How did you learn to use and navigate the Blender 3d interface?

Hey everyone!

For all of you Blender 3d artists, how did you learn to use and navigate the Blender 3d interface? Did you learn through tutorials on YouTube or a website? Or did you read any books that taught you all about it?

I learned by reading, studying and taking notes from the book Character Development in Blender 2.5 by Jonathan Williamson as well as looking at getting started guides and tutorials on Blender.org and cgcookie.

Blender Guru, Blender Cookie, Blender Diplom, YouTube and Blender-Artists are probably the main web-sites I used, but often when looking for something specific a simple web search would yield good photo and video tutorials from all over the place. My main source of training came from doing though, making various different models, scenes, renders and such sometimes using a tutorial and sometimes not. I’m a hands on learner myself.

Trial and error is probably the number one method of discovery throughout human history. Although it does have its drawbacks. Shennong, a Chinese ruler from over 5,000 years ago, contributed a great deal to the wealth of human knowledge by tasting and testing the effects of various different herbs and plants upon himself. Supposedly he eventually died as a result of these experiments. Considered to have given his life for humanity.

Some reading , the wiki, videos and mostly trial and error. I will say this. At first it was very frustrating and different to most software I had used before. But as I have got more familiar with it it has really grown on me. Its very flexible I think. I know there a dbate rumbles about right click select - I have gone from not liking it to it now doesnt bother me at all. I love the flexible window formats though.

Lots of reading of now-dead docs, lots of looking at the latest version of Blender and re-learning what used to work. That sort of thing. More or less the same way that I learn how to use any computer application of substantial complexity.

There is a bit of intuition involved too. Sometimes you see a button, and you just randomly press it, and hey presto!

i first learnt the interface with all the “middle mouse button” business from an “ebook” on wikibooks called “blender noob to pro”. my first project was to resurrect a sketchup file in blender.

Nothing more true hahaha. Learned by triyng to use it (more than 1.5 years of falling CUBES in the game engine :wink: ) But the mousewheel navigation was a lot intuitive, the right mouse button a bit less hahaha.

From here: http://wiki.blender.org/uploads/d/d4/QuickStart_Guide242.png

Ah the “middle mouse button”, I haven’t used that in years. I learned blender on a laptop.