My two are:
Making sourdough. I personally always heard like this weird almost mysticism around making it. But I bought a $7 starter from a bakery store, and using just stuff in my kitchen and cheap bread flour I’ve been eating fresh sourdough every day and been super happy with it. Some loafs aren’t super consistent because I don’t have like temperature controlled box or anything. But they’ve all been tasty.
Drawing. I’m by no means an artist, but I always felt like people who were good at drawing were like on a different level. But I buckled down and every day for a month I tried drawing my favorite anime character following an online guide. So just 30 minutes every day. The first one was so bad I almost gave up, but I was in love with the last one and made me realize that like… yeah it really is just practice. Years and years of it to be good at drawing things consistently, quickly, and a variety of things. But I had fun and got something I enjoyed much faster than I expected. So if you want to learn to draw, I would recommend just trying to draw something you really like following a guide and just try it once a day until you are happy with the result.
I’ve been wanting to learn blender for the same reason. Complicated models are an absolutely bitch to work with in parasolid modeling engines.
However, for simple designs, parasolid modeling is spectacular for designing models for printing. Fusion360 has a free tier for hobbyists (they hide it and you have to go hunting to find it, but it exists), and I’ve done most of my designs there.
I’ve also used tinkercad for really simple edits. I’ve heard great things about solidworks, but it’s expensive af, even for a hobbyist account.
Not sure exactly what you consider ‘expensive’, but there are ways to get a student edition Solidworks account for $100/year. I consider that a pretty reasonable price.
Personally, I find it infinitely more usable than Blender, but that may just be my personal biases in play. Your mileage may vary.
That’s absolutely reasonable, but I’m not a student. Is that required by the license agreement?
Easily fixable. What you do is go to the Titans of CNC Academy and sign up. Congratulations; you are now technically a student! When purchasing the Student Edition from Dassault, you’ll be asked what your educational institution is; “Titans of CNC Academy” is an accepted answer.
Then you can head over to Titans’ sales page and pick up an annual student license. (Make sure you’re getting the Student version and not the cruddy “3DExperience for Makers”. That’s Solidworks’ cloud-based software, and is a hot mess.)
The major downside to this is that files created in the student edition are watermarked as such, and will open with a warning if you try on a professional-licensed version of SW. You should be able to still 3D print for personal hobby purposes, but it is against the license to make money off of it.
