Instead of another “watch course X, then course Y” reply, here’s a slightly unusual story about how I learned Blender. My journey started with… tiny paper notebooks with plastic tabs. First I decided I wanted to do level art – not “anything 3D”, but a very specific role. Then I wrote down the typical problems a level artist has: modular modeling, clean pivots, instancing, Outliner hygiene, sensible naming, fast variant creation, scene dressing so a simple modular set suddenly feels like a full world. On top of that: knife tool, edge loops, mirroring, pivot point, snapping, fast rotate/scale – all from the keyboard, without diving into the UI.
At some point I basically started to ignore the UI. My goal was to do as much as possible from the keyboard, almost without the mouse, so I could focus on the art and cut out repetitive, pointless movements. Add face orientation and flip normals to make sure my meshes don’t end up with holes in the engine – I was terrified of that, so that shortcut became the very first entry in my “Blender bible”. That’s how I hunted for shortcuts in Blender. Each one went into the right notebook tab: a short line “what happens when I press this”, plus a color and category. And something funny happened – writing it down once was enough. My brain took a snapshot, and I never really had to study those shortcuts. That’s how I ended up with 100+ shortcuts in my muscle memory without classic memorising.
For the first years, YouTube tutorials were actually second priority. Notebook first, video second – more like a reference than life support. Over time this obsession with “small percentages” started to stack: an addon that gives +1% speed here, a tool that saves 10% clicking there, then a better naming system for models when exporting to an engine (suffixes, prefixes, category tags in the name). Up to 2023 I was testing tons of addons, sometimes hiring programmers to build custom ones, slowly shaping a workflow that compresses my movements in Blender as much as possible.
Today, after ~10 years with Blender, I’m writing my own addons with the help of AI: four small “control panels” that bundle everything I need as a level artist – from modular grid and mass-variant creation to automatic project housekeeping (batch renaming, suffix/prefix schemes, grouping assets for the game engine). And honestly, 2025 felt more like a x2–x10 jump than a tiny tweak. Small improvements simply stacked into a much clearer, calmer workflow.
If you’re just starting with Blender, my suggestion instead of “watch this course”:
- first pick a role (environment / level art, prop art, hard surface, etc.),
- write down the real problems that role has to solve day-to-day,
- find shortcuts and tools only for those problems and write them down by hand (analogue notes work surprisingly well),
- then layer tutorials on top of that.
If this sounds interesting, reply here – I can share how I structured those notebooks, or what exactly I packed into my level-art / modular-modeling addons. Happy to tune the advice to your role instead of giving generic Blender tips.
emaceart.itch.io <--- My itch page.