How Much Can You Learn In Blender 3D?

When you are first introduced to Blender, normally via a Youtube tutorial that shows you how to create something that looks ridiculously awesome, you are limited in your knowledge of what Blender is used for based on what your first impressions are.

But if Blender were likened to any physical object, it would be an iceberg because while you see a small portion of the software used in any one video, the actual depth of the software is far greater.

There are thousands of tools to learn in Blender, and these tools can be combined in a limitless number of ways to create digital products ranging from game assets to animations to 3D prints. You can choose to learn all the aspects of Blender, or you can choose to specialize with a singular toolset, such as the sculpting tools.

Your approach to learning Blender is going to be very important, as it is unrealistic to think that you can learn everything there is to know about the software in any short period.

What Are The Projects That Can Be Completed With Blender?

When using an application like Blender, you’ll quickly notice that the user interface is organized in a certain way because there are far too many tools to fit on your screen at any one time, even if those tools are stored in various drop-down menus.

To make things as easy as possible for the artist, the tools and features of Blender have been divided up into a series of workspaces, which are premade layouts of the UI that center around a specific task.

For example, a workspace allows you to focus purely on sculpting, while another workspace called the compositor allows you to edit your rendered images and animation.

The workspaces themselves can be found and selected in the header of the Blender UI, and the order follows a general workflow for designing digital assets like 3D models.

Below is a list of the various projects Blender allows you to complete…

  • Character design
  • Environmental design
  • Concept Art
  • Game Asset Design
  • 3D Animation
  • 2D Animation
  • PBR Texture Creation
  • Image Compositing
  • Sculpting
  • Procedural Modeling
  • Scripting
  • VFX
  • Motion Capture
  • Video Editing
  • 3D Printing
  • Architectural Design

That is a long list of projects you can either partially or fully complete with the Blender software. So it is good that the UI is divided up using the workspace system.

If you want to adopt an entirely different workflow, you can change the order of your workspaces by clicking and dragging to reposition them, although you can use any workspace at any point.

You can also delete workspaces from the tabs or even add other workspaces. For example, the video editing workspace is not immediately accessible, so you need to click on the + button at the end of the row to add new workspaces.

Some workflows have their own project templates that you can use. For example, a template focuses on 2D animation with the grease pencil.

Or you can go with the video editing template to import and begin editing imported videos using the video sequence editor to edit videos and then render them similar to how you would render images from the 3D viewport.

Why You Should Not Try To Learn Everything?

Blender is regarded as a Jack of all trades application, which means that it can be used to perform many different tasks that sometimes don’t even relate to each other.

There are a couple of reasons why it is not considered the best idea to try and learn every skill, tool, and feature in Blender 3D.

One reason is that there are entire workflows that you may never end up using. Going back to our template examples, if you plan to use the Blender software to design 3D models, then you will likely never need to access the video sequence editor to edit videos. After all they are completely different project types in most scenarios.

Another reason it is not recommended to learn every tool that you could is due to the consistent number of updates that the Blender Foundation provides. A new version of the software is typically released every three to four months, and with these updates comes a host of new tools and features.

That means that you can never learn everything there is to know about Blender as there will always be something new, and sometimes these updates can make old tools irrelevant as well, classing them as legacy content.

How Long To Learn Blender To Perform Certain Tasks?

While learning Blender in its entirety will take you thousands of hours, you can instead choose to learn all the tools in Blender related to the task you want to use Blender for.

An example would be a 3D animator who uses Blender to create animation shorts, CGI advertising, etc.

As an animator, you would be required to learn a wide range of skills, such as the ability to create various 3D models for your animations and the ability to create rigs used to control the animations of those models.

You would require the ability to apply materials and lighting to your scene and animate any aspect of your project using keyframes.

However, you would not be required to learn how to composite rendering images, or script in Python code, as they are largely unrelated.

The amount of time it takes to learn depends on what you are learning. It takes 4 hours to learn the surface-level concepts and around 20 hours to learn the workflow basics, allowing you to create an animation from start to finish, quality notwithstanding.

After 100 hours of practice, you can understand the elements associated with animation and many of the core tools used within the workflow.

From there, the more you use Blender, the better you will become as you improve the skillsets you already have established.

Thanks For Reading The Article

We appreciate you taking the time to read through the article, and we hope you found the information you were looking for. If you are interested in learning more about the blender software, you can read some of the articles we have listed below.

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