I have a great idea about how to make modeling tutorials, but sadly I am a one-month blenderizer and know nothing about how to use shape keys.
Let’s say i want to make a tut on building a house.
I would make two cubes in the center of the screen.
Then I would use shape keys and animate the first step, cutting the cube on the left with the loop cut tool and bringing the top middle of the cube up a bit to make the roof.
Next, using shape keys again I would animate the extrusion of the edges of the roof to make gutters.
After that, I would add naration to explain each step.
I would add a readme to the file and tell the user to press escape every time the narator tells him/her to try the step on the other cube and to press alt+A when the user is done modelling that step.
probs: will the sound play when one press alt+A? and alt+A starts from the beginning again
I can try and explain it in a more sane way if you need me to.
Im sorry I should have explained. You cannot add or remove vertices when using shape keys. You are only allowed to move verts that already exist in the original shape. You could however create an animation using Blender to show your different steps, and do the ole’ swaperoo between frames when you need to add more geometry.
Interesting idea but it’s quicker, easier and clearer just to record the actual modelling process as other video tutorial producers do already. It’s also possible to render regular progress with still images and string these together as an animation of the rendered result (and later convert to animated GIF if you like).
Flash has some very nice tutorials that are Flash files, with spaces to draw in, etc. This could work well will tutorials for blender, bu you won’t be able to teach animation by this method.
You could always hide the vertices in the other ones, and bring them to their spot when needed.
No you couldn’t. Doubled vertices don’t behave the same way as non-doubled verts, and you can’t key things like the existence of a face, etc.
Basically, IPO curves don’t exist for most of the processes in modeling. So you can’t animate them. You’d have to go to great lengths to fake it. As oldSchoolPunk said, when you know a bit more about modeling and animation, you’ll start to see how incredibly, mindbendingly not worthwhile this would be.
Not to say impossible (it could be faked) just really hard.
