I am a noob. And while I have found the availalbe tutorials very helpful, they are also somewhat scattered and at times poorly edited / translated.
What I am considering (trying to decide if I really have time for this) is to create a centralized training site. With the author’s permission I would gather the tutorials from across the web into a single location and in a standardized format, and would edit / spellcheck them. Additionally it would be nice to cross-reference tutorials where appropriate.
So basically I am looking for your thoughts. Does this sound like something that would be of use to you? Is this duplicating someone else’s current efforts? Is this just dumb?
This is a fantastic idea! I have been wishing for this also. There have been various attempts in the past to catalog VIA linking, such as Green’s Tutorial links by Rash. The current link I have no longer works.
Note to the tutorial makers-
It would be nice to have a standard format in your tutorials such as always stating in the beginning of your tutorial what version of Blender was used and what level of user it is written for.
thats a cool idea, i had been thinking that we need something like that, also one site for python scripts and anyother stuff that should be shared. if you need any help im willing.
Ok. Sounds like there is some interest. I build websites for work, so I think I could figure out something on the technical end. One thought though is hosting. If the site was to attract significant volumes of traffic I imagine the bandwidth costs might add up. So either the project would need to get some donated hosting, or have some other method to pay for itself.
This is already being done by Michael Thoenes (mthoenes on this site). When he is finished, it will be incorporated into the education section of blender3d.org. Perhaps you could contact him and join forces?
IamInocent, d52477001, me and other people from another forum (for french users, I forgot the name of the forum)… we are working on something like what you proposed… the more people that join us the faster we will be up and running.
It sound like a nice project and I wish you the best.
There should be a number of free hosting services that will be just too glad to get that many hits : for Lycos for example, you could have all the traffic you want, inasmuch as you keep a decent bandwidth per hit ratio ; I am all in the green with 1,2 Go/month and a ratio of 100 Ko/hit for my tutorials.
But, before talking of web hosting, shouldn’t you address the simple matter of getting the permission from the authors for using their work, modifying their formatting choices and mostly “correcting” their tutorials as suggested in the first message ?
Since Michael T. has already a selection of the tutorials almost on line, your project would make sense only if you’d be to gather them all in a centralized site. That’s an immense undertaking and a debatable idea still.
Keep working hard.
I have a lot of better things to do then redo what others are already working on.
Please tell us more about your project.
My interest in this project was for the following reasons:
I think it would help Blender to have a more organized tutorial reference, especially since there are not really any published books available. And I think Blender is a piece of software that deserves assistance.
I work as a web developer and have some code that I have written in the past that may be re-usable in this project.
I have found the state of many tutorials a little disappointing. Some are in multiple languages, and the english translation stops half way through. Other tell you to press a key - but the key is an image and the image is missing - so you have to go searching elsewhere to figure out what key you were supposed to press. Some are just written in such a manner that make it difficult to understand.
Whether the project is a good idea or feasable I don’t know. I don’t know if any of the tute authors would support such an effort or not. I’m just curious about the level of interest - and the feedback has been helpful.
Again, if you have posted what you all are planning on doing - point me in the right direction so I can check it out.
There was the idea first announced to the elYsiun community and also some of the early ideas about tutorial classification were commented… actually all the project related discussions are done throught a private email-list shared by all the project collaborators.
Our main goal is to produce a categorized list of ALL the public available blender tutorials, including also some hand-picked non-blender material that we consider to be of great interest to the blender community. That list would exist in a directory-like format… slightly similar to the system used by Yahoo to classify web-sites. Until now we have no interest in hosting the tutorials or modifying them, just to reference and link them from a centralized location.
So far we have completed a 5 pages long document detailling the guides to be used for tutorial classification based on content, what addition information will be present on the list and a few more technical details.
Software tools based on that document are been developed and should reach ¨full operative status¨ by the end of the next week.
If you are interested please send an e-mail to Iaminocent ( [email protected] ) or to me ( [email protected] ). We could really use someone with working knowlege on Server-Side CGI programming and/or Cascade Style Sheets (CSS)… not to mention that we would greatly benefic from more man-power (so far we have about 1,150 tutorials that need to be human processed soonner or later).
Why thanks for the offer Nuance.
My life has gotten a little hectic for the last 2 weeks but things are settling down in some kind of new order.
Let me this day to catch up on what I missed and I’ll come back to you.
I think that your ideas of upgrading the existing tutorial don’t have to die and we could discuss of a mean to achieve that goal too.
Even if this exact same thing is done by another group of users. It would be nice to have mirrors set up in case one site gets d/ced or shuts down for some reason. With several independant mirrors the chances of all of them being unavailable would be lower.
(so far we have about 1,150 tutorials that need to be human processed soonner or later).