A lot of those options are necessary complexity, not incidental. 3D modeling and animation are just very complex series of tasks, you can't condense the options much without sacrificing functionality for some critical workflow. The only way to satisfy both:

a) Having lots of options

b) Making those options discoverable for beginners

is with some kind of nested categorization scheme. Any UI you create to render that will naturally converge onto a high-fan-out tree-like menu.

As both a Photoshop and Blender expert (used both professionally for many years), almost all of it is heuristic/technique (memorizing what/where things are) not unlike learning kitchen utensils and the locations of the drawers they’re in.

So it’s

1) knowing what you even need to do in the first place to make the sphere, or swap the texture, or delete the lights, or etc.

2) where that tool is and how it works

Then later you can get into hotkeys and what your workspace looks like, and you can develop more of a command of things. Just start very goal oriented and pretend you’re staying in an Airbnb in a foreign country - you just need to figure out how the stuff works and where they are.

Hope that helps! Oh yeah and then there’s the typical OS level menus like saving, exporting - you probably natively know how to do that stuff already. So you can also use Blender to convert say glb to fbx and so-on, while making little edits you might need.

Be obsessed with your project so you have to use these things.

I'm glad it's not just me - I do game modding in my spare time and I figured out how to use Hammer to make maps - it took a day or two but I figured it out.

I wanted to make some models too but when I downloaded Blender and looked at a tutorial to create a cube and I just thought... why is this so complicated? It looks easier now (I was probably looking at doing it close to 20 years ago) but back then it seemed crazy that there was a long tutorial just to create a cube.

I played with a simpler modelling program called Anim8or (https://www.anim8or.com/) and it was quite nice to use though - I could create shapes and drag the vertices and it all seemed quite intuitive.

> If you compare 3DSMax 1995 to Blender, with few execptions, you'll find them very recognizable.

Workflows from 1995 have basically nothing in common with modern ones, everything is completely different and specialized in a lot of ways.

> It (3d asset creation) practially hasn't changed much since ~1995.

I disagree. In the past ~20 years, more and more 3D assets have been created as very high-poly models and high-res textures first (via sculpting, photogrammetry and baking) and the optimization process was pushed to much later stages. I'm quite sure it was not the case in 1995.

It's just like programming. We do have better tools and abstraction layers. But Jevons paradox got us.

Or perhaps I don't understand how things were done in 1995 as much as I believe?

One benefit of Blender is that it does lean pretty hard into separating distinct workflows. When you're using it on a team, you can teach people one tab at a time, and let them explore sculpting or texturing if that's their skillset.

It did take me ~5 years to get comfortable with the majority of Blender's features, but I made decent contributions to a small project before then. Solo stuff is much harder since you have to play the one-man-band by yourself.

There's already ai models that create 3d assets

My guess is that there's probably a missing abstraction layer in the 3d editors somewhere. I am pretty bullish on AIs ability to solve this problem, even just based on existing image to 3d models like TRELLIS and HY3D. They work pretty darn well and take a lot of the burden out of not just modeling, but texturing and uv unwrapping.

That being said, I have a correlate here for music production and you could definitely make a lot of the same arguments about it, and they'd be true -- really high learning curve to make something halfway decent even assuming you have the taste part sorted. Some of it is the ability to just creatively think in another language once you become fluent in it.

I think AI can give you leverage when it does stuff you could actually do it manually yourself because you can manually evaluate it and correct it competently. The hard part is how would you evaluate work that is beyond your current competence level?

If that isn't easy, if it's incompressible relative to your current skill level, then that's the very human part that will always be a bottleneck. And that's fascinating to me because if there were better AI tools for music production when I picked it up a few decades ago, I don't know that I would have developed the same fundamentals.

What will fundamentals look like in a post-agentic world? If a lot of the manual gruntwork disappears or is more heavily abstracted, I believe that will matter a lot more.

> It (3d asset creation) practially hasn't changed much since ~1995.

I don't think this is strictly true, not only are there new approaches to modeling like mudbox and such, but the nature of the assets people are creating is meaningfully different in 2026 than it was in 1995. The polycounts are orders of magnitude higher, the way you texture and shade the models is different, etc.

And then the actual hardware being used to render the finished assets is very different - it's much faster, it has dedicated acceleration for rasterization and ray/path tracing, etc. Fewer compromises are necessary to deliver your 3D assets to the viewer than back in 1995 and it's cheaper to deliver them.

It's true that a lot of the fundamentals haven't changed though. I'm not sure that's a bad thing.

Why does it have to be easier? It’s like asking for soccer to be easier so you can play in the World Cup.

A future where everything is very easy to learn is kind of dystopian

Why does it take a year for the cow to produce a calf?

Why cant it just spontaneously generate it as soon as the egg and sperm meet?

Take the Same question but replace calf with priest, surgeon, weather forecaster, chartered accountant, musician, chef etc. What is going on in these processes that requires so much time?