Where Should I Start?

IAmTheClayman

Hey everyone, I'm new to the Polycount forums, so I figured this would be the best place to post my first thread.

To say that I am an amateur would be the understatement of the century. I'm interested in learning about 3D modeling, but my only experience is some basic 2D work in flash and GameMaker (mostly the latter.) I've done some modeling work in Google SketchUp, and I recently downloaded Blender.

My real question is this: as a complete amateur, where is the best place for me to start? Anything you guys could come up with would be appreciate--other forums, online or written tutorials, video series, one on one work, etc.

Cheers,

IAmTheClayman

Xer0

3d Total has some good tutorials. Unfortunatly nothing for Blender (from what I can see.) http://www.3dtotal.com/

If you are a student, Autodesk is giving students a free 3 year license with a valid school e-mail address for pretty much any program. http://students.autodesk.com/

Cgtuts+ has alot of good tutorials as well, including Blender. http://cg.tutsplus.com/

Also seems the Blender Website has some good tutorials for getting started. http://www.blender.org/education-help/tutorials/

Ben Apuna

It sort of depends on what your end goals are, there really isn't a "bad" place to start modeling. The best thing you can do is just get started making something, everything comes through the experience.

Though I suppose you need to learn the tools first, Blender hmm...

There's Blender Cookie, 3D Buzz, and ralusek's Blender 2.5 Crash Course (Not For Retards).

The wiki here on Polycount is also VERY good source of information:

Environment Modeling

Character Modeling

Have fun

mortalhuman

Start with these:

http://gryllus.net/Blender/3D.html

Then these:

http://www.blenderguru.com/

http://www.blendercookie.com/

http://www.blendtuts.com/blender_tutorials

Vimeo and Youtube are both great sources, as well. gl, hf.

Mark Dygert

I'd skip blender and go with 3dsmax or Maya, not only will either of those apps improve your job prospects but you'll have access to higher quality help. I don't want to belittle blender artists but at some point almost everyone of them moves onto max or maya if they start to get serious about 3D, so might as well make the switch now.

Both max and maya have a wealth of knowledge packed into each app just press F1. Tons of tutorials to get you started and there's even more help on the web these days.

Outside of that what are you interested in making? Characters? Environments? Animation? Fully rendered 3D short movies or realtime content?

IAmTheClayman

Thanks for the input guys. I may take Xer0 and Mark's advice and skip over Blender. To be honest, I had wanted to start on 3DS Max but couldn't convince myself to spend that much money (I think this year's edition costs somewhere around 3 grand.) That 3 year student license would be great though.

IAmTheClayman

Well, I ended up getting 3DS Max thru that student program--thanks a lot for the suggestion Xer0.

As for what I plan on doing with it, right now I'm working on a basic character modeling tutorial that I found on Youtube. Once I get some techniques under my belt I plan on bring 3D life to some old sketches I have floating around, a courier-type character with some inspiration from Mirror's Edge and the Prince of Persia reboot. Hopefully I make some headway before I ship off to my summer job away from home.

Ott

I would highly suggest you start with an absolutely basic object. Make something you see around your house and focus on the entire process during your studies - Model it, unwrap it, texture it, and render it. Just as a very basic pipeline direction for your introduction into modeling for games. Starting off with a character and trying to learn basic principles can be very, very frustrating and time consuming.

Making characters is great, but even for people who have been doing 3d for years struggle with it. It is an advanced process to get decent results. The last thing you want to do is make some shit character and frustrate yourself with how miserable it looks (and it will).

Start by seeing if you can make a soda can, a shoebox, a coffee cup, a pen...really, really basic objects and then go from there. Remember that you have to learn to crawl before you can walk, or some shit like that.