Comment by wpm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wpm | Hacker News Reader

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Maybe this'll get me torched but one of the more useful things I've had an LLM do is generate a little tutorial for Blender. Though I'm coming in with zero 3D modeling experience, and the tutorial was for the basics, what I got (and this was with a local quantized Qwen, I'm sure the big boys would've done a better job) was fairly workable.

My issue was yes, it's always a YouTube video, and also always for shit I didn't want to do. I don't want to make a donut. I don't want to model a coffee cup, I want to make something else.

It was full of little errors here and there (the human crafted ones are too because the Blender UI changes so often), but since it had gotten me started and "in" the UI I could usually figure it out myself or use a search engine to find what I was looking for.

"Torched"? Nah, not at all. But the donut tutorial is famous for a good reason. A donut is basically a torus, which is one of the basic shapes that Blender gives you, so you're starting from a shape that's nearly right — and then the tutorial teaches you how to deform it slightly so that it looks less perfect and therefore more "real". Which means that you're learning the process of modeling. That same tutorial then teaches you the process of texturing, of lighting... By going through the process of crafting an object you don't actually care about, you learn the steps involved in crafting the ones you do care about.

Perhaps, if the object I do care about crafting requires that process. I'd rather just learn the process I need when I need it, not waste my time doing a bunch of nebulous "this might be useful later" or conceptual stuff. Blender is an immensely flexible and well-featured tool. If I'm using it for 2D animation, making models for 3D Printing, or video editing, being able to make a donut is quite frankly, useless.

The donut tutorial is fine, but it is an error to believe it is appropriate or useful for everyone. Probably best for people who have more vague goals like "i want to be good at blender" and not "I have this very specific thing in my head that I want to make and none of the free models out there are close enough."

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