My two are:
Making sourdough. I personally always heard like this weird almost mysticism around making it. But I bought a $7 starter from a bakery store, and using just stuff in my kitchen and cheap bread flour I’ve been eating fresh sourdough every day and been super happy with it. Some loafs aren’t super consistent because I don’t have like temperature controlled box or anything. But they’ve all been tasty.
Drawing. I’m by no means an artist, but I always felt like people who were good at drawing were like on a different level. But I buckled down and every day for a month I tried drawing my favorite anime character following an online guide. So just 30 minutes every day. The first one was so bad I almost gave up, but I was in love with the last one and made me realize that like… yeah it really is just practice. Years and years of it to be good at drawing things consistently, quickly, and a variety of things. But I had fun and got something I enjoyed much faster than I expected. So if you want to learn to draw, I would recommend just trying to draw something you really like following a guide and just try it once a day until you are happy with the result.
Man, I tried to get into this. Spent months running through the tutorials. I just couldn’t grasp how they design flow of creating a complex shape from scratch. It just didn’t “make sense”.
I’ve found parametric modeling programs like Solidworks far, far more intuitive to use - it’s easier for me to grasp “okay, this thing is a combination of added shapes, extrusions, negative spaces, revolved outlines, etc” than what Blender wants you to do. Unfortunately, most parametric programs really don’t offer good skinning/texturing and only mediocre rendering options.
I totally get that. It’s like finding a programming language or personal information manager app that you like. Have to try a bunch out to find something that works for you.
A long time ago I dabbled in script-generated ray tracing. That was fun, but I never got great at it.
I also learned PostScript for a while, because I wanted to create some very intricate printable forms. Using WYSIWG tools was just not cutting it. I ended up with some large 300dpi forms that I liked, whuch were perfect for the assignment.
Sometimes a different model or approach can make a huge difference to your work flow.
Blender tends to work better for organic shapes. I know because I suffer a LOT to make more parametric stuff with it. I really should learn how to properly use something like Solidworks, Fusion360 or something along those lines.
Try onshape. I learnt fusion last year though YT and playing around for 3D prints.
Its fine but a bit of overkill. Onshape has just enough support that a search for “how to do X” takes you to the wiki or official forum, and boom. Answer.
It also seems more initiative and just gets out of the way, compared to fusion.
No idea if its just coz I learnt fusion first though.
I tried solid works but nothing clicled for me with that.
I hear you on that. On the reverse, trying to make “smoothly flowing” curved shapes in Solidworks is a headache (similarly, I’ve suffered trying). They do offer a slicing tool so you can import your monkey head from Blender and convert it into parametric object(s).
FreeCAD is free and parametric. It’s what I use after Fusion changed their subscriptions around. I don’t need to be forced into a subscription once I put in the time to learn how software works, thank you very much.