To go from 2d to 3d just takes practice really, but as long as you can picture how to do something if you were making a physical model wire frame, you can do it in 3d.
If you want a sorta intro thing, here's what I wrote up for another fella who asked me about it recently:
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One of the best ways to get into a program is to do tutorials
There are some very good introductory video tutorials on the blender website here:
http://blender.org/cms/Getting_started.400.0.htmlI would highly recommend watching them to start you off because they give you a solid grasp of the concepts underlying the whole interface. (I watched them having worked with blender for years, and I
still learned some new stuff.
)
After that there is one FS related tutorial, and it's also the first one I ever found:
http://freespace.volitionwatch.com/fs2/mods/fighterguide/However, it doesn't actually teach very good modeling technique and is waaaay out of date now. It'll give you the most basic of basic ideas of the controls, but there's actually some really bad practices in there too. For example, the wings should have been mirrored rather than being made twice, and it shows no way to connect the wings to the fuselage.
It's also a really ugly design.
Anyway, aside from that I've written up a mini-tutorial here a while back which has a lot of helpful functionality instructions:
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,42815.msg879403.html#msg879403I am currently writing up a big tutorial that will cover the complete process of building, UV mapping, texturing, hierarchy setup, conversion and POF editing using only free programs such as Blender and The Gimp. However, it's progressing slowly as I have so much to do already and so little free time in which to do it.
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