I have been trying to use Cycles for a few months now and it is quite difficult to grasp. I know how to create basic materials and how to change shaders around. I understand moving nodes around and connecting them and everything like that. What I am having trouble with is the WHY of connecting everything. I have watched probably hundreds of tutorials at this point and have seen some extremely complicated shaders. Andrew Price from Blender Guru comes to mind immediately. He is extremely knowledgeable and knows exactly what to do to make a scene look exactly how he wants it. My question is how did he learn this stuff? Why do you know to connect a math node here or to use a color ramp node there? How do you know to use “Multiply” instead of “Add” or any of the other options on the math node.

Based on my experience, I could probably quite easily find out how to make a specific material based on a tutorial or soemthing in a book (I have also tried two books on Cycles). I am able to get the results the book wants me to get, and they look really nice. I want to know who came up with this stuff? Am I missing something? I want to be able to pull up the node editor and make the material I want exactly how I want without having to watch a 20 minute long tutorial or read 20 pages out of a book. I come from a programming background. The books for programming will typically explain the WHY very well. This WHY factor is very important in how I learn things.

I know through memory and repetition I could memorize all of this stuff, but I would rather know how to come up with it myself so I can do new and exciting things with Cycles. Please tell me what the best way to learn this stuff is. How did you learn how to do this?