[ Thanks to Michael J. Hammel for this
link. ]
“Being just like the rest of the end user world, I put the
manual aside (at that point I had only glanced through it).
Instead, I jumped right into the tutorials. I’m a writer – I need
to learn fast and have a firm understanding of my subject matter
before I can put words to electrons. (Paper? What paper?) The
Tutorial Guide had better get me going.”
“I wasn’t disappointed. The Guide starts off with an
introduction to the visually complex Blender interface. This
conglomeration of buttons and sliders is all OpenGL based – it
doesn’t look or act like a GTK or KDE application, but that’s a
good thing. For you UI aficionados out there, there is some
serious overloading of UI components in the Blender interface:
labels that act like sliders, direction oriented context sensitive
button presses, buttons which cycle through various values based on
which side of the button you press and more. The lack of
familiarity makes the interface appear complex. But once you learn
how consistent the interface really is, you find its exactly as it
ought to be. Its an interface whose features match its
functions….”
“The Guide is well designed. The early tutorials provide enough
basics to get you motivated enough to move into the more detailed
middle tutorials. Here you’ll find help in learning more specific
features. The Pawn tutorial introduces you to animation, for
example, while the asteroid tutorial covers particle systems. The
flow from front to back of the Guide is just as you’d expect –
beginner to intermediate to advanced.”