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.
As someone who also prints with resin, let me tell you that a decent mesh is crucial for bigger pieces that you need to make hollow. More often than not, objects are an amalgamation of smaller things cobbled together, but without vertices connecting them. When you try to hollow such a piece, it won’t work “the right way”, so you can end up with hollowed pieces that have no holes and will leak, break or fail somehow after fully printed.
Years ago, I also had to deal with an object that had some 50k loose vertices, invisible to the naked eye because they didn’t make any edges or faces, but chitubox sliced as if it had a million faces covering the entire build plate.
Another thing I do, mostly to help with stopping chitubox from crashing, is reducing the face count of models (Modifiers -> Decimate). Yes, 4 million faces, lots of detail, etc etc, but if it’s a 32-40mm tall mini, it’s extremely unlikely you’ll notice any differences between that original and a version with ~600k faces, both printed together.
Thank you for adding this to the discussion. I should have specified that I only print smaller things, maybe 10cm tall at the most. Most things I print are much shorter than that. I have only printed one hollowed print (out of hundreds of objects). For my modest needs, the savings on resin is usually not worth the hassle of cleaning / curing the interior cavities. I can definitely see how having bad geometry could foul up a large, complex and/or hollowed print!
I mostly print miniatures as well, but sometimes it’s miniature vehicles, or other sorts of big miniatures that, if hollowed out, can drop from ~35g to ~15g of resin needed. When a typical 36mm tall mini will usually take 5g with supports, that’s a big difference.
I remember I gave up printing a chibi Duran (from Trials of Mana), roughly 8cm tall, because each piece of the hair was a separate object, thus impossible to hollow “as is”. The hair alone was probably more than half of the total resin needed for the piece.
