I’m going to be doing a workshop on Blender, so I’d appreciate some advice, please. What should I talk about? (yes, softbodies and fluidsim will be in there:)) How should I present it? How do I keep people from getting lost as we’re doing the project with everyone? What sort of a project should I lead them through?
Right now it’s looking like the setup will be me with and laptop and a projector and the (audience?) will have their own computers with Blender to work on.
My advice right off would be to explain the features and then begin the UI tutorials. Once the user knows the features and then how to get to them they will be able to take off from there. How long do you have for your workshop?
Who are you presenting (workshop’in) with? What experience do they have? Is this a one off or a course?
With fluid sim and soft bodies you’re talking about some heavy weight topics. I might be a good idea to select demonstrations and examples for key features, particles (static, non static), armature, softbody, sequencer, etc, etc.
For hands on work the UI and basic modeling can take up a lot of time. The important thing is to hammer across a consistant method to get people started with as few techniques/shortcuts as possible, i.e. tell them only one way of rotating something. As you probably know there is a 100 ways to solving any one modelling problem and to detail every way of rotating could take up an hour - short cuts, grabs, rotate about cursor, rotate in a selected plane, rotate about object centre, etc. ,etc.
So far, the plan is that I’ll have one 1 1/2 to 2 hr. workshop to present this in. Not a whole lot of time. I’ve given shorter workshops before, but this time I have quite a while to prepare, so I want to do a good job.
I’ll only be talking about softbodies and fluidsim for a moment. To be honest I need to download the CVS and check out the fluidsim for myself. I just want to send them into that insane frenzy of “Wow, what an incredible program!” that we all go into when a new version of Blender comes out. I don’t have much time, remember, so I want to be able to excite them enough so that they persue this on their own.
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I’m not sure if I’m going to be presenting with any co-presenters.
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Yeah, that isn’t a lot of time to teach people about Blender. Probably the best you can do is to do a quick demo of the program and show what it can do and what it is capable of. That should get them excited
But if that happens they’ll want to learn how to use the program, so provide them with good links to get started.
Hi, Clean3D. My first suggestion would be decide which Blender version you intend to use. I wouldent recomend using any of the testing builds for a beginer workshop, so I would suggest you use ether 2.37a, or if you must use softbodies and fluidsim, I would wait until 2.4 comes out and is stable.
Anyway it sounds good,
I’ll show them how to get to the Blender docs at least. What are the other sites I should show?
I think that we’ll be using Blender 2.37a for this workshop. I want to show them fluidsim and softbodies but not have those be part of the project we’re going to do, they’re a little difficult for people just starting.
So, what sort of a project would you suggest for a group of beginners to attempt? I was thinking of showing them how to navigate the UI first and then go on to make a Suzanne head and render that. Is that too much or too little for a 1 hour (since I’ll probably spend the first 1/2 hr/hour talking about it’s features)?
If I’m to do a workshop, after the initial explenation and sales pitch, I would go into lighting theories. That is because that when later on, the students start modeling, it is far better that the produce attractive looking images through a good light rig setup. That ugly blue or black background and banded colors could shun them away from 3D. Once they understand how to set up a light rig, then they could experiment with modelling simple figure.
A photorealistic rendered cube or UV sphere, looks much nicer than a nice mega poly model under a bland and harsh spotlight. My 2 cents
So perhaps you could get the students to create there own version, styling it how they wish, and applying which ever scale they are most comfortable with, as I would assume they come from differing backgrounds.
