A few years before it was open-sourced, I became interested in 3D modeling, using 3D Studio Max at school. When I looked for free-ish software, I found Blender.

A few years before it was open-sourced, I became interested in 3D modeling, using 3D Studio Max at school. When I looked for free-ish software, I found Blender. It had about 1/10 of the options back then, and a bunch of features were locked up behind a license key, but it was small enough to fit on a floppy. So I downloaded it at school, took it home...and was flummoxed without any access to tutorials. I got about as far as this tutorial did through experimentation. A few years later, I picked it up again when I had a more convenient internet connection. Learning it through tutorials was a lot like learning a new programming language. Find some that cover the basic interface, then the intermediate interface, then stumble through the advanced tuts for whichever feature you think would be useful to know how to use. It's a great piece of software, and it feels nice to use once you've developed the muscle memory. The comparison to vim is somewhat apt, but that only really hit me when someone else mentioned it in a post a few months ago.