I‘ve spent countless hours learning Blender over the past few months (being completely oblivious of other 3D software to that point), mostly through many excell

I‘ve spent countless hours learning Blender over the past few months (being completely oblivious of other 3D software to that point), mostly through many excellent Youtube videos like from BlenderGuru, and I think it is the most wicket piece of software I have tried to learn in decades. It makes learning the fundamentals of vi a piece of cake. It has hundreds of features, dozens of property dialogs, and most of all it requires a very peculiar interaction style that is very different from 2D editors like the ones found in Office/Google docs. The difference is similar to switching from a notepad/Word paradigm of being in edit mode by default to switching to the command mode in vim. The most important learnings so far have been: - Instead of creating objects from scratch, the paradigm is to modify shapes, starting from a number of primitives. That’s why you get the “default cube” when you start it. An important operation is extrude, which copies the selected parts of a mesh and connects the copies to their original. So if you want to draw a curve, you place a default curve and then use an operation like extrude or subdivide to add new points. - There is a heavy interaction between mouse and keyboard. Depending on the task, it is vital to learn the keyboard shortcuts by heart. Those are often single keystrokes - e.g. tab for switching between object and mesh edit mode, 1/2/3 for switching between vertex/edge/face selection mode, g for moving the selected item, x/y/z to lock to an axis, x for delete, f for filling edges or faces into the mesh, e for extrude etc. while all of this is also possible to do with the mouse, there is a 10x productivity boost from learning the 10, 20 keystrokes that are used all the time. - It is highly extensible through plugins, mostly written in Python, though, unfortunately, lower layer operations are only exposed in C++. All of the youtube videos use one of the many screencasting plugins, which display the recent mouse buttons or key presses - it is a good idea to use a numpad, mainly to switch between different views The benefit: even with minimal manipulations in the lighting settings and the materials of the created objects, the renderer can already create raytraces that are absolutely jaw-dropping. But: Even after several months I still often ask myself “how do I tell it the computer”. I feel like I have barely scratched the surface of what the tool can do. Rendering pipelines? Sculpting mode? Probably 2022. Curious about the hottest tips from the HN users :-)