Feeling overwhelmed from all the awesome content out these days

Hey everyone! New member here. Nice to meet you all.

Question -  and I apologize if this has been brought up before. I wonder if any of you experience what I have been of late. Feeling overwhelmed with the amount of amazing tutorials/content out there for Blender. Talk about first world problems haha.  What a great problem to have. 

But in all seriousness. I find I struggle to stick to one tutorial/topic/workflow. I open up, Youtube, Vimeo, Gumroad, etc, and now CGCookie, and just see something that looks amazing and think,  "Woah thats what I should be learning!" and more often then not I spend my time just looking (or searching out ) different tutorials, but not actually work through a specific one. I'm hoping the "learning flows" of CGCookie will help this.  

Sometimes I think I need to disconnect from the rest of the internet and just stick with one source. Which I'm gonna try with CGcookie, and try and block out the rest of the noise (even though its fantastic noise).  Feels like I'm wasting time, and we all know time is precious when we have full time jobs/partners/families etc.

Anyways,  if anyone has experienced this and has suggestions, I'd love to hear them.


Thanks

  • hoarfrost31 replied

    I Understand what you mean to say here. The same thing happened to me. But all you can do is learn one thing at a time or even multiple things but then you will get confused. Best way to do it is to start slow and don't think about efficiency or learning a lot right away. Just pick some topic you like and stick to it and extract as much as you can from it. Then gradually you can increase your efficiency by learning multiple things on the same day or whatever. But keep it simple and slow to start with. 

  • Ingrid Frank(Fide) replied

    I have a similiar problem. I can´t say that I´m overwhelmed per se, but I tend to switch a lot between the things I want to learn, because I want to learn everything ar once! Ok, might be " being overwhelmed"  as well :´D

    I would stick to the "Introduction to Blender" learning flow. It covers all the basics you need! 

    Afterwards, take a look at the "Modelling in Blender" learning flow and watch all the "Modeling I" courses, since they cover some more fundamentals. It get´s a bit tricky after. You might think "Hey, why should I want to learn how to create a wall of mailboxes or a jellyfish?", but even if the main subjects of those courses don´t interest you much, the instructors introduce a lot of techniques or mention useful tips and solutions during said courses. Maybe start with the courses that interest you more, but try to complete the whole flow, since you can learn something new in every video.

    I hope I was able to help you a bit :) 

    And welcome to CG Cookie!

  • odunov replied

    Hello and welcome! :)

    I can't say I was ever overwhelmed because I found about CGC fairly early on in my 3d journey but I think I can say that you're on the right track. Following the learning flows is a great idea. You can even throw in interesting tutorials every now and then into the mix until you get the basics. After a while, learning becomes easier and you'll probably won't feel overwhelmed by the amount of tutorials because you'll have an idea on what to pursue.

    The community is here is fairly active so you can find help if you ever need it. 

    Best of luck to you in your journey!


  • numbernine replied

    Hey there,

    I'm also a relatively new member, only been a couple of months now. I can really relate to your entire post! In my experience sticking to the learning flows available here has worked really well for me. There is so much good/great content on the internet, sure. But constantly switching between everything is really detrimental, at least in my experience. Whenever I start to feel overwhelmed I just choose a course / assignment here to work on so I can focus on getting work done instead of endlessly browsing the seas of infinite content.

  • falker (falker) replied

    Thanks for the replies! Nice to know I'm not the only one. That's why I signed up here, hope this will keep me more aligned and focused on the workflows and branch off from there. Now if only some of the videos were not from 2.6 and earlier haha.... But I guess most of it is still applicable. 

  • Jonathan Gonzalez(jgonzalez) replied

    Honestly it's not a bad thing to jump around. Sometimes learning feels like a buffet and you want to try anything. Nothing  wrong with learning from a bunch of tutorial tutorials or courses. If you don't have a specific thing in mind that you want to learn, then it's perfectly fine to watch many different tutorials. I too tend to have an issue "collecting" tutorials or resources I want to learn from only to see that list grow in size without ever shrinking. 

    Something I've been doing lately is setting weekly goals on projects or things I want to accomplish. This weekly goal has been to create a new scene or render within Blender or Unity. Often times this weekly goal revolves around a specific tutorial or project, or combination of a few different tutorials but ultimate leads me to building a specific scene. 

    Here is an example of one I recently did: https://cgcookie.com/u/jgonzalez/projects/hidden-tomb  this scene was originally just going to be based off the sand dunes tutorial by Kent: https://cgcookie.com/course/creating-procedural-sand-dunes-with-blender-2-8  but I wanted to add a bit more to it and get creative with it which led me to adding some unique objects and textures. This was initially conceived by that tutorial, but by focusing on making it a project for that week I was able to stay focused and provide guidance. 

    You may have a large list of tutorials you'd like to get through, so see how you can go through them and build a complete scene. You more than likely won't learn everything from one tutorial or course, so this can satisfy your need to jump around, but keep you on track. 

  • curtisdd1 replied

    Hi ,

    I was majorly overwhelmed when i started 3d & I have no art experience or teachings whatsoever so it was a lot but  I really wanted to learn to model & create some cool scenes.  

    I figured out what I wanted to use Blender/3d  for-what do you want to create?   In my case it was mostly architecture & landscape scenes.   Once you decide that then your path will likely have a much smaller scope and therefore much less overwhelming.    If you  decide you want to do everything then figure out/choose the thing you want to do the most now and do the learning flow /tutorials that match that .   Stay focused on that learning path so you get some confidence & feel progress.  I recommend doing some Blender every day  at least 5  days a week personally even if its only 30 min or an hr.  Don't let yourself stop for a few days or even a week or more because it kills your momentum of learning .  I did that a number of times before I committed to learning Blender  & it was really hard starting back up as you have to build momentum up again and its very hard.   The cgcookie site is wonderful as is the Blender guru site & his beginning tutorial series .  Best wishes!