Show HN: Learn Blender shortcuts with lots of tiny videos (hollisbrown.github.io)
I've used blender for more than a decade and now ask myself what the best way to teach it would look like.
Video generally seems the best format to explain how to solve a specific problem, but its not exactly great for larger collections of small bits of information – like blender shortcuts.
This is why I made this video/text hybrid website from scratch. If you're a blender user or have experience in teaching others, I'd be very happy to hear your thoughts on it.
I'm also posting this here because I assume many of your are professional web developers. I'm a learning hobbyist and wondering if there are any issues with the way I built the website.
Thanks!
46 comments
[ 33.2 ms ] story [ 2018 ms ] threadDo they support tiny videos instead of images? Because I think this is essential especially for beginners who generally don't know the names of operations.
(BTW, found a typo: Seperate should be Separate)
I might suggest a compact view as an option to try to fit more on screen at once, or just increasing the density.
There already is a "collapse" button if you bring up the menu top right (maybe its too subtle?). Default browser zoom out (Ctrl -) should also work fine, so you can see all shortcuts at once, e.g. on a second monitor or on a beamer, if you're teaching a group of people.
I'm not a professional user of Blender, but it's my only tool for working with and creating models for 3D printing. Never could develop a liking for Fusion360, though I recognize the advantages that CAD programs give.
My biggest tip and gripe as a Mac user is to get a decent mouse button remapped utility and combine that with creating a Mac specific settings save file. For whatever reason, MacOS to this day doesn't recognize the extra mouse buttons that Windows does. Like Button4 etc.
Even today, "middle mouse" button is one of the weirdest default choices Blender could make. The middle finger of either hand is an assisting finger, not primary. The index and ring fingers are stronger and it's weird to assign actions that require persistent pressing to a finger that has less strength than the other fingers.
With a multi button mouse you can remap the middle button to the thumb. It's infinitely a better and more intuitive choice.
Also, Blender's trackpad support on MacOS is horrendous, despite the amazing advances we keep getting everywhere else with each new release.
I would love to see a new feature that is a voluntary checkbox for Mac users that enables a key binding layout dedicated to us.
Also my logitech mice come with remapping programs, does it come with one on mac?
I like the idea of using blender, but I'm under the impression it wouldn't work well for the kind of things I work on, which require precise, adjustable measurements, and parametric design. (Like, custom hardware to mount thing A onto thing B)
Instead of adapting to Anki, you could add your own JS script to this page, which picks a random sample from the array of tiles, highlight it in white, and you need to press the corresponding shortcut to go to the next sample (using a dictionary). You could memorize the time-to-press to generate a finale score (if you're motivated to do so).
I had implemented that algorithm to memorize videogames shortcuts. This could be a nice challenge for your skills! Maybe you could make another page for "VS Code" and that'd be niiiice.
I won't make this for other software, because I don't have that level of expertise for anything else. I've spent years helping other blender users, this is why I feel confident to author the information in this particular case.
I googled your name and 'blender' but didn't find any training resources online. I'm a new Blender user and am on the hunt for resources beyond BlenderGuru's Donut tutorial (which is great, btw).
Do you create any Blender educational content?
But the amount of quality content on youtube has been increasing steadily over the years, If I had to recommend 3, I'd say Grant Abbitt (Beginner), Erindale (Geonodes), Ian Hubert (for Inspiration).
To augment your learnings for blender here are my top:
@HarryBlends is #1 must Blender Binge:
https://www.youtube.com/@harryblends/videos
You can actually follow along with his vids - they are such amazing production quality.
https://www.youtube.com/@CartesianCaramel/videos <- hex unfolding is amazing.
https://www.youtube.com/@akanatinayoutube/videos <- young kid with great tutorials
Also, AI is fantastic at creating python snippets to do things, another HNer was asking about mapping the mouse for macOS and you can remap everything in blender using python (as its all python) --
And I have the bot reference where in the blender docs it got the python functions to map things: https://i.imgur.com/l1S8JaC.png
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I ran Lighthouse over the site. Excellent scores!
The one improvement I would suggest is to increase the contrast between your text and background. Currently the text is a little hard to read.
Have great fun coding!
Will also take a critical look at contrast again, thought it would be sufficient, and it quickly gets overwhelming in this layout.
It's not working as intended on firefox, though, when autoplay is disabled (this might be the default now, I'm not sure).
There is no way to know that the videos are videos, so the tips looks like a bunch of images. Clicking on them has no effect.
The only way to play a video seems to right-click on it, and select 'Play'.
You might want to add a 'play' button overlay on the videos thumbnail images, and/or show the controls by default...
Hope this helps,
I'm a bit weirded out by this being the default even for muted videos. Does that somehow save bandwith because you only get sent one frame of the video? Because otherwise a muted video is just a series of images, and they dont block images by default, right?
I find any autoplay, even muted or no audio, to be more of a distraction then helpful in general.
That said, I'm happy to make exceptions for well designed and intentioned sites, and so have allowed it on yours.
Any pointers how to go about the lazy loading? I want to keep it simple
Solution that would require more work involves removing autoplay attribute from videos and using IntersectionObserver to check when video is inside viewport and start playing it.
The content is focused on modeling though, now that it has a tag system I might add other sections like sculpting, animation...
I hope it catches on, because the lack of quickly accessible/searchable info like this is part of what keeps me from learning new GUI tools. One example is Fusion 360, which seems like a great way to design 3d printed parts. Instead I just keep plodding along with openscad, because it takes me more time to learn one design step in fusion, than to just quickly write up a first draft in code.
Then again, blender is way more shortcut-oriented than any other software I've used, one of the reasons I like it so much.
The important thing to know when learning hotkeys is how to perform the same action using application UI.
Otherwise the keyboard becomes an obscure medium for discovering application functionality
You wouldn't use a menu in notepad to cut/copy/paste, select all etc. right?
It's funny how, when I actually look in the menu, I discover some new things added in recent versions of Blender.