Ask Lemmy

I do resin printing. All models get sliced into 2d layers by the slicer program. Therefore, the geometry of the mesh isn't nearly as important as it would be for something you wanted to animate or use in a game. (Pro 3d modelers take great pains to keep their meshes very clean and smooth, made up of all triangles, etc. But if you're just going to convert the thing to a bunch of 2d slices, you don't need that level of discipline.)

You can basically overlap and tweak a bunch of primitive shapes (cubes, spheres, cylinders, etc) to build a complex shape for the thing you want. Then you can export that as an STL file and load it into your slicer. Once inside the slicer you can add any needed supports and then slice it.

In order to get to this pretty basic level of competence, I just watched several tutorial videos on the basics. Like how to add shapes, scale them, modify them, mirror them for perfect symmetry, etc. I have watched some videos on texturing, lighting, etc. out of curiosity but you don't need any of that for resin printing.

And once you export it as an STL it looks like one solid thing, so it's easy to rotate it around and so on in the slicer program.

"Blender Guru" is a really well done Blender tutorial channel, but he also covers a lot of things I don't really need. Early on, I learned a lot from the "tutor4u" channel.

That is a particularly handy feature for older computer games from DOS and C64.