Nothing wrong about watching/following a lot of tutorials, just have to be wise about doing it. Following tutorial should not be the goal.
I'd give some exception for those introduction-style playlist like the infamous donut or similar, for total beginners that want to actually do something in Blender, make that a goal. Once they know their way around and familiarized with how things work then the goal should be whatever they are trying to make and use tutorial as a crutch.
Some tutorials have misinformation and unless you are diligent with referring the manual, experiment or dig really deep, you will not catch it. Some top blender content channels are guilty of this. I don't see them often but they're out there. Some are of low quality and may teach you to do things in a not-so-optimal way. The latter are more frequent.
Every extra course or tutorial on the same subject will give diminishing return. I still sometimes watch them on 1.5x or 2x speed without touching blender, and if lucky, they may contain some tricks or knowledge I haven't come across yet.
My first report was in 2024 for 4.1 beta. I now have about 50 issues closed, a few of those are duplicate and known-issue. A few still open since 2024. And one tiny merged PR that puts undeserving "Contributor" label on all of my comments.
Back then I run daily build for the funsies and update every few days. I don't have to worry about getting things done and can spend time to reproduce bug, bisect from daily builds and narrow down to 24 hours period of commits that introduce the bug. I want to save time for devs/triage team so they can close/confirm the issue, look at it, fix it quickly and get back to do more important stuff.
Don't have that kind of luxury nowadays but I wish I can get back to my side project, dust it off and mess around with daily builds again. But no more of that PR shit, the repo is massive and setting up build environment is overwhelming.
I wish to donate in paper cash or other untraceable form, which is night impossible. So, putting in effort with bug reports is the best I can do for Blender.
If you don't go for tutorial/course/workshop route then reference is probably the only way.
The "Item" panel in the right side N-panel shows objects scale and dimensions.
I believe non 1.0 scale have no effect on lighting (it will affect result from modifier) it is still good practice to make it 1.0
Dimensions group will show... dimensions, of the object. Keep it realistic. If you wish to place something in the scene as a reference, someone made an extension for that. It have not pass the approval yet though. https://extensions.blender.org/approval-queue/autoscale-ref/
I think just knowing and keeping the scale in mind is enough.
For lights power, get it from manufacturer website. It is not a strict law and you can get away with some degree of artistic freedom. But be consistent, light from one candle should not be 5 times stronger than other candle.
Look at references, lots of them
Find those renders and style that you like. Observe fine details and experiment to reproduce same result. If you don't understand how to do specific thing, you can always ask around.
Use real world scale
If you are not making stylized miniature render, model everything to scale. Same applies to light size and power. If it's too bright or too dark, fix it with render exposure or compositor.
Use HDRI
With Cycles, you get decent lighting in one step. And even though EEVEE resamples light texture down, it still have enough detail that gets you okay-ish lighting faster than multiple light object setup. EEVEE next already have automatic "fake sun" if you want that.
Most of our search result pages feature one or more Instant Answers. To deliver Instant Answers on specific topics, DuckDuckGo leverages many sources, including specialized sources like Sportradar and crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia. We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results. Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing. Our focus is synthesizing all these sources to create a superior search experience.
Whatever they are doing over there, it's not working.
I also noticed that majority of results from DDG are some random website with no relation to my query whatsoever, having bot written article picked up by some SEO trickery. e.g garbage site about cooking (doubt) having tech related article written by bot. These sites seem to have articles for everything.
Another complain is how they detect simple unit conversion (or calculator) query. DDG have converter UI and still shove garbage converter sites up my face, I don't even know how these sites managed to have some specific "convert x unit a to y unit b" indexed. Annoying AF.
SEO is a broken game and index/crawler should change the way they do things. As it is, I see no point putting in effort to cater to good crawler anymore. Might as well block them all and go back to early 00's style neighbor links, slap tar pit and anubis on it for good measure.
I would love some suggestion for alternative privacy respecting search engine that have some "sense" of what they are actually indexing.
Nothing wrong about watching/following a lot of tutorials, just have to be wise about doing it. Following tutorial should not be the goal.
I'd give some exception for those introduction-style playlist like the infamous donut or similar, for total beginners that want to actually do something in Blender, make that a goal. Once they know their way around and familiarized with how things work then the goal should be whatever they are trying to make and use tutorial as a crutch.
Some tutorials have misinformation and unless you are diligent with referring the manual, experiment or dig really deep, you will not catch it. Some top blender content channels are guilty of this. I don't see them often but they're out there. Some are of low quality and may teach you to do things in a not-so-optimal way. The latter are more frequent.
Every extra course or tutorial on the same subject will give diminishing return. I still sometimes watch them on 1.5x or 2x speed without touching blender, and if lucky, they may contain some tricks or knowledge I haven't come across yet.
“There’s no point to report bugs”
My first report was in 2024 for 4.1 beta. I now have about 50 issues closed, a few of those are duplicate and known-issue. A few still open since 2024. And one tiny merged PR that puts undeserving "Contributor" label on all of my comments.
Back then I run daily build for the funsies and update every few days. I don't have to worry about getting things done and can spend time to reproduce bug, bisect from daily builds and narrow down to 24 hours period of commits that introduce the bug. I want to save time for devs/triage team so they can close/confirm the issue, look at it, fix it quickly and get back to do more important stuff.
Don't have that kind of luxury nowadays but I wish I can get back to my side project, dust it off and mess around with daily builds again. But no more of that PR shit, the repo is massive and setting up build environment is overwhelming.
I wish to donate in paper cash or other untraceable form, which is night impossible. So, putting in effort with bug reports is the best I can do for Blender.
If you don't go for tutorial/course/workshop route then reference is probably the only way.
The "Item" panel in the right side N-panel shows objects scale and dimensions.
I believe non 1.0 scale have no effect on lighting (it will affect result from modifier) it is still good practice to make it 1.0
Dimensions group will show... dimensions, of the object. Keep it realistic. If you wish to place something in the scene as a reference, someone made an extension for that. It have not pass the approval yet though.
https://extensions.blender.org/approval-queue/autoscale-ref/
I think just knowing and keeping the scale in mind is enough.
For lights power, get it from manufacturer website. It is not a strict law and you can get away with some degree of artistic freedom. But be consistent, light from one candle should not be 5 times stronger than other candle.
There are some free extensions that copy "Photographer" add-on which have light presets, lumen or candela conversion all that stuff. Useful quick read
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/lights/light_object.html#power-of-lights
Size affect shadow blurriness. Distance affect how long bright-dark gradient is (falloff) Again, artistic freedom.
From technical standpoint, I think it comes down to knowing what will happen when tweaking certain number. The rest is artistic skill.
I will only suggest the absolute basic.
Look at references, lots of them
Find those renders and style that you like. Observe fine details and experiment to reproduce same result. If you don't understand how to do specific thing, you can always ask around.
Use real world scale
If you are not making stylized miniature render, model everything to scale. Same applies to light size and power. If it's too bright or too dark, fix it with render exposure or compositor.
Use HDRI
With Cycles, you get decent lighting in one step. And even though EEVEE resamples light texture down, it still have enough detail that gets you okay-ish lighting faster than multiple light object setup. EEVEE next already have automatic "fake sun" if you want that.
Have fun!
The artist wish to not have their works repost so I will only link to twitter post.
https://twitter.com/nyum_serori/status/1727823790242140256xcancel just loads image more reliable than other instance once you get past the janky bot check. Use any front end you like.
"Special" and cute
if so, the story better hurry up and move on from tragic backstory to the fun part soon
pleaseIt's nice. The smallest cat is my fav (Azuki?) the one who take care of the lost green cat.
Those kitties need more brain cells and half the lewdness though.
yeah... about that bread...
It's quite rare that I felt betrayed by bread.
To be fair, it's on me buying it not knowing the word "melon" is for its appearance, not its content.
Right. I need to calm down.
Recent long research on machining messed me up good.
Whatever they are doing over there, it's not working.
I also noticed that majority of results from DDG are some random website with no relation to my query whatsoever, having bot written article picked up by some SEO trickery. e.g garbage site about cooking (doubt) having tech related article written by bot. These sites seem to have articles for everything.
Another complain is how they detect simple unit conversion (or calculator) query. DDG have converter UI and still shove garbage converter sites up my face, I don't even know how these sites managed to have some specific "convert x unit a to y unit b" indexed. Annoying AF.
SEO is a broken game and index/crawler should change the way they do things. As it is, I see no point putting in effort to cater to good crawler anymore. Might as well block them all and go back to early 00's style neighbor links, slap tar pit and anubis on it for good measure.
I would love some suggestion for alternative privacy respecting search engine that have some "sense" of what they are actually indexing.
TIL the existence of 発車メロディ
I only encountered basic tones during a whole year I was there.
Oh, I should have word it more clearly. I watch things season by season and currently mid way through fall 2025. 3 behind current season.
If I'm not mistaken, I'm 3 seasons behind. Will be a while before I get to taste the five stars cringe.
To know where something lands on the spectrum, you need to know both ends of it 🧠👈
friend
Will throw this into random corner of my brain and check them out after I empty my backlog... eventually.
💀
My mixed feelings about mech aside, it got absolute banger songs. No pun intended.
Re-sublimity | agony | Suppuration -core-
edit: correcting anime run date
stabbed into chicken nuggets... McNom Opus
wonder if this is a trend/meme in Japan
Too distracted by the dino and not noticing the cup and rectangular thing next to it. What is that? Ice cream?