Teaching Blender - Class Structure

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
21

A fair point, Lancer. I think something to think of when keeping a long view of things is what purpose volunteering can have. If you need to get food in your belly, you certainly have less leeway in where you distribute your time, and a paycheck is a necessary priority.

But if you can find free time around work, or free time around your schooling, volunteering to teach is a wonderful opportunity. It essentially becomes a resume item equivalent to an internship or entry level job. Furthermore, volunteering is a level of generous sacrifice that mean a lot to whatever organization you volunteered with.

It’s very easy when you’re a student to assume it’s a two-step process of #1. go through school and make my portfolio, and #2. have job. But many people then discover the catch 22 of needing more experience to find work, but needing work to gain experience. Volunteering to teach somewhere is just as solid a resume spot as an internship, and either of these can serve as the almost mandatory stepping stone between #1 and #2.

IMHO, don’t ever think of it as getting taken for granted; think of it as the opportunity that’s going to lead to the better opportunity. Hope I don’t sound too preachy, but “getting taken advantage of” in the exact way you described, and embracing it, helped lead to more legitimate opportunities down the line.

22

Lancer - I want to say I appreciate your last post and how it addresses issues that need to be addressed.

I see your point in the matter of submitting work to help the cause. Submission of volunteered work doesn’t get you much in the long run. I myself find it hard to find away around this. I see tons of people who submit tutorials on the web, and their names never get noticed, even when it’s smack dab on the page.

The only way I can see it working so far is by this turn of events:

A lot of people on blender have capabilities of showing and teaching how to use blender, but they have nowhere to start. With this community, it’s intentions are to get that person going and help teach, and spread the word of blender. In that persons course, depending how much they charge, a certain portion of that money will be required to send in to the source: The Blender Foundation. I’m sure they earn enough to keep going, but why not help them out further? By helping the source, we can only improve Blender itself.

It may be a strange concept, but I think it could work. We could also get more people involved with the teachers and create workshops, pressing along and testing blender’s abilities.

I know I’m looking at the big picture a bit much, and still need to work on some smaller things, but I’m going to take that step that most people have looked at and then shrugged off. I want to teach and spread information on Blender. I’ve tutored people before and speak in front of people at conventions (not blender related), but I think I can try to put it all together and try to create something from it.

Lancer, what I want to say is I know it’s hard to commit to something because it may not help you directly, but it helps the blender community as a whole.

If anybody knows a way that we could help the supporters, believe me I would try it.

Anyway I’m glad I got your input and thoughts. I hope things go good for you. If you have a change of pace, we’ll be waiting.

23

I haven’t said “no”.

Don’t misunderstand me… it’s not that I don’t support or partake in goodwill or volunteer work. The danger is when someone sets themselves up as a learning centre or similar business. They tend to get an “us and them” attitude about their establishment, take shortcuts for a quick profit instead of properly looking after their tutors and keep expecting more effort from everyone in order to maximise their own interests. Ultimately, they look at all the hard work “they” have collected and start working competitively against anyone with similar ideas, even if that means patenting material which was given to them in good will.

Like I said, I can only say a certain amount. No, I have never had legal issues with an employer, although there are some who I can see are expecting increasingly unrealistic amounts of free work, setting me up so that it’s my reputation on the line if I don’t deliver. It’s very frustrating.

Some of the work I’ve volunteered as “open sourced” was because of these reasons. I could see resourses needed to be made or my own lessons would suffer, but these resources would take a lot of time, and as my offer of paid work was turned down, what should I then do? My answer was to make the resourse because it was much needed, but to publically release as Open Source before using it at the host venue. That way, they could not claim the unpaid hours of work as their own preventing me for taking it elsewhere.

24

Ok thanks Lancer. By the way, I’ve changed the theme of the page to give it more of a blender atmosphere. Also gave it a subdomain of blender.techyfx.com

As far as the lesson plan goes I think I’ll try to divide it into three classes:

Class 1: Blender Basics

  • History of Blender / Examples.
  • Showing the basics of a object
  • Exploring the GUI
    [LIST]
  • Moving objects in the object mode
  • Modeling a basic object
  • Showing the different menu items
    [LIST]
  • Shading
  • Object
  • Editing
  • Rendering

[/LIST]
[/LIST]

Class 2: Lighting and materials

  • Using Textures
    [LIST]
  • Applying colors
  • Shading
  • Applying images
    [LIST]
  • UV mapping

[/LIST]

  • Lighting

  • Types of Light

  • AO

[/LIST]
Class 3: Modeling

  • Using a reference

  • Knowing your views and XYZ axis

  • Modifying the object
    [LIST]

  • Scale

  • Rotate

  • Grab

  • Using modifiers

  • Mirrors

  • Subsurf

  • Array

[/LIST]
Yeah it’s pretty simplistic but I am also working on some study sheets. I’ve attached one for the basics of a model on the website. It can be found as a PDF file.

I’m not going to limit this site to just teachers. I think we should have people schedule study groups and workstations, we could have a good thing going towards blender.

25

Move “Modeling a basic object” from “Blender Basics” to “Modeling”, or, have it lower down on the Basics list. The GUI should include things like splitting the screen, wireframe mode, layers etc. I would move basic objects around before starting a session on how to actually make objects.

“Lighting and Materials” - You should also look at applying more than one material to different parts of a mesh, different kinds of map (e.g. normal mapping). You might want to go into the “how to” of 3 point lighting, and maybe nodes for gamma correction for “advanced” students who are curious.

“Modeling” - All the grab, scale & rotate stuff should have been covered in the GUI session, they merely apply it to edges and faces. Once they are going into modeling, the new skills to introduce would be extrusion, adding edgeloops, how to set up a mirror modifier (Array is more of an interesting distraction while they are learning the bare basics).

Class 2 and 3 should be swapped.

  • Learn to look at Blender / GUI basics
  • Make a simple models
  • Texture your models.
26

Nice look on the new site. I thought I’d see how your modeling PDF was shaping up but hit cancel… 34Mb pdf? (slow connection here)

27

you think zip versions would be better?

  • Let me see if I can change that into a webpage or something…that is pretty crazy

edit : yeah something must have happend. 34mb is crazy. Rendering something so it will be some time