Was really good, enjoyed that, time went by really quickly. Cheers for doing that for us. Nice getting to ask questions and getting instant strong feedback, picked up lots of things.
Awesome presentation, even though it was more of an intro to Zbrush every 3-5 minutes you'd drop some little bit of knowledge that I know is going to greatly benefit my workflow.
Yeah, it was good. I had to leave early, so it sounds like I missed quite a bit of time. But still, it was fun. Would have been even more awesome with a full chatroom.:)
So, I do hope all of you kids that came found it useful. I think re: chat room--not for me as an instructor. There were a max of 4-5 of you asking questions at one time and that was enough to inundate me with information. 4 hours of me working and I didnt come out of it with a finished bust even means I spent more time contemplating chat than my actual work. Not entirely bad, but terrible for demonstration sense. Think of if you could all talk amongst yourselves? None of your questions would be answered because I'd be talking about one thing and you would have chattered the new questions right off the page. So yeah, sure. A chat room for you guys would be fine. But I do not want to be in it for those reasons. It's REALLY hard to keep talking for 4 hours and keep working you know? If you have thoughts on that I'd love to hear them. Especially from those of you champs that made it to the class.
You'd essentially need a facilitator. Someone to act as a liaison between the audience and yourself. This person will cherry-pick** questions and feed them to you over the course of the evening. This way, you can worry about the bust/topic/whatever while answering a slow-drip of questions.
**Relevant to the evenings topic, things you haven't covered yet, screening stupid questions (e.g.: stoofoo do you wear pants when you use zbrush?????, etc.)
Bonus points if this person is on mic with you, so its a conversation between the two of you. You work, he/she probes.
shokhan: I think having my questions on a second monitor would help. I still think the problem is more in the amount of ground covered and less in the way it was covered. You folks asked some really off the wall questions which is fine, but in my classroom setting instead of humoring the homies who ask those questions, i just have them wait for the time when it makes sense for the whole room to hear about it. It's slightly different, you know?
Adam: were you in the class!? We did that for a while. It's actually a bit more rough sounding when someone else filters it. My idea of relevance is not the same as jimmies. And it's hard to makke that form factor work out for everyone.
Maybe make people raise their hands if they have an important question (let them type it out or something) so you can finish your sentence, then see who's got a question read it and see if it's important or not. Or tell the person to remind you later on in the process. (I also asked some questions that would probably have come up later on in the process.)
overall it was fun and educational. I understand it would be a lot more educational once you guys figure out the tool and actually work on something all together.
And also: it's weird to listen to a guy you don't know for 4 hours :P.
I had great fun
Next time though i think it would be best if the Q+A was left for the last 20-30 mins or so...then you could have at least finished some sculpting ^^
At least you know this is doable
I'm not sure about a chatroom you need some kind of formality/focus to it.
You have a chatroom its like everyone talking in a classroom when the teacher is talking, no one learns anything. So were able to see each others questions, but not a formal chatroom.
I think with the questions, you should have them at certain intervals or times.
And I still dont like Zbrush as I side note. Its a good tool, which does what it does better than anyone else but its not user friendly, intuitive, I could see even from your usage.
Id say I took away heaps of valuable tips from that lesson I think if this was a proper lesson and people were working away they would maybe not ask as many questions. Think we were just blasting as many questions at you for 4 hours to get as much info from you as possible so eventually some of the things you do would make more sense to us therefore we’d probably ask less questions later on. Dose that make sense.
Also I guess depending on who this is aimed at but like you didnt need to show us the export into maya you could have said that and we could have gone and done it for ourselfs. meaning you could have continued to work into the model. Probably would have gained like and exta miniute or 2.
And if you had a laid out lesson plan for each lesson certain questions you could say ill go over that in this lesseon.
There is more I just rembered as that was an introduction to zbrush I found towards the end that I kinda didnt have much more to ask except for more sort of artistic questions about form and muscles. So id say the next lesson would have been a bit more quiet a few random questions but less questions about like your UI and the brushes and stuff.
Your a very good teacher taught me more in 4 hours than I have learnt in uni for the past 4 years altough my uni dosent concentrate on 3D all that much more a mix bag of everything
No to the classroom wide chat room, I think things got derailed enough and no one could chat ha!
Yes to the helper monkey who filters questions and publishes the ones that make sense.
Yes to the second monitor, hopefully we can see both. The screen space was getting very crowded.
For the intro to Zbrush I would do a little more "this is zbrush, this is how the brushes work, this is how you juggle meshes, these are materials this is why I HATE the dusty orange default mat" Maybe 5-10min of that so even the slow kids aren't lost.
As one of the slow kids who has spent more time with mud and hardly touched Zbrush, I could hear hotkeys firing off and the cursor changing but no real grasp on what happened. A lot of stuff that's second nature to ya flew right past. "Joe make pretty brush, do stuff... drool..."
Having the meshes loaded up and labeled logically along with the UI's set up ahead of time would help I'm sure.
Probably skip the 30-40min base mesh building, some good things came out of the discussion but things like that can be noted and pointed out in a few minutes.
The tip about smoothing out tri points was great but could have been demonstrated in 1-2min on a mesh that was set up for that specific example, luckily it came up and a good example presented itself.
Id agree with no class room chat mabye for like 5 mins after would have been nice to chat to people like you do after a class normally. If it went down properly mabye that would just be a case of people getting together after it on like skype or something just so that people who missed bits or were unclear on bits could get that from someone who understood it.
Going back to page 2 of the thread, I'd like to see this kind of stuff more regularly as well (perhaps as part of PC2.0). Their are a ton of talented artists here, and who wouldn't like classes taught by Pior, Per, Kevin Johnstone, Kite, SpaceMonkey, Bobo, Eraserhead, etc.
As for the chat room, I think it would be a good/bad, sense if people could see how many other questions were being asked they wouldn't repeat questions and might be a bit more restrained in what they ask/say. Everyone being seperate like they are now makes it seem like they are the only one their, and so they're more likely to just fire away any thought that enters their mind making for a lot more proverbial noise. Add that to only answering questions from 'raised hands', and things should become much more manageable.
Would be nice if polycount had something like that, one being a tutorial session, and one being a discussion session with someone taking the lead and just trying to answer questions. I would definately gain a lot from that as anyone can find tutorials online, but you want more of a one on one expereince, finding out peoples workflows and questioning them, as mentioned it becomes second nature to a lot of professionals so its nice to be like, "hold on a minute, why did you do this?"
You can have the chat room separate from the direct questions submission area. So everyone can whoop and holler about what's going on and not disturb the presenter. While they still get a good amount of direct questions.
It just felt really weird only being able to write to the presenter. Didn't feel as much like a community thing. The only way you could tell was by looking at the list of other people watching, and later when there was direct interaction with the audience.
Going back to page 2 of the thread, I'd like to see this kind of stuff more regularly as well (perhaps as part of PC2.0). Their are a ton of talented artists here, and who wouldn't like classes taught by Pior, Per, Kevin Johnstone, Kite, SpaceMonkey, Bobo, Eraserhead, etc.
yes. polycount should have people doing this if possible. shit would be ace. maybe volunteer & donation run? drool.
and of course I'd totally be interested in any FuturePoly ones as well.
yeah would be well worth paying for something like this putting what ive learnt from that one lesson into my workflow and its making things easier and zbrush makes a lot more sense to me now. Before think I was just trying to bend zbrush to my will not really trying out other things.
Going to invest time in findinding what every thing in zbrush actually dose altough some stuff isnt needed think its good to know a package well so you know whats possible.
Hey Stoofoo, sorry I missed it as it seems like alot of people loved the class ( had the little one and hard to get a 2 yr old to watch anything but elmo:)) If we do something like this again, and have Per/Kite/Bobo/Spacemonkey/etc veterans to share some of there secrets, please count me in! We could surely should set up an online polycount class at least once a month ranging on different topics, as I have always tried to set up a university within the studios I work for, so as an artist you can learn from your peers.
Hey folks. In the interest of getting the class off the ground I'm trying to set up another session tonight. This time more of the actual intro to zbrush I intended last time. More similar to how i'd conduct the actual class, less random Q&A that derailed me for 4 hours. Anyone into it? It'd be later in the evening. 5-6 PST. I know its a bad time for your overseas folks, but it's the only time we managed to sort out the timing at the school space.
I've been trying to force myself to spend more time in Zbrush. Will this class include any more of the time saving methods and pipeline tricks that blew minds in the last session or is it all just the very basics of Zbrush (subdivide, work at low res, subdivide again, hee's how to mask, etc)?
No idea how to embed the video properly in this ui and I mayyy be drunk.
It went well, I think. Small group as pc was dead when we were trying to start unfortunately. But this video is the result of my babbling for a while. I recorded audio too, but there about 1:30 of video and I was not sure where to place it. So short and sweet for the tubes.
Replies
THANKS, GOOD WORK.
- Dale
One small problem audio sometimes lagged out and would miss small bits of info but nothing major.
-Craig
Just get the issue with not being able to see each others comments sorted out and it'll be golden.
Just kidding! That was awesome, thanks for taking the time to go over your workflow.
Also, hustlin.
<-- Zach
outtie 5000
**Relevant to the evenings topic, things you haven't covered yet, screening stupid questions (e.g.: stoofoo do you wear pants when you use zbrush?????, etc.)
Bonus points if this person is on mic with you, so its a conversation between the two of you. You work, he/she probes.
Adam: were you in the class!? We did that for a while. It's actually a bit more rough sounding when someone else filters it. My idea of relevance is not the same as jimmies. And it's hard to makke that form factor work out for everyone.
overall it was fun and educational. I understand it would be a lot more educational once you guys figure out the tool and actually work on something all together.
And also: it's weird to listen to a guy you don't know for 4 hours :P.
Next time though i think it would be best if the Q+A was left for the last 20-30 mins or so...then you could have at least finished some sculpting ^^
At least you know this is doable
I'm not sure about a chatroom you need some kind of formality/focus to it.
You have a chatroom its like everyone talking in a classroom when the teacher is talking, no one learns anything. So were able to see each others questions, but not a formal chatroom.
I think with the questions, you should have them at certain intervals or times.
And I still dont like Zbrush as I side note. Its a good tool, which does what it does better than anyone else but its not user friendly, intuitive, I could see even from your usage.
Also I guess depending on who this is aimed at but like you didnt need to show us the export into maya you could have said that and we could have gone and done it for ourselfs. meaning you could have continued to work into the model. Probably would have gained like and exta miniute or 2.
And if you had a laid out lesson plan for each lesson certain questions you could say ill go over that in this lesseon.
Your a very good teacher taught me more in 4 hours than I have learnt in uni for the past 4 years altough my uni dosent concentrate on 3D all that much more a mix bag of everything
Yes to the helper monkey who filters questions and publishes the ones that make sense.
Yes to the second monitor, hopefully we can see both. The screen space was getting very crowded.
For the intro to Zbrush I would do a little more "this is zbrush, this is how the brushes work, this is how you juggle meshes, these are materials this is why I HATE the dusty orange default mat" Maybe 5-10min of that so even the slow kids aren't lost.
As one of the slow kids who has spent more time with mud and hardly touched Zbrush, I could hear hotkeys firing off and the cursor changing but no real grasp on what happened. A lot of stuff that's second nature to ya flew right past. "Joe make pretty brush, do stuff... drool..."
Having the meshes loaded up and labeled logically along with the UI's set up ahead of time would help I'm sure.
Probably skip the 30-40min base mesh building, some good things came out of the discussion but things like that can be noted and pointed out in a few minutes.
The tip about smoothing out tri points was great but could have been demonstrated in 1-2min on a mesh that was set up for that specific example, luckily it came up and a good example presented itself.
Overall good stuff!
As for the chat room, I think it would be a good/bad, sense if people could see how many other questions were being asked they wouldn't repeat questions and might be a bit more restrained in what they ask/say. Everyone being seperate like they are now makes it seem like they are the only one their, and so they're more likely to just fire away any thought that enters their mind making for a lot more proverbial noise. Add that to only answering questions from 'raised hands', and things should become much more manageable.
It just felt really weird only being able to write to the presenter. Didn't feel as much like a community thing. The only way you could tell was by looking at the list of other people watching, and later when there was direct interaction with the audience.
:poly142:
The funny thing is we did cover this topic.
yes. polycount should have people doing this if possible. shit would be ace. maybe volunteer & donation run? drool.
and of course I'd totally be interested in any FuturePoly ones as well.
Going to invest time in findinding what every thing in zbrush actually dose altough some stuff isnt needed think its good to know a package well so you know whats possible.
Spark
+1
No idea how to embed the video properly in this ui and I mayyy be drunk.
It went well, I think. Small group as pc was dead when we were trying to start unfortunately. But this video is the result of my babbling for a while. I recorded audio too, but there about 1:30 of video and I was not sure where to place it. So short and sweet for the tubes.
(i like brackets.)
(also im going to go over topogun and rendering/texturing)
Will have to see if I can make it, got to hand in my honours project in the morning so we will see how that goes.