I think Materials and Shaders are difficult to ‘teach’ in isolation. There’s an established teaching methodology of Presentation, Practice, Production which these Core courses tend to follow.
- Presentation (shows you the tools/settings and what they do)
- Practice (follow along copying the teacher using the tools)
- Production (use what you’ve learnt without following an instruction)
I think this course is too skewed towards Presentation of ‘everything’ and the practice/production is saved until right towards the end when it might be more appropriate to split the course into smaller chunks of Presentation, Practice within the context of a known and common material e.g. Metal, Plastic, Glass, Emissive, Subsurface etc. etc. and then provide a more complex scene as a Production task at the end.
I would definitely recommend you do the fundamentals of texturing FIRST as, while longer, it’s more in-depth and has a better balance of the Presentation, Practice, Production methodology imo. It took me quite a while to complete the final exercise and although I really struggled I did learn a lot. I’d then suggest still doing the CORE version as I think it compliments it well with new techniques but the Fundamentals is an easier grounding if you’re coming to this with zero experience
