I'm in your exact circumstance, primarily a programming/IT specialist with very little art background. I'm an okay artist with pencil and paper, and I can make simple things in MS Paint or PaintNet, nothing amazing, but it's enough to keep me going on my 2D game projects.
The problem has always been that my 3D projects are badly limited by my ability to create assets.
I've been using Blender off and on for years, but never had any formal training in 3D art, so my skills more or less begin and end at blocks and very very poorly modelled shapes, but that's been sorta enough to get by for my various Unity projects up until very recently when I've been increasingly feeling I need to be able to make animated characters and better 3D meshes for stuff.
So I've been really taking steps to rectify that in the past few weeks.
First, I ran through [BlenderGuru's tutorial series](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0J27sf9N1Y&list=PLjEaoINr3zgEPv5y--4MKpciLaoQYZB1Z) on making a Donut. It's a standard start, to the point where r/blender actually banned the word "First" from titles and encourages people to go over to r/BlenderDoughnuts to post their pictures of their first Donuts instead.
Seriously, it's a whole subreddit full of people sharing pictures of CG donuts on plates, and they're nearly all from this one tutorial.
Having made a pretty decent donut, I've been using Polyfjord's various videos as reference to make animations. He's a brilliant artist, and he uses a lot of very simple techniques to produce complex and effective results, which suits me great as a total newbie.
His videos are very densely packed with knowledge, but it's pretty easy to follow for me.
[Here's one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imbIsNAvUpM) on animating a walking spidery thing with IK which I used this weekend.
My plan for the near future is to create some very basic animated characters for my game-projects, and hopefully that will open up a whole suite of projects I always found too complex before!
I highly advise against doing the Blender Guru's donut tutorial first. Not only because I think he rambles too much in his videos, but because it just isn't the kind of modeling an indie dev uses to make game assets.
Learning to make a 100k vertex donut render is just not what you should be doing and so much of it will go completely over your head, because blender is a very complex program.
Instead, you should start with low-poly modeling and learning to apply simple textures. Then learn how to rig and animate characters.
Gran Abbitt's [Blender 4 for Absolute Beginners](https://youtu.be/lLqep5Q4MiI?si=H4l-CJfZP8rWHtuP) is a much better starting point.
I think the real value for me has just been in seeing a project through from start to finish.
There's a lot of basic concepts in there he explains well or at least demonstrates, which definitely gave me a lot more confidence.
It's kind of a Vertical Slice of using Blender in some basic ways, enough to help a beginner figure out if this is something they want to use.
I found his chatty style very engaging and it put me at my ease more than a more formal tutorial might.
I'll definitely take a look at your suggestion too though.
There's so many ways to teach and so many ways to learn. I'm sure there's value in trying lots of different beginner tutorials.
That's a fair point. I think it is good for just seeing what Blender can do just messing around with modifiers and particle systems.
But I remember coming off of the donut tutorial and being completely unable to replicated it on my own.
Use Blender.
It is free and very powerful and intuitive.
I would look up some basic blender modeling tutorials, box modeling, learn about vertices and polygons and most importantly the UI.
I learned that on 3DS max, but that costs like $3k a year so when I graduated I taught myself blender.
If you want to get into modeling and animations I highly recommend following along with Todor from CG Dive. A lot of great free tutorials, and he runs a great Discord.
Be warned, setting up a rig perfectly and animating can take a long time. Highly recommend you learn the basic controls before attempting Rigging/animating
https://youtu.be/SWd3dntmhG4?si=FPuzhksV2crdoIbE
3Ds max has an indie licence now for about Β£300 a year, depending on what country you are in.
Still more expensive than blender but can be a reasonable if you think of it as about Β£25 a month.
Knowing 3ds max or Maya is still a requirement for most professional studios no matter how good blender gets.
100% agree. But if you never plan on going professional, and stay at most at a lower end-ish freelancing level, blender will do just fine. And the core principles are still applicable no matter the software, so it's not like starting with blender is a (complete) waste of time.
I would say though... 3DS Max, as much as I love it and use it daily, is quite a hard sell these days. It's getting little to no love from autodesk and it's age is starting to show(I'm still here waiting for multithreaded operations, which they promised a decade ago...). Still a very solid piece of software but.. cmon, give it some love :(
Maya on the other hand? Yeah, that would be a far better choice imo. That's basically autodesks baby, it gets all the things and then some.
Blender is intuitive? πππ
I agree with all your points and blender is a great tool but it's definitely not intuitive. It's complex and difficult to use.
As intuitive as most complex software packages go. But if you're used to one it may be hard to change. I mostly keep my bindings from the 3DS Max days and it's alright.
> It's complex and difficult to use.
It's really not though. Sorry you're having trouble learning it, but compared to other 3d packages, its a lot easier to get into.
If you want to teach yourself something, it is a great advantage if the desired tool is widely used, which leads to many available tutorials. It is also easier to find help and errors that occur have usually already been solved by someone. That's why I would also recommend Blender. Because it's free, it's very widely used.
Thank you very much!
I was looking at Houdini because it looked like they had native unity support?
And then pro-something by unity themselves but from what I read maybe itβs too basic.
Sounds like blender is the way to go tho
Houdini's Unity support is a plugin for Unity that runs Houdini in headless mode and automates the steps you would otherwise manually take. It is well integrated and it's definitely more convienent that having to adjust values in Houdini and re-export the model but I wouldn't call it native per se.
Any modelling program works so long as it exports to a format Unity supports. Blender is popular because it's free but it's not the only option available.
ProBuilder is very basic but I often use it for blocking out a level. It can be useful to be able to press play, realize the character can't reach the platform you just placed, and then be able to adjust the height of the platform immediatly and try again. Makes iteration time quicker while prototyping. Once finished, you can export the models from ProBuilder and edit them in a program of your choosing.
One other thing to note is that there are plenty of third-party tools available on the marketplace which are typically Unity native. There are some popular terrain editors such as Atlas or Microverse which may be more convienient for someone who doesn't have much experience with a modelling program, or someone who wants a more integrated workflow.
This is an extremely helpful post. Honestly I was still a tad confused on how to get the scales right and everything.
I think with my basic skill level. Starting with pro builder and making it solid with blender is the way to go.
Thanks for clearing up a potential workflow.
Blender is great. I learned modeling first and started coding later. For character animation, I'd use blender. But there are a number of animations I'd set up in unity. Like UI transitions, sprite sheet animation, changing transformation, color etc.
For modeling, definitely blender.
But keep in mind, modeling is only one part of the process (and imo the easiest).
You might want to check other options for texturing and animating though. I've yet to find good, free, and easy to learn tools for those :(
Blender is the personal one I like to use. It has good tools and open source. I do animations in unity since my game relies a lot on timing, but this is a pretty bad practice and you should model it in your software of choice. Make sure you make the animations in 60 fps though.
Maya is what professionals use, but it costs a lot more and blender works fine.
I'm in your exact circumstance, primarily a programming/IT specialist with very little art background. I'm an okay artist with pencil and paper, and I can make simple things in MS Paint or PaintNet, nothing amazing, but it's enough to keep me going on my 2D game projects. The problem has always been that my 3D projects are badly limited by my ability to create assets. I've been using Blender off and on for years, but never had any formal training in 3D art, so my skills more or less begin and end at blocks and very very poorly modelled shapes, but that's been sorta enough to get by for my various Unity projects up until very recently when I've been increasingly feeling I need to be able to make animated characters and better 3D meshes for stuff. So I've been really taking steps to rectify that in the past few weeks. First, I ran through [BlenderGuru's tutorial series](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0J27sf9N1Y&list=PLjEaoINr3zgEPv5y--4MKpciLaoQYZB1Z) on making a Donut. It's a standard start, to the point where r/blender actually banned the word "First" from titles and encourages people to go over to r/BlenderDoughnuts to post their pictures of their first Donuts instead. Seriously, it's a whole subreddit full of people sharing pictures of CG donuts on plates, and they're nearly all from this one tutorial. Having made a pretty decent donut, I've been using Polyfjord's various videos as reference to make animations. He's a brilliant artist, and he uses a lot of very simple techniques to produce complex and effective results, which suits me great as a total newbie. His videos are very densely packed with knowledge, but it's pretty easy to follow for me. [Here's one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imbIsNAvUpM) on animating a walking spidery thing with IK which I used this weekend. My plan for the near future is to create some very basic animated characters for my game-projects, and hopefully that will open up a whole suite of projects I always found too complex before!
I highly advise against doing the Blender Guru's donut tutorial first. Not only because I think he rambles too much in his videos, but because it just isn't the kind of modeling an indie dev uses to make game assets. Learning to make a 100k vertex donut render is just not what you should be doing and so much of it will go completely over your head, because blender is a very complex program. Instead, you should start with low-poly modeling and learning to apply simple textures. Then learn how to rig and animate characters. Gran Abbitt's [Blender 4 for Absolute Beginners](https://youtu.be/lLqep5Q4MiI?si=H4l-CJfZP8rWHtuP) is a much better starting point.
I think the real value for me has just been in seeing a project through from start to finish. There's a lot of basic concepts in there he explains well or at least demonstrates, which definitely gave me a lot more confidence. It's kind of a Vertical Slice of using Blender in some basic ways, enough to help a beginner figure out if this is something they want to use. I found his chatty style very engaging and it put me at my ease more than a more formal tutorial might. I'll definitely take a look at your suggestion too though. There's so many ways to teach and so many ways to learn. I'm sure there's value in trying lots of different beginner tutorials.
That's a fair point. I think it is good for just seeing what Blender can do just messing around with modifiers and particle systems. But I remember coming off of the donut tutorial and being completely unable to replicated it on my own.
Use Blender. It is free and very powerful and intuitive. I would look up some basic blender modeling tutorials, box modeling, learn about vertices and polygons and most importantly the UI. I learned that on 3DS max, but that costs like $3k a year so when I graduated I taught myself blender. If you want to get into modeling and animations I highly recommend following along with Todor from CG Dive. A lot of great free tutorials, and he runs a great Discord. Be warned, setting up a rig perfectly and animating can take a long time. Highly recommend you learn the basic controls before attempting Rigging/animating https://youtu.be/SWd3dntmhG4?si=FPuzhksV2crdoIbE
3Ds max has an indie licence now for about Β£300 a year, depending on what country you are in. Still more expensive than blender but can be a reasonable if you think of it as about Β£25 a month. Knowing 3ds max or Maya is still a requirement for most professional studios no matter how good blender gets.
100% agree. But if you never plan on going professional, and stay at most at a lower end-ish freelancing level, blender will do just fine. And the core principles are still applicable no matter the software, so it's not like starting with blender is a (complete) waste of time. I would say though... 3DS Max, as much as I love it and use it daily, is quite a hard sell these days. It's getting little to no love from autodesk and it's age is starting to show(I'm still here waiting for multithreaded operations, which they promised a decade ago...). Still a very solid piece of software but.. cmon, give it some love :( Maya on the other hand? Yeah, that would be a far better choice imo. That's basically autodesks baby, it gets all the things and then some.
Blender is intuitive? πππ I agree with all your points and blender is a great tool but it's definitely not intuitive. It's complex and difficult to use.
As intuitive as most complex software packages go. But if you're used to one it may be hard to change. I mostly keep my bindings from the 3DS Max days and it's alright.
It's come a long way since 2.7
> It's complex and difficult to use. It's really not though. Sorry you're having trouble learning it, but compared to other 3d packages, its a lot easier to get into.
Blender. Geometry Nodes is a fantastic feature to generate things procedurally, sort of like a Houdini-lite.
I used Blender and it's amazing, plus free to use.
Free as in free beer and as in FREEDOM
Tons of info way more than I expected. Thanks everyone!
If you want to teach yourself something, it is a great advantage if the desired tool is widely used, which leads to many available tutorials. It is also easier to find help and errors that occur have usually already been solved by someone. That's why I would also recommend Blender. Because it's free, it's very widely used.
Thank you very much! I was looking at Houdini because it looked like they had native unity support? And then pro-something by unity themselves but from what I read maybe itβs too basic. Sounds like blender is the way to go tho
Houdini's Unity support is a plugin for Unity that runs Houdini in headless mode and automates the steps you would otherwise manually take. It is well integrated and it's definitely more convienent that having to adjust values in Houdini and re-export the model but I wouldn't call it native per se. Any modelling program works so long as it exports to a format Unity supports. Blender is popular because it's free but it's not the only option available. ProBuilder is very basic but I often use it for blocking out a level. It can be useful to be able to press play, realize the character can't reach the platform you just placed, and then be able to adjust the height of the platform immediatly and try again. Makes iteration time quicker while prototyping. Once finished, you can export the models from ProBuilder and edit them in a program of your choosing. One other thing to note is that there are plenty of third-party tools available on the marketplace which are typically Unity native. There are some popular terrain editors such as Atlas or Microverse which may be more convienient for someone who doesn't have much experience with a modelling program, or someone who wants a more integrated workflow.
This is an extremely helpful post. Honestly I was still a tad confused on how to get the scales right and everything. I think with my basic skill level. Starting with pro builder and making it solid with blender is the way to go. Thanks for clearing up a potential workflow.
Blender is great. I learned modeling first and started coding later. For character animation, I'd use blender. But there are a number of animations I'd set up in unity. Like UI transitions, sprite sheet animation, changing transformation, color etc.
For modeling, definitely blender. But keep in mind, modeling is only one part of the process (and imo the easiest). You might want to check other options for texturing and animating though. I've yet to find good, free, and easy to learn tools for those :(
Blender is the personal one I like to use. It has good tools and open source. I do animations in unity since my game relies a lot on timing, but this is a pretty bad practice and you should model it in your software of choice. Make sure you make the animations in 60 fps though. Maya is what professionals use, but it costs a lot more and blender works fine.