I "grew up" using Cinema 4D. Likewise I just find that the UI of blender is for whatever reason _incredibly_ not intuitive for me. I also don't really like the fact that everything is a youtube video nowadays; I guess it's easier to monetise for the kind people who make tutorials but when I learnt 3D modelling as a teenager (in ~2005 with a desire for 3D printing!) C4D just intuitively "clicked" and they had a lot of hugely detailed, technical information with a lot of physics in it. One of my dad's friends had a license for it, and I was somehow able to just internalise its various primitives and object based workflow.

I've tried many times to get to grips with Blender but for whatever reason I've found doing the simplest things very tiring. If there's a big, illustrated PDF manual out there for a recent version, I'd love to know of a link to it...or even better yet a conversion guide from C4D (!)

Many people start learning blender with the donut tutorial. It’s pretty famous.

It’s a general beginner tutorial, but blender can be so weird that many skills don’t transfer (like how you move the camera in the viewport).

The tutorial takes you through pretty much everything you need to know to get started with blender. Modeling, texturing, painting, modifiers, compositing, geometry nodes, and rendering. You can skip the parts that seem familiar, since you already know 3DS Max.

When I started on 3.2 there was a series of 3-5 minute videos covering the absolute basics of the interface, voice by some european (nordic?) guy.(Maybe CGboost 2.8 series?)

Were the concepts basic? Yup. But watching a 5 minute video on 1.5x speed gets through it pretty quick and covers some edge cases for the topic at hand, which can be surprising even at a basic level.

THEN MOST IMPORTANTLY you need to practice using the keyboard shortcut keys which are pretty essential to feeling like a native in Blender.

After the first X number of videos, if you can predict what is coming.. well, then you are bored and you are ready to step onto the next thing and explore that instead.

(edit: stick to points rather than rave on)

I think you need to start learning a lot of things from scratch. They are just very different programs with different concepts and layouts. You can sure transfer some things over but I think it might be best to just start from scratch, skip through the parts you feel familiar with. Try some beginner tutorials like the donut to get some overview and then learn how you learn new stuff. Just maybe try to not to think of it as 3ds Max but different. Blender is a very different experience and not looking it as a migration but a new tool might ease the frustrations.

I wish Autodesk had a Creative Cloud equivalent: imagine a 50€ / month subscription that gives access to all Autodesk apps, it would have sold like hotcakes.

By remaining expensive proprietary tools, they lost the new generations of developers who learned 3D with Blender and Houdini Apprentice and who will naturally continue to use them once they become professionals, so the customer base will keep shrinking.

Do tiny projects in Blender and just trudge through the horrible experience of having to look up a bunch of stuff. I also moved from 3ds Max to Blender, but back in the Blender 2.7 days, I'm sure it's easier today.

Basically take whatever you'd do in 3ds Max normally, commit to doing in in Blender and prepare to Google/Ask an LLM "I can do X in 3ds Max 2025, how can I do the same or equivalent in Blender 5.2?" A LOT. Nothing beats practice :)

I used to use 3ds Max and I find the Blender's UI really terrible after years of occasional use. It's very unintuitive and you'll have to learn everything from tutorials / reading Blender forums. It seems to have many annoying quirks, which make me angry every time I use it.