PSA: How to use a 3d tutorial.
ngon master
Every time a new tutorial video comes out, it kinda bothers me when I see multiple p&p posts of clones. So I felt compelled to write this.
How to use a 3d tutorial.
Lets be one-hundred percent blunt and brutally honest from the get go. No one hires someone because they can follow a tutorial. If you have portfolio full of content from tutorials, you are not getting a job. We've seen dozens of old damaged pillars and dozens of identical fire hydrants. Being able to make a high quality game artist asset isn't the only thing you are being hired for. A studio is looking for someone who is a creative problem solver, someone that can do stuff on their own, without needing their hand held through the process.
Simply put, if you follow a tutorial letter by letter, and you get a result that's on par with the example in the tutorial, no professional artist really wants to see it. You may be proud and want to show some friends and family, go head, you deserve some credit for making something look good. But don't post it to an art forum expecting praise and a lot of critiques and suggestions. It will get largely ignored. That's not to say, if you aren't getting the same results and you need help, PLEASE ask for it! As long as you can't figure it out from the tutorial. We all love to help people that are trying to learn.
So what now, you followed along and got a cool piece that no one wants to see again, what do you do? You take the knowledge, skills, and ideas presented in the video, and you take it to the next level. Or put it into a practical application. Knowledge is retained by repetition and struggling through challenges, that's something that you don't really get from just following along. Show us that you can take that knowledge you've gained and apply it to something else. If you do the extra work you'll be much more valuable as an artist and better at what you do in general. Plus you will better understand the ideas and fundamentals behind the art. You can learn a lot more from a tutorial if you use it properly.
Lets be one-hundred percent blunt and brutally honest from the get go. No one hires someone because they can follow a tutorial. If you have portfolio full of content from tutorials, you are not getting a job. We've seen dozens of old damaged pillars and dozens of identical fire hydrants. Being able to make a high quality game artist asset isn't the only thing you are being hired for. A studio is looking for someone who is a creative problem solver, someone that can do stuff on their own, without needing their hand held through the process.
Simply put, if you follow a tutorial letter by letter, and you get a result that's on par with the example in the tutorial, no professional artist really wants to see it. You may be proud and want to show some friends and family, go head, you deserve some credit for making something look good. But don't post it to an art forum expecting praise and a lot of critiques and suggestions. It will get largely ignored. That's not to say, if you aren't getting the same results and you need help, PLEASE ask for it! As long as you can't figure it out from the tutorial. We all love to help people that are trying to learn.
So what now, you followed along and got a cool piece that no one wants to see again, what do you do? You take the knowledge, skills, and ideas presented in the video, and you take it to the next level. Or put it into a practical application. Knowledge is retained by repetition and struggling through challenges, that's something that you don't really get from just following along. Show us that you can take that knowledge you've gained and apply it to something else. If you do the extra work you'll be much more valuable as an artist and better at what you do in general. Plus you will better understand the ideas and fundamentals behind the art. You can learn a lot more from a tutorial if you use it properly.
Replies
If you show others You'll receive praise until your caught
Ive only ever watched a tutorial for to acquire a new technique on approaching a certain shape. Though i never followed tutorials like i was suppose to so i never made the Do it and learn connection now i just know how each tool works and not where to apply them on extremely complex geometry
So many ideas! So little Skill
Following a tut != learning the technique.
Whats unfortunate is one of the biggest complaints about the newer tutorials from Eat3D and Gnomon is specifically the fact that they skip things and are not "follow along" videos that you can copy piece by piece until the end.
like i followed the 3dmotive modular one, when i was building gothic architecture.
and when i was first learning modeling i was actually following tuts for completely different 3d packages than what im using, and found it helped me internalize the information, since i needed to understand what a tool did so i could find the equivalent one in my 3d pacakge, instead of just clicking buttons.
this too.
This is blatantly not true. It might not be so for many people, but don't spout this off as fact.
When I started 3D I followed tutorials precisely. The difference if you learn a technique or not is if you make an effort to understand WHAT you're doing and WHY. For me learning consisted of doing 3-4 tutorials and then doing something that used those techniques without following one.
If they weren't step by step (without skipping something) I would not have learned the techniques as they were.
However following a tutorial is not the same as producing something of your own, which I think is the problem here.
As long as you're paying attention to what you're doing while you're doing it, you learn the technique and can then apply it to your own work.
I will agree that tutorial pieces shouldn't go in portfolios though.
just following a tut wont make you internalize the skills used in it, your following it up with your own project to use the skills right after there still fresh in memory, which helps them go into your long term memory and helps you get a good context in your head of when best to use these skills.
I doubt just following the tut word for word, with out that follow up while it's still fresh in your head would be very useful to you?
if saying this since i seen people try to follow older tuts, that are getting stalled because buttons and tools have moved around the app since the tut was made, so the person isnt really learning the skill, there just pressing the some buttons.
PS: though times... some people need tutorial to use tutorials ;]
At this point I often read or watch through tutorials to see the approach that people take on things and hopefully learn about something new. When people are just starting though a good tutorial is invaluable to getting a good start (although you only really know you know when you have to use what you know in many different situations).
I'd actually like to see people make stuff based on a tutorials as part of their learning process, and then add them as part of an 'education portfolio', but what you actually see is that people download the project files and use them to put in an actual portfolio to send to employers. That is absolutely infuriating.
I never want to put down tutorials, people put a lot of effort into them and they are invaluable for people to get on the right foot with what they're learning and on the fast track to using software and techniques well.
I would say as a general rule people who make tutorials just shouldn't describe every step as exact or give out the project files, but then again some things are technical enough that there are exceptions at every step and some of my best learning has come from digging through other people's project files.
The best tutorial DVDs, like say the old Gnomon ones from Puddnhead that everyone complained about, are the ones where the guy just talks nonstop for hours, never explaining techniques, tools, etc. You can listen to it once and probably 90% will go over your head. But then get back to it a year later when you've grown, and you'll find a few more gems of knowledge in there. Come back when you've grown some more, find some more gems.
I don't see why advanced tutorials should cover UI and tools.
As you become a more experienced student you move on to other textbooks that just outline a problem instead of telling you how to solve the problem, but if you were completely new to the field and got the advanced stuff first, you'd learn nothing.
In other words, there's room for and both types of tutorials should exist. It's good that both types exist. It's also not bad to follow a tutorial but it's quite useless to post work derived from one and especially bad to pass off a tutorial as your own.
So saying that one kind of tutorial is "the best" is very subjective and depending on where you already stand in terms of skill or experience.
As for me i still have tutorials way back from 99 lol
Well no... I mean it's not like that part is exclusively replacing the thing you wanted to learn from that tutorial right?
The way I see it it depends on what you are actually being taught in the tute... is it a technique tute? Function tute? Workflow tute? I know my way around my apps, but if a guy's teaching a technique that exclusively uses a tool that you may never really touch when doing the basics but skips over that bit... would be pretty frustrating.
I wthink you learn technics from it...but still i wouldnt hand in those works as Portfolio...