Really cool!
If you are still making these fantastic tutorials, one on Yafray and its functions would be great. A lot of people seem to have questions (including me ;)) about Yafray and its’ potentials.
-Laurifer
…one on Yafray and its functions would be great.
Well, the problem with that is I’ve never used Yafray :).
That’s the main reason why I want more people in on the project. So, who wants in? I really want this to be a community project. That’s the main reason why I made that video tutorial on how to make video tutorials so I can make this a community project.
I’ll be getting a web page in the near future (week or so) so I can make a permanent place for these tutorials (and maybe for the project as a whole, depending on how things go). So far we’ve been reaching half our bandwidth (18.1GB in two weeks!) for our six current tutorials (and I will be going with the same hosting company as zerohaven), so bit-torrent and mirrors are most definitely the way I’ll be going for new vids. On top of that I’ll have a bulliten board for reviews on individual tutorials so we can get feedback on each one and make imporovements until we have a comprehensize source of tutorials where nothing is left out. Downloads (18.1GB in two weeks!), so wherever this goes, I think people are going to be pleased with it. I’m wondering if I’ll just have it as an extension of my site (like glenmoyes.com/blendervt) or go ahead and get a new domain for it. I’m going to talk to some more people and see where this will ultimatly go. I just don’t want this site to move around more than it needs to–hopefullly never.
Some things I’m going to do differently though. I’ve decided that I might generalize the introduction a bit. Instead of stating the project name (BlenderVT), I think I might just state the topic. This is mainly so that there is a bit more continuity among videos because I might have people host tutorials that were not for this particular project, but still have the same purpose in mind.
wow really cool that someone is actually doing this. its like something off of 3dbuzz.com. 
Id just like to make a suggestion [please dont take it the wrong way! 
, your doing some really cool stuff for us!!] for me when i watch these i watch it once then forget what i was doing and have to switch back to the video, and i cant really watch the video and follow along at the same time. what would be really cool is interactive tutorials.
AutoCAD website has what i was thinking about
[click View Now button;then flash popup window then click Main Menu->Productivity Tools->Tables]
It allows you to be in the “program”[flash] at the same time that you are learning what you are doing[or expeiriencing like the eg.] add some voice and its like being in a Blender class; a Virtual Blender Class of sorts.
edit* maybe not i guess it would be kind dissapointing to have to open blender and find that all the stuff you just did in the flash window isnt done in the actual program but it would probably be useful for learning the GUI
again you are doing some really great stuff; and this was just my inane ramblings
I guess the thing i have with interactive tutorials is that, even though they are interactive and that they do help you walk through the process, it just isn’t the same as the real thing. I learned Blender by tinkering around, and then going to the documention to find out how to do something (it helped that I’ve had expirience with 3D software before so I know what was possible and also what it was called). The video tutorials that I’ve seen helped a lot in that I could see in one stream of conciousness everything about how to use a feature, and I can later duplicate exactly what happened in the tutorial.
I’ve heard talk about possible implementing a tutorial engine inside of Blender. It’s probably just wishful thinking, but what the heck, it would be cool. I just wonder if it will be on the wishlist long.
It’s difficult to figure out the best way to teach a program, since there are so many people that learn differently. I firmly beleive that for a majority of people this will be a better learning tool to watch people actually do it than reading the manual. The problem is that people will naturally want to test it out immediatly if they read it because there’s no real proof that it works until they try it themselves. With a video tutorial, they just have faith because they just saw it happen right before their eyes. So, for those people that feel they learn better through osmosis might not experiment as much as they should to truly learn. So, for them I feel that these tutorials will either serve them really well (because they really do learn just from watching) but for some a video tutorial might be more of a crutch than from learning through true expirience.
Some things I am planning on doing is releasing the notes for the tutorial, a printout that shows the hotkeys and some basic steps so that people will have a reference so that they can try out what they learned without having to go through the tutorial again. The thing people will forget the easiest is the hotkeys which is, in my opinion, the main problem with video tutorials.
good idea on the vid tuts, i’m getting the how to’s for my bloded module, make my own.
MacBlender
Metsys, blender-france.org would like to host your video tutorials also. If that is something you are interested in. drop me an email. or you can contact blender-france.org directly
oh yeah the bandwidth is enormous! I hosted GreyBeards tutorial… here’s the stat:
http://www.blender3d.ch/linkson/usage_200409.html
+his ftp account is still active. I could change it to something you both could use.
Thanks, it would be appreciated. I’m in the process of trying to find a permanent home for these videos. When I get that taken care of then I’ll contact all of you who offered to be mirrors.
fantastic
Whoa. I just watched the interface tutorial and learned a lot. :o This is perfect! And here’s why:
My filmmaking class has been expanded to include 3D animation. My teacher, though, knows nothing of 3D. So he wants me to be the Blender guru in school, and teach the class… through video tutorials. So, because your tutorials seem more patient, comprehensive and clear than I could do (I started earlier today!)… I would LOVE to use these. Do I have your permission to distribute these tutorials to about 20 classroom computers?? That would be VERY VERY cool.
GREAT job nonetheless. These will save me a lot of time and frustration in my personal Blender… experience (not related to school, I mean). 
–Colin
Metsys
: like i offered GreyBeard, i’ll give you access to my FTP and i’ll build a mirror of your vieo tutorials.
PM me
MacBlender
Thanks for these videos Metsys. They are fun to watch and I would have loved to have them when I first had to climb the steep learning curve of Blender.
Great stuff!
CONGRATULATIONS!!! We just exceeded our 5GB bandwidth per day!
So yeah, the site is going to be down for today. I just wonder what happened, we’ve been getting 1 - 2.5 GB a day and in one day we doubled it, and I didn’t release anything new.
Anyway, it’ll be back up tomorrow.
As for those mirrors, since I’ll probably be redoing those anyway when this becomes official, and also since our server got hit pretty good, I’m all for it.
Yes! Go ahead. They are going to be licenced under the Open Concent Licence anyway, so go for it.
Yay! I’m happy.
Okay, the files are back up. I’m getting mirrors to lighten the load.
thank you for these tutorials Metsys,
They’ll be of great help for many people
a valuable contribution to the community
greetz
Thank you for your willingness to help the Blender Community in a big way. As a newbie, I am having difficulty with older tutorials because of the recent GUI changes. Your up-to-date information is a big hit here! Yeeeeeeee-hawwwwwwwwwww!
Couldn’t you use DemoForge? It creates much smaller files because it isn’t storing raw graphical data.
I still want to use software that is free. The reason for this is that I want the rest of the community to be able to create their own tutorials, without financial restrictions, x-day trials, or pirating. So, if I figured out a way to create video for free, then I can share that with the rest of the community so they can do the same.
Also, recording actual video takes a lot less post-processing time than creating an interactive tutorial (and I beleive that the best interactive tutorial is using Blender itself). And I’m still planning on making DVDs.
Speaking of free software, I downloaded an opensourced version of CamStudio 2.0. It works as well as I remember, except that it does a lousy job at creating DivX files on the fly, and it doesn’t capture as quickly as FrontCam. But it’s now an option.