After speaking with a few members of our community I have decided to prepare a series of video tutorials geared towards the 3d beginners in how to approach modeling and animation. These will be primarily created in respects to modeling and animation for video game models but will cover some high-poly aspects as well down the road. Initially these will all be free for the community but I may considering shifting them to a paid series down the road. As well, each tutorial will have an accompanying documented version so those that either don't feel like watching a tutorial or don't have the bandwidth, or would rather just read, can follow along. I'm not sure when the first one will be released, but I will let you all know when it will be, and I will try to stick to a fairly decent release schedule following the first tutorial.
So I hope you all look into them when they are available and I greatly hope they can, at least, help somebody learn some things and improve themselves in their own art.
Awesome :D looking forward to it
Good to know. So long as you, the community, are interested I will continue to pursue, develop and release content. If you, or anyone else, has any suggestions on specific topics you might like to see covered feel free to add me as a friend/comment on my page/drop me a private message or whatever.
Will these be for 2.49 or the 2.5x series?
2.49 right now, I will not issue tutorials for the 2.5x series because they are progressive alphas and betas, so the tutorials will remain 2.49 until stable 2.6 is released. It's not a bad idea for people to get acclimated to the new Blender, as I have myself, but I refuse to work in anything but a stable release. There's nothing more frustrating than having to give up on a work or trash it because of a program bug you never saw coming.
But the difference between 49 and 5x is insane, its basically learning an entirely new program. I would actually suggest, now that its actually the main download on the blender website that beginners start there rather than starting a generation behind. by all means go for teaching 2.49 if that's what you know, but there's no point starting there.
also: according to the blender website:
"Blender 2.59 is the third stable 2.5x release from the Blender Foundation." and I've never had any crashes... I'd say its as stable as any other program I have on my machine.
I didn't find the leap between the two that much different. The majority of common functionalities all work the same. Some of the hotkeys are altered and such but I never had to refer to anything to get acclimated to it...but perhaps it's just my perceptions of things. Perhaps I shall reconsider, at least for tutorials sake, doing them in 2.5x and then again in 2.6 if there is that much of a request for it. There will be upcoming news in the next few weeks anyways regarding the whole situation and how I plan to go about it, so that gives me some time to think.
the new 2.59 has been tagged as stable...
I've got 2.59. I'm hoping your gonna start there. :S
I have decided to work in 2.59. I hadn't initially realized it was the stable release till everyone told me and now after working with it for a bit, doing the second week model challenge of mine, I'm quite pleased with it's performance and stability. My only next question is how rudimentary are you guys looking for? I don't wanna go back over the simple basics of moving around in the program as there are a breadth of tutorials on that but rather re-integrate knowledge of the basics of using the program while achieving a finalized modeling result. Any complaints or suggestions with this approach?
Nah as stated, there are other tuts that cover the interface, I found one on blenders introduction page... But it isnt as in depth for practically working with it, So while you do the first tut, you can just explain certain shortcuts etc quickly as you model, No need to cover other things outside of that, overtime we will learn all the other things =}
Well I've written up the outline and I have 3 series planned so far. An introduction series, where I will quickly cover moving around in 3d space and working with Blender, then basic modeling and modeling techniques, basic particle systems and very basic animation and how to handle the various rendered outputs. The second series will be all about character modeling. I've considered doing a concept art video for it initially but have cut that out with just a prepared concept. That series will also cover unwrapping, texturing, basic rigging and basic character animation. Finally the game modeling series, which we'll take the previous model, model a low-poly mesh from it and bake the detail information from the high-poly to low-poly for use in a modern game engine.
How far has this come yet?
I have the first few video tutorials planned out at the moment. You can be sure that I am working on this as I have altered my daily schedules to include time for this venture. I'm waiting to make an announcement until I have everything set however, including a few initial videos to ensure I have content coming out at a timely and consistent manner and setting up a website to handle everything. I expect to be recording very soon. Just give me a little patience and there will be an announcement before you know it :).
And now for 2.6x?