Proposal: Community Tutorial Project?

[EricTRocks]

As far as organization, I've tried my best to categorize the videos on the Softimage Tutorials vimeo group. If anyone wants to volunteer to help moderate and organize please PM me.

[Hirazi Blue]

So how are we going to do this? As a proper (and probably in the long run yet again slightly doomed) Community Project or shall we simply open a “missing tutorial request” thread here and see how it develops. My idea to engage a large group of users to join the effort, even those who had never dared to make a tutorial before, probably was a little bit too optimistic. A compromise, I guess, would be the “missing tutorial request” thread together with a thread dedicated to presenting new tutorials, additionally to EricTRocks’ efforts with the Vimeo Group (as I still secretly want to add something to the si-community specifically as well, obviously).
Your thoughts on all this would be very much appreciated.

[gustavoeb]

If a missing tutorial thread shall be open one should take into account that, without a centralized source of SI tutorials, requests for duplicates will arise. So, in my opinion a sticky (and organized thread) should be kept in the tutorials section.
The first post in this thread should be a compilation of all known tutorials split by category, type (text/video) and availability (free/comercial). When possible one or more viewers could rate the tutorial, tag it as up to date or oudated (in relation to currently used features and workflows), and maybe add a short description to it (which could be limited to X characters, like twitter). This will help people not to waste their time, and also highlight what is missing as far as tutorials go...
This is by no means something small. It could be tackled inside the forum stucture or outside of it. It is easy to set goals way to high, and make it unfeasible, so I know I might be getting unrealistic here...
In order to achieve this I think it would be possible to firstly index some well kept bases, like AD's Youtube Channel, AceMasterminds Youtube Channel and the Vimeo Group Eric mentioned. The indexing of those should be tedious, but easy... Then it is up to voluntaries to add whatever else they find. It would be up to people who use this centralized source to eventually rate the material as they see it, and also request if there is something they cant find...

[EricTRocks]

While I think Gustavo's idea may work on a smaller scale, the amount of items that we would have to list is pretty astronomical. I think a sticky thread for people to post ideas of tutorials they'd like to see / can't find may be more useful in terms of what this forum can handle / deal with. Otherwise a database would be needed and a list of searchable entries would need to be available as well.

This is what xsidatabase was meant for initially but the community based aspect didn't really pan out.

Not sure what I'm really saying here other than having a huge list of all videos is not really manageable in a single forum thread and another type of solution is probably needed so it can be easily searched, items tagged and categorized.

Lastly, I think there may need to be a weekly poll of what tutorials people are looking for then the results at the end of the week will determine what tutorial should be made during the next week. Asking for more than 1 tutorial a week may be too much even if spread around a group of people willing to make them.

[gdebello]

A full military vehicle rigging tutorial, similar to how Craft Director studio works but only using Softimage would be great. Any tutorials like that now?

I work in military sims now and rigged tanks and bradleys similar to how Craft works. I know mine is not the greatest of rigs but it works. I can make one of what I have done for mine but I won't be able to start until the new year.

Thanks,
Glen

[gustavoeb]

Yeah, I was aiming at what would be best, but reconize it is unrealistic

Not sure what I'm really saying here

Neither am I

Should we start an rray.de for tutorials then? Or are we better making something within SI-Community, strenghtening one spot instead of spreading thin?

[EricTRocks]

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.

[Hirazi Blue]

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.

[Nick3d]

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

[AceMastermind]

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.

[Mathaeus]

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.

[rray]

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.

[Nick3d]

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

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

[Hirazi Blue]

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…

[EricTRocks]

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.

[gustavoeb]

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