[HN Gopher] Show HN: Learn Blender shortcuts with lots of tiny v...
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Show HN: Learn Blender shortcuts with lots of tiny videos
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! Github:
https://github.com/hollisbrown/blendershortcuts
Author : hollisbrown
Score : 129 points
Date : 2024-08-16 22:38 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (hollisbrown.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (hollisbrown.github.io)
| degosuke wrote:
| Great idea! For better retention maybe it can be done as an anki
| deck?
| hollisbrown wrote:
| I knew about analog flash cards for learning but thanks for
| bringing anki to my attention!
|
| Do 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.
| rsanek wrote:
| yes -- you can both embed them as a hosted video (YouTube /
| HTML) or use their built-in video player with
| [sound:filename.mp4]
| MrDisposable wrote:
| This is great, thank you. I have a Markdown file for Blender
| shortcuts I learned, but this seems to be more useful for
| remembering them.
|
| (BTW, found a typo: Seperate should be Separate)
| hollisbrown wrote:
| Thanks for pointing it out, that reminds me I should probably
| run the entire website through a spell checker / AI at least
| once.
| Avisite wrote:
| I have been using blender for years now, but still learned some
| useful shortcuts thanks to this. this is a great way to teach
| shortcuts, and is perfect for a quick reference on a second
| monitor.
|
| I might suggest a compact view as an option to try to fit more on
| screen at once, or just increasing the density.
| hollisbrown wrote:
| Cheers, happy to hear that!
|
| 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.
| geuis wrote:
| This is awesome!
|
| 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.
| prox wrote:
| I think you can remap everything in Blender.
|
| Also my logitech mice come with remapping programs, does it
| come with one on mac?
| ilkke wrote:
| Do check the settings! IIRC blender specifically has a toggle
| between a 2-button and 3-button mouse. Maybe even single button
| is possible, I remember using ctrl and alt with a stylus.
| alanbernstein wrote:
| What sort of things do you print?
|
| 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)
| hollisbrown wrote:
| Blender is mainly for visualisation, but I've used it for 3D
| printing. You can set up models in a parametric way by using
| modifier stacks (e.g. screw, solidify, subdiv etc) or
| geometry nodes, but I imagine other software is more advanced
| in this regard, or needs less customization and thought.
| owenpalmer wrote:
| I adore this format, fantastic idea. I would love to see it for
| other programs as well. This is an Anki deck waiting to happen!
| anon012012 wrote:
| Beautiful!
|
| 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.
| hollisbrown wrote:
| Thanks, and thanks for sharing, I love the idea and will think
| about it. Even though my intuition says it would be more
| productive if I put more time into adding content and polish to
| the existing concept, and people openend the actual software to
| practise their muscle memory.
|
| 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.
| maroonblazer wrote:
| Love your site!
|
| 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?
| hollisbrown wrote:
| Its a pseudonym but I dont have any educational content in
| my real name either, this is my first attempt to
| contribute.
|
| 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).
| samstave wrote:
| This is awesome - I was a Master at Autocad for decades,
| and it was because of mastering keyboard shortcuts for
| every thing I did and having a vast ustom keyboard mapping.
| _(When I was learning Autocad in the early 90s I read one
| book "The Abc's of Autocad" -- and I did every lesson in
| that book ~five times, which taught me all the keymappings
| and I never had to read another book on Autocad.)_
|
| 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
|
| ---
| bonniesimon wrote:
| I wish there were something similar for Davinci Resolve
| neovive wrote:
| That would be great! I usually search and end up on YouTube.
| Most videos for specific features are longer than needed when
| you only need to see how to do something quickly.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| One JS file, one HTML file, one CSS file. Perfection.
| rikroots wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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!
| hollisbrown wrote:
| Thanks! I wasn't aware of tools like Lighthouse, will have a
| look into how it rates things.
|
| Will also take a critical look at contrast again, thought it
| would be sufficient, and it quickly gets overwhelming in this
| layout.
| me_bx wrote:
| Hi, the site looks nice.
|
| 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,
| hollisbrown wrote:
| Thank you very much for pointing this out, if a play button can
| be a fallback for those users only I'll put it in there.
|
| 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?
| sjagoe wrote:
| I turn off autoplay globally because it's been abused for so
| long by some news sites, for example, that autoplay a video
| and then pin it to follow you as you scroll the article.
|
| 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.
| akovaski wrote:
| In case anybody is wondering, Firefox doesn't block muted
| videos by default. The above poster had changed their
| settings to block muted video, which can be overridden per
| site.
| butz wrote:
| As a user with media autoplay blocked I find this website hard to
| use. Please consider adding play/pause buttons for each video or
| just keep video playback controls visible. And with blocking
| disabled, all videos are loaded at once, and when everything is
| playing at once it makes it harder to concentrate on one thing.
| You should consider adding some kind of lazy loading. Sad that
| loading="lazy" is not natively supported on videos yet.
| hollisbrown wrote:
| thanks! If a fallback is possible, I'll put it in.
|
| Any pointers how to go about the lazy loading? I want to keep
| it simple
| butz wrote:
| No simple (native) solution yet, as far as I know. While
| iframe has loading="lazy" support, it probably will be
| detrimental to accessibility. Could be a fun experiment,
| though. Maybe try setting preload to "none" on video? But
| this might be overridden by autoplay attribute.
|
| 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.
| ilkke wrote:
| Great idea and execution, with the shortcut keys doubling as
| models. Certainly gets my visual memory engaged. Works great on
| Firefox android. Only thing I could wish for is sections like
| selection, sculpting, etc. Thanks for making this.
| hollisbrown wrote:
| Check out the filter in the top right corner menu. I think its
| too subtle and most people are missing it.
|
| The content is focused on modeling though, now that it has a
| tag system I might add other sections like sculpting,
| animation...
| jithinraj wrote:
| This format is awesome and helps eliminate the fear of starting
| by making learning shortcuts easy and interesting.
| alanbernstein wrote:
| Excellent work. At first glance, I'd say this is The Right Way to
| do documentation for complex GUI design applications.
|
| 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.
| acutesoftware wrote:
| Very well done - it took me several attempts to get the hang of
| Blender and I still only know / used half those shortcuts. Thanks
| for the easy to use tips!
| baby wrote:
| Can people list similar things for other tools? This would be
| useful from vscode to photoshop!
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