Some people have natural talent in something, even though they just begin. Or they learn fast, like I do. Sometimes real life helps (concerned people will most likely understand or guess what I'm saying, so I will not bother to explain more).
You might say my education and job required that I'm a fast learner, so that certainly helped. Also, from my point of view, I would believe that people familiar with CAD software coming from engineering or architecture backgrounds could transition to "artistic 3d modelling" pretty fast.
Mayo Master your work is outstanding! I can't believe for one minute that you only have 4-5 months experience in this!
Do you think you could explain how you became so good so fast? As a newbie I have attempted to line up blender cameras to field images and to be honest it seems impossible
. Also getting the scale to be correct seems to be extremely difficult too, do you have any tips/methods?
Finally how are you getting the textures/colours to be so close to the original? Are you using GIMP to make textures from scratch? What rendering engine are you using, internal or cycles?
Sorry for so many questions, can't wait to see the final render of the house field
.
Let me try to answer all these questions... but for reference, you can also check out how I progressed on my very first scene (it's in the "Field scene screens (non bombing mission) gallery" thread), you'll see that there's a lot more fumbling around.
I would say that, at first, you have to be patient about getting the basics right. Make baby steps before you try to run on your own. Initially, omega_res_novae pointed me to the following wikibook, which helped a lot in the beginning.
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro
In the aforementioned wikibook, I personally went through the first two units entirely before starting to model on my own, even though it itched to do it before that. Then I really started with very simple objects (a beer can, a crumpled piece of paper, a trash can), and when I decided to model my first scene, I picked one that looked simple. As a noob, you have to be able to take satisfaction from completing very basic modelling, while being humble before the gap that separates you from true 3d artists (I think it's healthy to keep that mindset). As you take on gradually more complicated stuff, there are two sources that can be very helpful:
- Tutorials around the net. There are LOTS of those. I personally favor the tutorials from Andrew Price at Blenderguru.com, I like his teaching style.
- Real life. More explanations here: after I started to do 3d modelling, I would almost say that I took a completely new interest in just "observing the world" (yeah, I was feeling a bit nuts sometime). For example, I could stare at a tile for 10 mins to study how it was made, how the light was interacting with it, what affected specularity and reflections, etc. You can get a lot of information just from observing everyday's life environment.
Now, to your more specifically technical questions:
- Aligning the field screen and the camera IS a real pain. I managed to do it manually for my first scene, it took ages. To do it manually, generally the idea is to draw two parallel lines along each axis to get the alignment right, but it is very difficult. Which is why SpooX's walkmesh and camera data exporter is such a powerful tool. I strongly recommend you use it. If you don't have PSX discs to extract the data, ask me what field you'd like to work on and I can send you the Blender file, much like SpooX did for me while he was building his script. All that's left to do is adjusting the focal distance, but with the right alignment it's not difficult to do.
- About texturing: that's actually the thing I find the hardest. In my first "man in the pipe" scene, I must have redone the texturing of each object more than 15 times. I think one difficulty is that your colors are a combined consequence of both your texture colors and your lighting. To dissociate these components, I try to get a particular color reference. For example, in the scene I am currently working on (mds5_i), I know the top of the medkit has a white diffuse color (all RGB at 255), and the red cross on the side has the RGB of 255, 0, 0, in terms of texturing. Your lighting is what will make the difference between these texture colors and their RGB values on your rendered image. I find it easier to set the lighting from reference colors in the scene, and then work on the remaining textures. Of course it gets more complicated when your scene has several light sources (something I did not anticipate when I started "the man in the pipe"). Now for texturing, because my artistic skills are rather limited (I'm not unable to draw with paintshop or GIMP, but it's not my strong suit), I tend to prefer working with a combination of texture images (cgtextures.com may be your friend) and procedural textures. For example, the cliffs on Aerith's house outdoor scene are entirely made with procedurals. Also, combining the textures using "Multiply" instead of "Mix" can give pretty good results (I used that a lot for the roof of the house), in a way you can have a texture pattern with any color. As for color matching, if your light setting is correct, then it's a tedious looping process about going back and forth between rendering your model, compare it with original picture, see the discrepancies, adjust the texture colors in your model, re-render and so forth. At least that's how I do it. Don't forget that texturing isn't just about setting a diffuse colors, something like bumpmaping is almost as important. But if you're good with GIMP, more power to you because you can have much more accuracy with UV mapping.
- Finally, I simply use Blender's internal render engine, we don't need anything more fancy than that. Or at least, the improvements I can make to a scene are much more depending on my own improvements as a 3d modeller, than on the use of a fancy render engine. Besides, I don't use cycles, mostly because cycles is meant to help your rendering processes via GPU usage, and my graphic card sucks.
I hope all that helps
Unless there's something very specific I'm looking for (in which case, the internet is also filled with reference pictures), I wouldn't go out specifically with the purpose of "observing real life in order to apply the knowledge in 3d modelling". Besides, it's currently -30 C in my place, so I wouldn't go out at all 
