The missing tutorials thread

[Hirazi Blue]

I am opening a new thread as a sort of spin-off of the Proposal: Community Tutorial Project? thread that should help us determine, which (kind of) tutorials for Softimage are most sorely missed and to maybe in the end create some of those mising tutorials ourselves to remedy this situation (but that's no promise!!!)

As there are more tutorials online than most people truly know about, some tutorial requests will inevitably lead to pointing out the tutorial someone overlooked, and that’s okay, but I hope this thread will be focused primarily on tutorials that really cannot be found (as in: you’ve already looked for them yourself before posting here).

So the basic question of this thread is: what (kinds of) tutorials are currently missing?

[colour]

Well I'd pay for a good set of Syflex Ice tuts, so if any are created free, I'd be all the more thankful for them! Dealing with characters all the time, and the expectation of high quality cloth are becoming a common occurrence. Capes or cloaks which are partially skinned to a character's shoulders and chest (or seems to be) while the rest flows free. Dresses which are fitted to the rigged character or form part of the enveloped character in parts, and are free flowing in others. Examples where you have a low res proxy and a high res final. Some of these cloth scenarios seem to be composed of 2 or 3 meshes which perform different parts, but come together on one final mesh. Blending between skinned rigs and simulation. Directing cloth movement with wind or vectors. I see a lot of requests for these type of examples on the various forums, and am in great need of them myself too.

[j3st3r]

Actually Syflex ICE is quite easy to use, I did it in my tutorial on Digital Tutors. However I used it for a static character, but that applies pretty much for animation as well.

[EricTRocks]

ICE Syflex is very limited right now since you can't drive parameters via per point data so I believe that the non-ICE based Syflex is going to be more complete. Though less easy to use.

[AceMastermind]

I'm looking for the Pixel Corp training videos that were available on the old SOFTIMAGE|NET forum. I know there has to be at least one person out there that still has them. These were the titles:

XSI Fast Track
Models in XSI
Project Management in XSI
A quick intro to Sub-D modeling in XSI
A quick intro to utilizing XSI's viewports
Brief overview of the XSI animation editor
Brief overview of the keying and layering panel
Brief overview of the timeline in XSI
How to set animation keys in the timeline in XSI
How to set animation keys in the property page in XSI
Edge Loops In XSI
Bevel Component Function
Rotoscope Setup
Temporary Selection Centers
Cleaning a scene for animation
Rigging a Clock for Animation
Intro to NLA in XSI
Modeling An Alarm Clock
XSI Texture Projections
XSI Texturing comparison of Blinn and Cook-Torrance nodes
XSI Texturing - how the XSI Incidence node works
Assigning materials in XSI
XSI texturing using Mix node
XSI Material Manager
XSI texturing using Phong and Lambert Nodes
XSI Render Region
XSI Render Tree
XSI manipulating UVs with the Texture Editor
Basic Bones in XSI
XSI Shape Manager
Lattices in XSI

[Bullit]

Spying my HDD?

I have them, i mean, i didn't checked all the titles. They are 33 movies with a total of 376mb. Where do you want them?

[EricTRocks]

You sure those videos are able to be re-distributed?

[AceMastermind]

I have them, i mean, i didn't checked all the titles. They are 33 movies with a total of 376mb. Where do you want them?

Awesome! I've been searching for these ever since that site went down. I'll take them from wherever you want to upload them. You could probably just zip them all up into a single archive. Thanks!

@Eric
Yep, as far as I know. They were donated to the community.

[EricTRocks]

Ok cool just don't want anyone to step on anyone's toes

[Bullit]

I don't usually upload so big files so an advice to which place to upload to will be good.

[Rork]

Important question about these tutorials...

If people start making them, are other people willing to pay for them? Creating proper, organized training takes time.

[Hirazi Blue]

@Rork - My idea wasn't for making commercial tutorials, but to catalog and possibly fill some gaps in the available tutorial offering by volunteering community members. My original idea, already dead, was to even make a "Community Tutorial Project" out of it, having "everybody" join in the "fun" of making them. If more commercial tutorials are inspired by this effort, however, I wouldn't necessarily mind, as long as the gaps are filled...
;)

[Bullit]

I am looking for an Autodesk tutorial/presentation of one version were there was made improvements in modeling. It had a boat sort of Noah ArK and animals.

Disregard i found it here:http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/marks/go ... _5_is_here

[Kerro Perro]

I may have missed this if there is one already but i would really like an in depth tutorial about normal, displacement and vector displacement mapping. I've found a lot of basic stuff out there but would really like to see someone tweak and troubleshoot those to get them "perfect"...

[Bullit]

Maybe this will help:

[Kerro Perro]

Hmm that normal map one is better than i remember it - must try out all the steps in that - but the vdm one is kinda what i was talking about, it's only in mudbox and i followed it but get a lot distortion every time i export and render:

vdmcrap.jpg

And yeah i tried all the different settings in mudbox, it always comes out the same. Tried different sculpts too...
Also it only renders when i use "send to.." from mudbox, when i do it by hand as Manny suggests it doesn't do anything, no matter what geo approx settings i set...
I was gonna make a seperate thread out of this but i'd rather just have more in depth information about this subject - sort of a "teach a man to fish" idea ;)

Update: well i followed Manny's normal map tut and had a bunch of problems, i shall spare you all of this since i have no immediate plans to use any of this but they were commen ones like odd lines and artifacts that i've seen threads about here many times so i guess my requests still stands: more instruction/information on this would be a valueable addition i think.

Would gladly pay for it btw but it would have to be proper in depth, no "how to set your render tree" type stuff ;)