01-22-2011, 01:05 PM
Check the tutorials on blender. org and the blenderartists. org forums to see what other people are doing. A lot of the newer features are not well documented yet so you have to kind of play with them to get them to do what you want (well, you might not know what you want to do yet with things like subsurface scattering). There is a blender IRC channel on Freenode as well.