The year I decided to learn 3D modelling was a year filled with frustration, excitement, mistakes, brief and fleeting moments of joy and guess what? More frustration.

I was smart enough to document all of my ‘Well, I definitely learnt THAT the hard way’ lessons, and I’ve decided to share them with you guys, in the hopes that you can learn from my mistakes and ensure that history will in fact, not repeat itself.

If this article helps save you even a few days of productivity, then I’ll consider that a great success. (Borat GIF here)

1.Figure out what is important to learn first, and focus on that.
The 3D world is massive, and I’ve wasted hours of my time being unorganized and not knowing what I should learn.

This is totally normal.

Sit down and ask yourself ‘What am I interested in? What do I want to create?’
For me, it was really cool weapons and assets.
I sat down and made a small list of the things I knew I would have to get down before I can even start looking at anything else. Proper research is crucial at this stage.

For me the list was:
Master Modeling
Texturing/Unwrapping
Sculpting


My focus list made me realize how much time I was wasting on other aspects of the 3D world that had little to no relevance to me.
In my head I thought I had to also create cool effects for the weapons, like flames coming off of a blade or explosions from a weapon.
Why the hell should I be worrying about cool flames on a blade when I can’t even model the blade properly yet?
Anything else I was trying to learn that wasn’t on the list was immediately shelved, to be revisited in the near future when the need arises, such as rendering, compositing, lighting and particle simulations.

Thank you for sharing your opinion. I often look at vacancies for 3d modeling jobs. My oldest son is graduating from university next year and he is a little worried about getting a job. I showed him the RemoteHub site. It is a large service for finding remote work. Now he roughly understands what will happen to him in terms of demand and payment. Maybe he will find a good job right away, but rather start as an intern in a large company to build a good portfolio.