I just finished my pal Stephen Burns‘ Blender 3D 2 class. Stephen teaches professionally so that helped make up for the fact I’m a doofus.
Blender 3D has a steep learning curve but it is worth it because the damn app is FREE. While his first class was some basic interface and modeling, this second class included importing reference, and learning to think in “Object” mode and “Edit” mode and how to use “modifiers” to alter a 3D polygon mesh.
Briefly, altering a mesh position and scale and rotation is done in Object mode. Modifiers that subdivide the mesh or thicken a 2D mesh into 3D are applied in Object mode. Editing of individual polygons, edges and points are done in Edit mode.
Basically we covered poly box modeling and point editing along with the use of modifiers and surprisingly editable Booleans to cut holes in a poly mesh. Simple stuff but all necessary to learn an interface in a new 3D modeling app.
If you look for Stephen Burns on FB and look for his Warp Nacelle FB page you’ll see examples of his hard surface modeling of custom model parts that he 3D prints for clients using FDM and SLA printers.
