Should I try Blender?

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  • #1731676
    Ethiopia
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    I have to disagree with your advice to learn hotkeys when starting a new program. When I retired from full time work (in the graphics industry), I worked part time for a small outfit that made online training material for aircrew (pilots, flight engineers, load masters and tech crewmen). I learned a lot about instructional techniques, among them was something called 'positional data'. It seems that numerous studies have shown that people learn better and retain material MUCH better from reading books (you know, those paper things) compared to online material. It was found that because of how our brain retains memories, we make links to areas in a book ("half way through" for example) and on a page that help us recall the data. Even chapters will help a lot. When reading the same material on a screen it's one big endless scroll that has none of this data. Even if a PDF has separate chapters and marked pages it doesn't have that physical presence that we now know is so important to retention.
    The same goes for hotkeys. Remembering some random/arcane set of keys is nonsensical to someone just learning the software. It's better that they learn the set of clicks that brings up the tool or function, because they will recall the spot on the screen or menu where the tool is located more easily that a set of obscure keystrokes. That's why beginners are encouraged to keep menus in plain view vice 'auto-hiding' them. This is one of the beauties of Adobe products. You could put all the pallets in each program in the same spot and have similar tool sets in the same area on your monitor(s). Because I used so many different programs I only memorized a few keystrokes, but I could zoom my mouse around to the tool bars and menus like lightning.
    Memorizing keystrokes is fine if you use a program regularly, but if it's only an occasional tool, your memory of the keystrokes will fade quickly while the memory of where the tool is on the toolbar will last much, much longer.
    I agree about the add-ons. There's many good ones, but there's also a lot of mods that move stuff around because someone decided that they like it 'that way'. Being able to modify stuff at will is not always a good idea. While I have used Blender almost since it's inception, my install is still mostly vanilla and I haven't bothered with hotkeys. I also use Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, After Effects (I just loooove AE!), Studio and a bunch of other little toys. Now fully retired, I spend less time pushing pixels around so my speed and familiarity has dropped, but I still know how to access everything because I remember WHERE stuff is instead of relying on HOW TO.

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