Reply To: This lesson is going way too fast…

[eromivus]

EDIT: Getting to the ax painting exercise forced me to come back and give this a second watch. The struggles of actually doing the thing gave me a focus that was lacking on my first watch, and I got a lot more out of the second viewing—particularly the painting videos. Teasing the ax at the beginning of this course might be a good idea, that way I understand right up front that I’m going to be learning some concepts and techniques that will build up to creating that thing. Absent that context, I think the videos on the first go around seem a little random.

Hi Kent. I’m not here to pile on; rather, I think I can help provide a little more perspective that may help you guys out when you redo this course for 2.8. First off, I definitely understood the gist of this course, so it’s not like this was a failure. That being said, the specifics of watching you demonstrate and explain things in this section of the beginner flow made me think I had missed a few videos, or that I was viewing it out of order. I really think the only problem is how things were framed. Taking the baking video as an example, I think this may have been more useful as a higher level demonstration of the consequence of not baking (when it makes sense to do so) by steering us into the actual problem first and then introducing the solution that is baking. While then demo’ing how we would do this and showing us the end result, stress that it’s not important for us to fully understand the details and methodology yet. Doing so frees the user from the anxiety of not internalizing every jot and tittle of what you’re doing and instead allows them to focus on understanding the big picture view of WHAT this is and WHY it’s good to know going forward.

To sum up: it’s perfectly ok to introduce more advanced processes or ideas while explaining a beginner concept so long as you make it clear which parts are not yet important to understand. Without those prompts, the beginner has to assume that everything being shown is vital to know before proceeding, and then they’ve immediately hit a wall and frustration follows. I think in this case it’s not so much that you introduced advanced things, it’s more that the HOW overwhelmed the WHAT and the WHY, where a little reassurance that the HOW wasn’t too important right now may have been all that was needed to get the intended message across.

Not to beat a dead horse, but I had another thought that kind of connects up to what I said above. Sometimes it can actually be helpful to show more advanced things when they’re easier to relate to than something that is so simple it’s not even practical. I think as beginners, we’ve all come here with ideas in our head of things we want to make, and it’s that inspiration that can get us through some of the early barriers. Something that I struggled with on the texture painting videos was that there was a disconnect between what you were showing and what I would hope to some day create. Obviously my ultimate goal is not to be making low poly monkey heads with splotches of paint thrown on it, so while I knew what you were showing had a point and you wanted it to be simple and unintimidating, I wasn’t sure how this was actually going to help me down the road. When I think of professional assets, I wondered how what you were showing would actually be used, and then I feared you were showing methods that are going to be quickly overshadowed by more advanced texturing approaches. That disincentivized me from wanting to spend too much time or thought on those videos.

Hopefully this is received as constructive criticism and helps in some way. I’m definitely loving the site so far and have learned quite a bit.