Blender can do a lot, but I really hate the interface. I'll stick with C4D.
https://wiki.blender.org/uploads/f/f5/2_78_env_lighting.png
Ok without reading the manual, tell me what the 'Correction' slider under 'Gather' does. It's (probably) an advanced feature, sure so maybe you can't expect to know at first. But why is there no way to find out other than googling?!!
No little help icon next to anything. No simple tooltips, let alone rich ones. There's zero discoverability.
That's a weird approach to using software. Most people do not launch an application to twiddle with sliders and buttons but to accomplish a task. You can safely leave the correction slider alone until the day you need it (Googling will help), or until you read the manual.
Several posters have already compared Blender with vim - incidentally, vim also has zero discoverability, but once you're familiar with the vernacular, you will be unstoppable.
They only read the manual if the software is so unusable that it requires it. Have you ever seriously read the PowerPoint manual for example?
There's even an xkcd about this.
That's how broken blender is. It's hideously painful. If this text box were Blender, it would have taken me about 148 minutes to type this reply, with a random adjustment or undo or redo every letter of the way, I would have been fighting with this text box the whole way.
if Maya is emacs, Blender is vim. Neither of them are Sketchup, and neither are trying to be.
By the way: I used to hate vi, cause I never gave it a chance. Recently I buckled down and learned how to use it. Now I think it's awesome, and I've hardly scratched the surface. But I finally got over the steep hump, and it was worth it.
It was not designed to be easily learned, but the ui is fast to use once you learn it. One hand on the keyboard hitting memorized hot keys, the other on the 3 button mouse...
What drove me to learn was that I could use a powerful tool, that's improving at a fast rate, legally, for free.
I since used lightwave, maya, sketch up, newer 3ds max... inventor. I still go back to Blender because it's faster for me.
Since 2.5, command and hotkeys in the interface, there's undo, much more friendly to new users, there's much better learning resources. If I was starting now, I'd probably become proficient 5 to 10 times faster.
Seriously, it's just that non intuitive. In the beginning I thought it was perhaps because I was used to C4D, but after that episode, I realised some things in blender simple don't make sense for someone that thinks in objects the mathematical way.
On a side note, I started 3D with POV-Ray many years ago, and, although not having a UI, at least the text description of the scenes was perfectly intuitive... I just can't reach that point with Blender.
How to do what you wanted:
Shift-A Cube Shift-A Cube G to move second cube(assuming you don't want them stacked) Shift right click to select other cube Ctrl+P select Object to parent one to the other(you would use Keep Transform if you wanted to keep them together but move/scale/rotate separate)
Look in the Scene graph on the right, they're still separate objects so you can assign different materials to their faces, unwrap, un-parent them with Alt+P, whatever.
If you wanted to merge the geometry, you'd use Ctrl+J to join them.
In Blender terms, you probably wanted to create a “parent” (typically an empty) for your objects.
Blender is the only piece of software I've used in my life with such a hideously broken interface and no, the problem isn't with me.
It's a trauma. It traumatized me. There is no other piece of software on the planet that I would even conceive of using a word like that for - it's the only traumatic interface I've used in my life. Nothing else compares.
I am telling you my feelings as a user who accomplished what he wanted to and got beautiful results. Together with my beautiful results and outweighing them, I remember the trauma.