I have found these videos helpful. To some it may seem slow, but the material is covered well and understandable. A lot of the basics are covered in detail, and early on shows things not to do, or what to watch out for like overlapping vertices. It's a another approach to learning. Part 1
You've probably done it already but for others reading this. If you sign up for Blender Guru's e-mail's you can download a handy keyboard shortcut list. You can then add other ones that you use often.
Yes. Thank you! The most frustrating part of learning Blender is navigating the Perspective view ports. I have looked at least 20 different ways and I seem to navigate to a layout of no return. I save often now.
Ha, yes. I lost all the menu bars once. Blender's strength (well one strength) is that there is normally five ways of achieving what you want, so you can find out what works best for you. That said I've never used a piece of software that kicks you in the nuts so hard, or so often
I know what you mean, the camera can be confusing at times. What I often do: Reset camera: Shift + c Change to local view while editing an object: select the object you want to work on and press / on the numeric keypad. View and rotation of the camera seems out of place? View the selected part: Select the part you want to work on and press , on the numeric keypad.
One advantage of being a senior citizen, through the community college I attend, I can get max for free. However, Blender seems (IMHO) to be well suited for track building. Another frustrating thing however, is in max, in the UV mode, you see all the textures and they load with the fbx (as long as they are in the folder). I have not found how to do this in Blender.
What do you mean ? The textures that are used in the scene in Blender are even packed within the .blend file. And in UV mode, you will see the one for the object you are editing.
I must be doing something wrong then. I have the textures in the folder with the Blend file and had them in the folder with the fbx file when I imported.. I wonder if I needed to change some mapping before I exported from 3dsimed. I thought I remapped. I know I used .png edit: For the heck of it I pulled up the fbx in max and the textures are there, so I am definitely doing something wrong.