to familiarize myself with the subject matter. No practical practice done.

This fine day isn’t going much better, but going to try and get an apple out of here. And then maybe try a green pepper for some personal practice.

Not sure about the brushes being on the bottom of the 3D view. The names only show when you hover over them.

So far, not liking sculpting. Going to take a lot of getting use to: pressure sensitivity; where to place the damn pen on the tablet (almost went back to the mouse); size of the brush to use; how close to the object I am to sculpt relative to brush size. Putz. Putz. Putz. Had to start over twice because I had gotten too far past my “undo” limit: getting real good at that. And no, it’s already pillow time and I’ve only got the apple shaped - no creases added to top/bottom (that’s what screwed up the apple the first two times).

Biggest problem I’ve had is knowing when to hit [ALT] to rotate the object and when not to - to sculpt. Good grief the number of times I went to rotate and forgot to [ALT] and wound up sculpting and deforming or creasing the apple in the wrong spot. Practice. Practice. Practice.

I know it’s all going to take some getting used to. One lesson learned - save project before moving on to the next sculpting phase in case I go past my undo limit again.