What's I'm Jonathan and welcome to maker tales where I'm sharing my maker journey
to help you go further in yours so don't forget to subscribe hit that little
bell icon to never miss an opportunity to keep making in this video well I want
to be taking you through a bit of a journey I've decided that I wanted to
learn blender so for those of you that don't know what blender is blender is a
huge free 3d creation suite which has an incredibly large massive unbelievably
large toolset now it's usually mostly dedicated to visual effects animation
artist however since around November 2019 there has been a big switch when it
went into 2.8 and now I really want to give it a go I did try and learn it a
few years back I felt a bit limited with it but I think things have changed first
off I want to introduce J wall the youtuber that is from print that thing
so he's a maker who saw the potential of blender quite a while back and not only
that he's got to grips with it for 3d printing in general now he has created a
free course and a paid course to let anybody unlock the maker potential of
blender and that's where I come in I'm collaborating with Jwall
to basically challenged his courses to see if they really are what it's all
cracked up to be and give it a maker point of view review
I think it's only fair that I only use J walls courses and resources while
learning because after all I've just paid him to learn how to use blender so
from here on out I am only gonna be using my own 3d modeling knowledge along
with only Jwalls courses and resources I won't look at any other tutorial till
I finished his course to start off I really think it's only fair to go with
the free course as honestly I think everybody would only go and do the free
course that they really could to learn blender straight up like that
Plus on top of that I don't really feel comfortable paying for a course that I
don't understand or feel great about the teaching style of so I jumped in
straight into the free course first to grab the basics and see if I even like
blender so as far as free courses go it's a really solid start and it does
show the a very good fundamentals and understanding of blenders UI controls
and an introduction to the amazing power that is modifiers jwall also touches on
plugins and he also goes about how to really create a model for 3d printing
and how to export it for 3d printing overall I would say Jwall has done a great
job here in this free course perfectly suited for those who are just touching
3d modeling for the first time ever as Jwall likes to say unlocking a new
superpower of creation having said that for anybody that is already a little bit
acquainted to 3d modeling you're gonna struggle to make your heart's desire
after watching just this free course you will get a good understanding of the UI
and the very foundations of blender but not much else so now if my foundational
understanding of blender I was really eager to get on with the rest of the
blend of course however J wall got me to do four tasks before starting the paid
course so we're getting good comparison of before and after the course but a lot
more on that a little bit later now onto the paid course beginner 3d print design
four-week workshop yes the workshop is four weeks long however it is designed
in a way that you can just spend about an hour and a half a week
going through the lessons having said that all four weeks of the video are
available to you as soon as you sign in and pay for it they're all right there
and I went through them all in just around 2 days so in total I put in about
nine hours of work but honestly a lot of that time was
just tinkering around learning and fiddling about with all the new things
that I learned in each session now I want to go into detail of each week and
what I learned along with feedback but those of you who are short on time and
really just want to know my bullet point notes and thoughts here they are but
keep in mind that 100 percent of this is going to change with time as jwall has
taken everything I've said with incredible constructive feedback
criticism enthusiasm and has got straight to work in sorting out anything
that I've mentioned here so week one is exactly the same as the free course take
that as you want to take it week two while these modifiers are literally
everything in blender and they're non-destructive which is awesome week
three well it's organic subdivision modeling
coloring things in with materials and making a toy car with moving wheels now
there is one bit that I don't like his which he he teaches you how to do the
Torrance's for the wheels through scaling instead of using an offset which
doing a through scaling is a big no-no in my book and lastly you also take a
look at slicing a 3d model to go and do it in other smaller printers but the way
he shows the slicing it's very slow and tedious and from the earlier weeks I
really feel like there is a much faster way of doing it
lastly in week four bit of a disappointment
I felt rushed you learn very little on sculpting you design a small phone
speaker but you learn nothing because all of that you already learnt last week
through subdivision so it's literally just subdivision using a boolean of what
you've learned earlier on and then you get to set up an Eevee studio to make
some pretty renders now that was pretty cool you only a bit that was unfortunate
about it is that we learned through the global scaling of a workspace right in
week one this tutorial no longer really works well it does work but not fully as
he does it in his tutorial so even editing Jonathan here so I just
really put down the course I didn't mean to put it down that far well I'm trying
to say is those are the flaws sort of that there are right this minute
but jwall is all over it and it's going to sort them all out like that's the
amazing part of this so if you're an absolute beginner and you have no idea
about 3d printing and 3d design jump straight into the workshop if not go and
do the courses anyway now let's go into the in-depth look of each week so week
one yes it is exactly the same as the free course with one very big difference
here you're now part of a four-week workshop so there's up to 30 other
students doing this exact same course and jwall is literally one click away
so it's pretty awesome they're on top of that at the end of every week there's a
VR slash video chat Meetup so yeah sort of held accountable right
there they're expecting you at the end of the week to have a model so that
gives you a big drive to get it get it done so it was brilliant because you
really do learn how to make some amazing things and you learn modifiers which
are really cool now week 2 here is where you really
truly learn the power of blender which is flexibility and how easy it is to
everything so we create lithophanes we create some pottery let's see here we
create some pottery and then we even go on to create some rings and what's
amazing about all of these they're all incredibly easy to edit and it was just
brilliant this week you learn about NURBS curves
and it truly shows you how modifiers are your friends when it comes to week three
it's all about subdivision modeling along with hard surface modeling so in
the subdivision modeling you learn how to make this really cute little elephant
he tells you to go ahead and try and make anything these cube animals are a
great learning curve to understand how box modelling and subdividing works it
really was very interesting and to see the way that blender works with it it's
truly as nice when it comes to the toy car however he um wasn't I wasn't
exactly feeling the greatest about it mainly because of the tolerance thing I
know I keep saying that but you can really get it get into a bit of a hard
place if you're just sort of eyeballing the tolerances when it comes to 3d
printers and then we had the first little hiccup which is slicing designs
and I have to say the slicing was very painful and slow the method that he did
it like I understand why I did it he wanted to teach you some new tools
because that's really powerful the way that he's doing it however through all
the things that he taught us throughout the other courses of the other two weeks
I really feel like there was a much easier way of doing that now I know he's
gonna do something about that but that's where I stand and then we get on to week
4 week 4 I pains me to say this but it was a disappointment because honestly it
felt a little bit rushed and a bit skipped over and I understand they're
very complicated topics and they're right in the beginning beginner level
course here of blender there a bit part of me is saying if you're going to show
this show a little bit more than just quick reflection of it or just don't
bring it into the beginning of beginners of blender at the first place and maybe
show a little bit more of a different topic that's quite beginner oriented
then what was pretty nice was the whole Evie 360 because you learn how to export
some pretty cool little 3d things by the end of their site look at this has an
awesome little turnaround right there and I loved it I loved it and he showed
you how to set up the lighting and everything it's beautiful
only thing is that cus the way that it was set up and he's now gone back and
changed things the scaling that is used is literally a thousand percent bigger
and smaller so the exact light rigged up that he had isn't the same that you
actually need and all that but all this will change oh I also forgot to mention
then you create this little phone amp which it is great like I love it because
you're sure he's showing an idea that you can make really simply with all the
tools that you've learned but you've just paid for a course and the last week
is just making something that you might already had thought of doing and you're
not really learning anything you're just putting what you've just learned into
practice which I feel like that should have been more of a challenge instead of
it being an entire course in itself and that there is the whole 3d print design
in four weeks workshop now what I would say is this for everyone for those of
you that this is the first time you're touching 3d modeling this is the course
to do because honestly jwall is right there one click away and he is helping
you out not only that you get an entire one-hour one-to-one with him so if you
have any questions you can just get in contact with him there and he could he
holds your accountable because at the end of each week there is going to be a
meet-up there is going to be a whole bunch of people there your model will be
in a VR space where everybody else gets to see it and right there there's a real
drive to learn 3d modeling now if you do know 3d modeling and you just want to
get acquainted with the basics of blender don't bother with the workshop
just it's gonna be on your own back here now you've got to keep that in mind it's
all on your own back and there will be no driving force for you but he also
offers just the course not the workshop but it's the workshop only has 30 spaces
each month the courses is unlimited but it's on your own back
at the same lessons as the workshop cheaper even still but they're all right
there so if you want to learn very quickly what you need for blender for
makers they're right there now you might be asking I could do all this completely
free and I can learn blender through the thousands of videos that are out there
right this minute now before taking on this journey I was this close to self
teaching all of this a blender through free YouTube tutorials however most of
these videos that I was finding or either outdated because now we're on the
bait 2.8 Update so there's a big pivot there and if you're trying to learn the
basics through the wrong version it's gonna be hard but I found that a lot of
these tutorials were very much a visual effects video or animation based in some
sort and I knew that I was gonna have to learn a whole bunch of fluff to learn
the maker basics that I wanted now do I feel like I could make anything I want
now that I've done this course no I do not feel like I could do
anything I want within blender right this minute
but I would know where to start and how to improve on that and grow from there I
do know there's gonna be a whole bunch more courses that's going to
intermediate courses that could be advanced courses I'm sure once I've gone
through all of those probably but for now this has been a great start now if
you're interested in taking one of these courses yourself do check out the link
down in the description because Jwall has provided a 90% discount if you want
to take it from that link it will support this channel which is brilliant
it will save you a whole bunch of time it saved me a lot of time but do you
don't it's there it's an offer I personally think it's a steal because it
saved me a whole bunch of time now if you want to see how much this course
helped me you can check out the before and after over on Jwalls Channel right
there because I'm telling you it was bad and I'm a little bit embarrassed to see
how bad I started but it really did help getting through this course anyway guys
thanks for watching keep making and Let the quest continue