Over this past summer (2022) I have watched a very dramatic downward spiral in the quality of Blender-related videos on YouTube. It used to be where no matter what you wanted to do, you could find quality tutorials on it. No longer. Now, everything is “create shoddy shortcut SHIT quick and easy! Create ____ in under __ minutes! It looks like crap but it’s quick and easy!” All I can find are people selling addons - it seems there are 20 addons for every potential customer. Texture packs and courses as well. Everybody has something to sell. Everything is low poly (low quality), almost everything looks like a cheap cartoon that would appeal to a 3 year old, and everything has to be a cheap shortcut that’s created quick and easy.
There was a time when peopole didn’t fear work; when the result was its own reward. People had pride in what they created and rightfully so. It’s beyond tragic to see the quick and easy mindset consume almost every Blender-related video on YouTube, and it took one summer to happen.
And people still can’t grasp basic second grade spelling/grammar in their videos, such as the proper use of an apostrophe (a long-forgotten art). I suppose it was inevitible that cheap, shoddy shortcuts would replace quality craftsmanship. Anybody wanna buy a bridge? Quick and easy!
People trying to sell you stuff isn’t really Blender-specific, it’s been a trend across the entirety of Youtube. Tons of channels are doing various sponsorships and whatever else. Hell, Linus (the one with Tech Tips, not Torvalds) was even so open as to break down how they make a lot of their profits. Turns out Youtube ads don’t really make that much money! His pie chart is probably not too dissimilar from that of current big Blender Youtubers.
Youtube is successfully morphing into TV 2.0 with frequent ads and family-friendly content…
…there was a time when people didn’t fear work…
I don’t think so. Are you sure?
Besides, I have 2 decent explanations for low quality videos - maybe the tutorials are bad to get you to pay for the better courses or for the addon that just does it for you, or maybe the tutorials are fast to appeal to kids that just want a result right now, not to you.
I certainly doubt you’ll want to watch a backrooms tutorial or a tutorial for making a Minecraft animation with some premade rig without even knowing how to pan your view.
But, not every tutorial with adverts is bad. I’d say Blender Guru’s tutorials are still top notch, and the donut series is something I really wish I had when I was starting Blender before he had made even the anvil tutorial.
I find this phenomenon to be very logically in line with the hyper-acceleration of online media consumption. It’s a new form of reductionism which takes the whole and turns it into a part with no new whole to construct from it.
This is a generalization at best. There are good quality Blender tutorials being uploaded to YouTube as we speak- @Pxy-Gnomes ’s innovative facial rigging techniques, @Ascalon ’s pioneering work with facial normals and geometry nodes, BlenderSecrets, P2 Design Academy uploads videos about rigging every couple weeks, and you will not find better out there. The good content is there, as is the bad content. Same as always.
Low poly does not mean low quality. Low poly is an art style in itself that takes quite a lot of work and artistic consideration. It may be not your style, but there’s no need to sneer at it.
Again… might be not your style, but the field of NPR in Blender is fascinating, complex, and has much wider appeal than to 3 year olds.
It really didn’t, though, Andrew Price has been uploading the quick and easy videos you’re talking about for 5 years.
What’s wrong with quick and easy, by the way? I’m not really understanding your ire- isn’t a good thing that Blender improvements have made it easier and faster to create?
No? I have bad news for you about your nostalgic Blender YouTube of a few years ago- they were just trying to make money back then too. You know Andrew Price is a millionaire, right?
All in all, I think you’re seeing the past through extremely rose colored glasses here. I’ve been in Blender YouTube for a long time and I have not observed anything like what you have.
Lastly- if you’re so unhappy with what’s available, go make your own YouTube videos. It’s easy to criticize content creators until you try it yourself - turns out, it’s a lot of work to make videos. If you can’t do better, you don’t really get to bash like this. This has gone beyond constructive criticism and firmly into the realm of “put up or shut up”
Because Blender is FREE, it is accessible to more ppl (in comparison to Houdini, C4D, etc), oftentimes they are young folks who just finished watching a few tutorials and think they know it all, so they add their own “basic” tutorials to the mix, the result is that 90% of Blender tutorials on Youtube are the same ReReReReRepurposed “basic” tutorials with a different channel name.
Many of these young ppl were inspired by existing channels like “Ian Hubert” and went like “wow I can make tutorials that are 1-2 mins long and get 500k to 1M views easy!”, so everyone and their dog jumped on that bandwagon.
Youtube itself became more short form content oriented with all their recent updates, noticing how ppl now have a shorter attention span then a goldfish (8sec vs 9sec).
Now you will still find “quality” tutorials in that last 10%, but it’s more challenging to filter it in the vast sea of “trashy” content due to the shear number of videos that you have to scroll through until you find something.
Compare that to any other commercial DCC, and the landscape would look quite different, simply because there is little content to begin with (compared to blender), and it is more like 70% “quality” and 30% “trashy”, as most ppl making tutorials for them are oftentimes professionals with their own set of clients.
Thanks for the mention! My videos can be found here:
I kind of get what the OP is talking about though. The Noise to Signal ratio in community content has definitely shifted over the years. I think this is because the community is so much larger, and also because of changes in social media and web discussion spaces.
There is more quality content than ever before, but it isn’t necessarily as easy to find. It gets lost in the churn. And a lot of it isn’t on YouTube even. When I started doing this ~9 years ago, there was a lot of discussion on FaceBook and forums. Over the years it has shifted a lot more to Twitter and various Discord servers.
Also back then it wasn’t as easy to sell products or addons. There’s a lot more convenient market place sites like Gumroad. So its easier to get into addon creation, and easier to sell stuff.
Overall, there’s more going on and more good content than ever. Also there’s a bunch of people trying to get their businesses going, and they tend to be more motivated at pushing their stuff so it tends to end up being more visible. And that’s fine when the products are good.
Mind to share some of those places ? right now I’m only following this forum + devtalk and a few youtube channels, and would like to expand my scope if that isn’t too much asking.
The problem with Discord is the same issue Facebook and Reddit has, and that is the fact they suck as far as archiving goes. Many topics in active pages will be buried within days and never seen again.
Youtube is a lot better at least, since you can go to a particular channel’s page and see every video that was posted (though it partly depends on whether the organizational features like playlists are used). It might be better to direct people to gems among the various channels so the algorithm will push them above the noise.
First let me say I’m not selling anything but have no problem with those who are. (Assuming appropriate value)
I have been building my own private tool to track Blender (and related software) YouTube tutorials.
-So far I’ve collected over 100 such YT channels
-I’ve created a web scraping tool that scans to see recent postings
-My tool will remain private and is a work in progress.
I have noticed that YouTube often ignores many of my subscription choices when it promotes things to watch. This observation was one reason I created my tool.
Here is a list of Blender channel videos that have posted new videos yesterday or today. Many YT Blender channels are very good. My list also includes channels that aren’t tutorial-based, but might inspire my own work.
My tool does a lot more than I’m ready to discuss at this point. I have no plans to commercialize my efforts, though hope to make Blender Internet content more discoverable to the community.
Note that this reality has been partially subverted very recently (a few months ago), at least on Discord’s Blender Community, the largest Discord channel related to creation in Blender. The wise administrators there started to use, at first experimentally, an extraordinary Discord feature which is Forum-like chat, which allows to create threads/topics (just like forums’) which then become immediately accessible & archived in the search engine of that Discord channel’s ‘forum’ chat. You’ll find it on the Help section. Previously, on Blender Community (Discord channel), there were only ‘Help Chats’ related to particular topics of CG in Blender (e.g., “#help-animation” chat), but now, along with those thematic Chats, there’s also the ‘Help Forum’, which is actually a ‘chat’ that contains in itself the threads/topics and the search engine. As you type there to create a new thread/topic, asking for help, simultaneously you are searching for an existing problematic with the key-words (and probably tags if any). These data do not help in recovering any content discussed in the conventional chats though, but the fact that it hold its own archive, which is cumulative over time, just like in a Forum as this one Blenderartists, is fundamental for research.
I was one that could not praise well enough the Educational relevance of this new approach, while that feature was being implemented. I’m not sure though if those contents can be googled effectively; I believe the data is only accessible from the Discord channel’s specific forum-like chat, by the Discord channel common members; but it would be great if it was ever available online publicly.
You need to be a member of said discord to see those threads in the first place. This is a massive downside, the vast majority of Blender users are not there (why should they be?), and will google, finding results here, on the Blender stack exchange, or in odd cases on reddit, but never there. So, you’re forced to be there, and to use Discord’s search.
And Discord’s search is very bad. It searches for conjugates of what you typed in, but only sometimes (???), there doesn’t seem to be a way to get it to search for just a specific word, or for a specific combination of words without it also picking up something completely disjointed, seemingly no way to search for anything more complex like hyphenated words or discarding searches that contain specific words (how can it not do EITHER of those???), or for punctuation…
Results are sorted by date, with no option for relevance, so you can search for “blender reddit bad”, and instead of finding something about the subreddit, you’d find this completely unrelated reply you’re reading, with no deeper commentary about reddit, now on top of your search (if we ignore the search term itself, of course). And probably a lot more, until you get to the thing you’re actually looking for.
This is indeed a limiting factor. That’s why I’m sharing this small piece of information: because if even actual members of Blender Community Discord channel sometimes are not aware of that ‘Forum’ feature in the channel they’re in, imagine people that are not Discord users or members of that channel.
I’ve never liked nor understood the whole search engine in Discord, I find it quite confusing. However, I’ve just made a test specifically for the ‘search engine’ of its Forum-like feature (which seems to be different --way more limited-- than the generic search engine in Discord): it just searches for key-words for the title of the topics/threads themselves; it also can search for tags (which are customized Blender Community categories like “rigging” or “animation”).
At least the good part of it is that it is a very niche database, so if I just type “shape key” today I immediately only get topics/threads with that on their titles for the this “Forum Chat” feature. (Note: currently there are just 7 topics/threads with that “shape key” search). If I just type “shape key” on the generic search engine of that Discord channel, however, I’m getting some more or less chaotic 87 pages of very hard to categorize “shape key” related content, from chats or ‘forum’ chats.
I’m not expecting an answer, but I’ve asked Discord if it is not feasible to make their ‘Forum’ Chat content indexed to the web or something like that.
I agree; they [all] certainly shouldn’t. But because certain dynamics of different social media can be very different, experiencing the Teaching-Learning processes from a Chat situation (e.g., Discord channel), a Forum situation (e.g., here), a Comment Section situation (e.g., Youtube), or even something else that can be done virtually you name it, I believe is very relevant to anyone that is willing to navigate into what the ‘Blender community’ overall really means.
There will always be the mainstays - Ducky 3D, and a whole array of others - who don’t sell out. Blender Guru has always been a high-volume money broker. His videos used to be the best out there, but the latest I watched was version 3 of making an Earth degraded to “do it in 20 minutes,” offloading everything onto volumetrics which kills render times. NOT what I’m looking for. He outsources everything, hires trillions of people to do everything for him, and buys all his models. Even so, he used to have the best content (my opinion). For however he got there. No longer. Now he’s on the “do it in 20 minutes with the half hour you saved being pissed away on render time, times two!” gravy train. Oh well. Take what we can get; the rest, I just have to put in the work and figure things out myself.
Andrew is a millionaire … I would be shocked if he wasn’t. He’s a money broker. Use other people’s work; you get the money. It’s his choice, he’s very slick about it, and he has the money where I don’t. I don’t do rigging except when there’s no choice; I focus on hard surface (having to CONSTANTLY step through the hundreds of HardOns and CocksCuttter sales videos pretending to be tutorials). I see Josh or Ponte and I run the other way; I know what’s coming. Everything is based on the boolean modifier which for me NEVER works right and never has. Anyway, the world is full of opinions and it’s inevitible that some are going to conflict. My favorite video of all time? Wayward Art Company’s procedural landscape video. CG Matter/Default Cube stuff has priceless info, ultimately built on on creating procedural masks which bring just about anything within reach. There are a few exceptional channels but making vids takes time and these guys are human. Or perhaps something more.
I would like to know a list of all of the star systems he has deals set up on (because that is the only way you will manage to hire trillions of people while living on a planet with less than 1 percent of that population)? The labor must be really cheap based on the content volume.
