Understanding 3D Graphics

I find modeling to be super intractable. I've sat down several times to attempt a project and I always get super fixated on details. It's seldom good enough for me to just make it look right, I want it to be technically correct. A pic-rail needs to be modeled to spec, dimensions need to be correct. All the shader functions need to be tuned to the real world measurements. Of course I have to model the mechanism! And the geometry needs to be manifold and the topology needs to be technically perfect... It tends towards a crash course every time.

With that said I love it, I've learned so much just toying around with the software: optics, material science, psychology, illusion, compsci, math... Not to mention the actual artistry of CG which is so diverse. And I find overall it facilitates a unique form of reasoning. It's a confluence of a dozen different disciplines and it's a great playground for the ADHD mind if one isn't fixated on productivity.

While decent article, it is noteworthy that this represents one (traditional) approach to 3D computer graphics.

There are many different approaches that you might encounter that don't fit so neatly into this traditional workflow. Sculpting has different feel than manually placing polygons for example, and SDF based representations are completely different. Recently splatting has been all over the news. Solid modeling is popular among CAD users. Generative approaches like Blenders Geometry Nodes are also fairly exciting. Voxels and point clouds have their own stuff too, latter being interesting especially in the context of photogrammetry. And so on.

I'm bringing this up mostly because if you get excited and go learn Blender, and then find traditional modeling to be very tedious then it is good to know that there are many ways to skin a cat, and no one way is "correct". Especially for art you should do whatever gets you the result you want.