Proposal: Community Tutorial Project?

Links and discussions concerning tutorials
EricTRocks
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Re: Proposal: Community Tutorial Project?

Post by EricTRocks » 02 Dec 2012, 06:18

That's the tricky part. Keeping certain resources as minimal and precise as possible might actually strengthen them. I know that if I go to rray.de I'll find the plugins I need / want. If I want to discuss stuff or ask questions then I come here. I never really come here to find plug-ins. That might be one reason xsidatabase didn't work cause it was trying to be too many things.

I don't mind having different sites for different resources as long as there are links from one to the other to easily get traffic from one to the other. I remember those good old early days of the usable internet where there were link networks that connected similar sites. I think if there is a unified "Softimage Resource Network" it wouldn't be terrible to have multiple sites.

In the same vein, think of AD. It's trying to be everything for all industries. Not sure how well that is working out for them. :)
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Hirazi Blue
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Re: Proposal: Community Tutorial Project?

Post by Hirazi Blue » 02 Dec 2012, 11:13

While I agree that a better understanding (catalog/index/database) of the tutorials already "out there", would surely be helpful, the work involved in setting this up AND maintaining it isn't something that shouldn't be underestimated. Rork once made a very good start here, but even he didn't go into individual tutorials per se, it was more about websites worth visiting when looking for tutorials.
Personally I think a tutorial request thread can easily be used to weed out some duplication, by pointing people in the direction of already existing ones. And in the end there IS still a lot that seem to have been largely untouched by the current tutorial makers. There is an obvious tendency to focus all efforts in this respect on ICE, resulting in many good tutorials on the ICE side of things and less so on the non-ICE side IMHO.

PS I don't like the idea of rating the existing tutorials very much, that would confuse matters too much IMHO, especially as it's not a "popularity contest". Some tutorials are better than others and some tutorials work better for some than for others. The main question would be: did you learn what you set out to learn from it.
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Re: Proposal: Community Tutorial Project?

Post by Nick3d » 03 Dec 2012, 10:56

In a not-so-short period of time ( could probably be around January-February ) I was thinking to start a series of tutorials related to game developing with Softimage with Unity/UDK.
Most of the stuff will be focused on preparing everything into Softimage ( units setup, UV, rigging, animation mixer, map baking, FBX export ) and then be exported properly into Unity/UDK.

From what I've seen there are on youtube ( Acemastermind for example ) really good tutorials...but the organization is not that good...I mean, have a list with the tutorials is usefull, but I would suggest to have something more specific, like a brief description ( with keywords ) of the tutorial itself, so anyone that goes into the tutorial page in here with a Ctrl+F could easily find what he's looking for.

Personally I would like to see an entire project ( that could be a cinematic trailer ) explained from A to Z ( Ice effects, rigging, texturing and shading, rendering tecniques ) from the artists themself

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AceMastermind
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Re: Proposal: Community Tutorial Project?

Post by AceMastermind » 03 Dec 2012, 11:50

Nick3d wrote:From what I've seen there are on youtube ( AceMastermind for example ) really good tutorials...but the organization is not that good...I mean, have a list with the tutorials is usefull, but I would suggest to have something more specific, like a brief description ( with keywords ) of the tutorial itself, so anyone that goes into the tutorial page in here with a Ctrl+F could easily find what he's looking for.
The organization where, YouTube or on this forum? Are you suggesting that I go back and add further descriptions and keywords to 1017 videos? The titles of the videos already provide the brief description and keyword, both here and on YouTube. If someone doesn't know what a word in the title means then they can just look it up in the docs.

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Mathaeus
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Re: Proposal: Community Tutorial Project?

Post by Mathaeus » 03 Dec 2012, 23:01

a bit off topic, anyway perhaps is interesting, where is so nicely organized Houdini exchange site today, about half year after start. If I'm correct, almost in same place.

btw I think I have a few ICE tricks, easy to put into small tutorials, but first I'll need to check out is it something similar already published, somewhere.

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rray
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Re: Proposal: Community Tutorial Project?

Post by rray » 04 Dec 2012, 02:55

Good idea, this would be a site I'd spend a lot of time on.

Here is an early predecessor of rray.de (from 2006), I planed it as a full online school with video tutorials, media resources, references etc., maybe commercial.
But was a bit overambitious so it never came to be.

For what it's worth, I can offer the php framework of that site to anyone who'd like to create this tutorial site.
softimage resources section updated Jan 5th 2024

Nick3d
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Re: Proposal: Community Tutorial Project?

Post by Nick3d » 04 Dec 2012, 09:55

AceMastermind wrote:
Nick3d wrote:From what I've seen there are on youtube ( AceMastermind for example ) really good tutorials...but the organization is not that good...I mean, have a list with the tutorials is usefull, but I would suggest to have something more specific, like a brief description ( with keywords ) of the tutorial itself, so anyone that goes into the tutorial page in here with a Ctrl+F could easily find what he's looking for.
The organization where, YouTube or on this forum? Are you suggesting that I go back and add further descriptions and keywords to 1017 videos? The titles of the videos already provide the brief description and keyword, both here and on YouTube. If someone doesn't know what a word in the title means then they can just look it up in the docs.
Yeah, Monday is not a creative day for me :D

Beside that I appreciate really much the tutorials available, but as I said a complete, full, professional tutorial ( or series of tutorials ) made by professionals in order to better understand whats going on behind a project and to learn lots of tricks

I would be very pleased to see something like a digitaltutors website, where you have everything well organized, divided by categories and well explained, but yes, it takes lots of time and its not so easy to do...

Hopefully someone will make an effort and build something that can be usefull to everyone, who knows

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Hirazi Blue
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Re: Proposal: Community Tutorial Project?

Post by Hirazi Blue » 04 Dec 2012, 10:24

Wow, this thread has veered off course somewhat! It quickly became obvious that my initial proposal for a Community Tutorial Project wouldn’t work (at least not in the way I envisioned it). But still, figuring out, what tutorials are missing and even having some volunteers to try and fill some of the gaps, would be nice too. As to organizing the tutorials better, I’m all for it. Anyone with any good suggestions as to reorganizing our own tutorials section efficiently (as in: not too much work to achieve now and not too much work to maintain), feel free to speak up.
The same obviously goes for methodically cataloging the existing tutorials, in a new site or here. You’re more than welcome to try, but I promise you, you’re in for a lot of work beforehand and maintaining the resulting database will give you a lot of work afterwards also. Projects like that tend to die slow and painful deaths (with a few notable exceptions).
But in the end that way not a single new tutorial gets made, which was part of the point I originally was trying to make. And to reiterate that original point, I wanted to make a community effort (“Project”) to get as many people as possible into the fine art of tutorial making, so that filling the gaps in the existing tutorial offering would be something “we” would do “ourselves”, more than just a small group of volunteers. But like I said, that was a bit too optimistic…
:-
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EricTRocks
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Re: Proposal: Community Tutorial Project?

Post by EricTRocks » 08 Dec 2012, 23:04

I think we need to open a thread on the tutorials people are looking for. The organization will need to take a back seat to the actual creation of them.

I've toyed with the idea of opening XSIDatabase back up but solely as a tutorial database / directory of links so that it can be searchable. However, it will be a lot of work and I would not want to do it unless I had another 5 people helping out.
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gustavoeb
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Re: Proposal: Community Tutorial Project?

Post by gustavoeb » 09 Dec 2012, 23:19

Hey Eric, Im up to it. I think I can commit a couple of hours per week on this from January and forward...

Lets see if others want to engage...

I wish the best on the requests thread, hope people keep it realistic. Doing compelling project based tutorials is very time consuming, maybe the initiative can be more succesful if tutorials are short topic based. Much like Paul Smiths stuff
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antsjoe
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Re: Proposal: Community Tutorial Project?

Post by antsjoe » 10 Dec 2012, 01:09

Eric,

What skills/abilities are you looking for in the 5 or so persons to help out on the Soft Image Database?

aj

EricTRocks
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Re: Proposal: Community Tutorial Project?

Post by EricTRocks » 10 Dec 2012, 01:24

haha, no real other qualifications other than just being able to use web forms, find tutorials. I'll be setting up the backend. Really if you know how to post to a blog / forum you've got the skills. :D

Moderator edit: I moved colour's tutorial request to the new The missing tutorials thread - HB
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