Where to start with 3D modeling?

Hello friends! I’ve been wanting to get into 3D modeling quite recently, but am confused on where to start. Most videos i watched on how to use blender rambled and jumped around a lot which made it very confusing and frustrating for me to learn anything, I’ve also been told that starting with blender is too advanced, but what else would i use? i need a few personal opinions on what i should do!

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The first thing you need to do is familiarize yourself with the interface - you need to know where everything is.

(Once you start getting used to it, you will feel more comfortable working with the program)

A good tutorial series on youtube will show this first before anything, and then move onto creating basic models such as a low poly tree.

One tip is to be patient and be proud of what you make, if you don’t have the motivation to learn, then you won’t get anywhere. It can takes months to get to a stage where you can finally start creating models on your own.

(Also, there are probably many other posts similar to this, so go check those out before posting your own)

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I’ve found YouTube videos for Blender by these two helpful in the past:

YanSculpts
Try this one ->> 3D Modeling for Complete Beginners - Blender 2.8

Blender Guru
Search for Blender Beginner Tutorial - Part 1

There is a lot to Blender and much (most?) isn’t relevant to building things for Roblox–a lot of it doesn’t apply to modeling at all. It’s probably a good idea to look for videos that focus on modeling for games. Make sure you are watching videos for recent versions of Blender (2.8+), and try to start with ones that use a modeling style called “box modeling”.

3D Fundamentals
The most fundamental idea in 3D modeling is the vertex. This just represents a point in 3D space. A point can be placed anywhere in 3D space by moving it along one or more of the axes, X, Y, and Z. Two vertices can be connected with an edge. Three vertices connected to each other (3 vertices, 3 edges) makes a face. A bunch of faces will make up a mesh (or several meshes), which hopefully looks like whatever you are trying to model.

The tools you care about in Blender will allow you to select vertices, edges, faces, and/or meshes (objects) and edit or manipulate them in some way. The fundamental operations are move, rotate, and scale (just like in Roblox). Eventually, you’ll want to learn ways to add, remove, and generally work with models at all these levels, but the box modeling mentioned above is primarily concerned with the face level. Essentially, you start with a basic shape (like a primitive cube) and then move, rotate, scale, and “extrude” individual faces to create the shape you want. Blender provides modifiers that can be applied to your model that will do things like smooth your model by adding extra geometry (Subdivision Surface Modifier).

You’ll learn about that and more by watching videos. The main takeaway here is that everything Blender does (with respect to modeling) is related in some way to vertices, edges, faces, and objects. There are MANY different ways to work with models at these various levels, which can make learning a 3D software somewhat difficult/confusing. Keep in mind that a lot of the modeling tools are there for convenience or for specialized purposes and aren’t necessary for you to know until you run into a situation where they’re needed. A lot of models can be built by simply moving, rotating, scaling, and extruding faces and applying a smoothing modifier. Start there. Then maybe look into smoothing groups and texturing. You’ll need to know enough about materials to get to textures, but keep in mind that most game platforms (Roblox included) can’t do anything with all the material settings. That’s primarily for rendered images/videos.

Best of luck.

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This has been brought up before i would recommend searching just to see if your have question hasn’t been asked. It really depends on what softwares your willing to use and wanting to pay for. There are variety of different softwares I believe the reason why your confused because your not starting the basic, learning the software, working your way around the interface and more.

Blender is a open source software I would not recommend getting a software you have to pay for it’s similar to free options it may have a different interface or tools other options it’ll do the same as any software.

If your just starting off I’ll try watching the blender gurus beginner tutorial since it’s more for beginners to start on, it’s informative in terms of learning the basic tools, techniques, and ropes around blender. There are different tutorials that go into more detail and explain. I’ll try taking notes so you could have a better understanding and use that on later process.

Keep learning how to use blender as its very useful and it’s free, it just takes practice and patience to get the hang of blender. It’s not something that comes overnight.

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Thank you @tehls, @Astr0Derp, and @jordonh23 this is all very helpful to know!

If you want to get into Blender I’d also suggest checking out this site:
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro#Table_of_Contents
It goes through the fundamentals of Blender and from what I remember its way of teaching was easy to pick up. Another thing that I would suggest is writing down all keybinds and getting used to the Blender interface. After learning the most important keybinds and getting used to the interface learning the program is way more enjoyable.

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