Reply To: Trying … constructive critics on tutorials

[Marc Albrecht]

Hi, Adrian,

thank you so much for your response, I appreciate you taking the time to address points individually!

My idea was not so much to start a discussion, but to give feedback about WHY one user has stopped paying for courses. Before I get into my typical babbling, let me stress: I am not saying your material is bad or not worth the money you take for it. I was trying to give you feedback, personal, honest, and with the necessary time having passed to really come from the heart, not from an instant “meh” kind of feeling.

— electronic nibble-here —

While it is understandable that you “defend” (no offence) your perspective, my own life experience says that swallowing feedback like this and letting it settle for some time, THEN giving it another think (maybe if others chime in with similar feelings) most often is the more productive way of handling initial frustrations with someone’s moaning and whining (I have been told to be a disgusting whiner many times before – including Mr. Roosendaal – so I obviously must be one). 🙂
Yes, most of your material stands high above Youtube stuff (although that isn’t saying much – I usually don’t watch videos on Youtube as that most of the time is killing lifetime that nobody can ever give you back).
My intention was to make it better, not just “better than youtube” 😛

That said, above notes I put down while watching your tutorials about a year ago or so. As I couldn’t simply download the tutorials, I was forced to skim through them online (I discussed the negative user experience of that with someone at CGcookie before, we simply do not share the same perspective there). It is very likely that my notes do NOT apply to every single course but have been very specific single-point-issues. I can’t tell you, for example, which course had nerve-wrecking almost-unhearable-but-still-too-distracting background music noodling ALL THE TIME. It doesn’t matter, really, because: It is FEEDBACK, it is a suggestion. It’s absolutely possible that CGcookie thinks this is COOL and is happy to not cater for students that prefer their own background music while listening to tutors! I am fine with that – yet, you can only consider this opinion if you have HEARD it.
I don’t know who kept talking about “this vertice”, I do remember it made me stop watching the course though. To me things like that sound like the tutor simply doesn’t care – and my personal reaction usually is that I join in and don’t care either.
Audio quality: I do agree that – judging from memory – the audio tracks on your material are above Youtube standard (I have censored my own cynic sidelines on this here), “highest standards” they were not. I am not interested in “highest standards”, I was giving feedback on things I noticed (room reverberation for example, varying noise level / amplitude, little things like that which can easily be corrected by a single run through a tool). This is, obviously, not IMPORTANT – like I said, it’s the sum of little unimportant things that frustrated me.

My point about showing mistakes, dealing with bugs and overcoming issues in the software to me is the most important one, really. No matter how good a course is: If the tutor experiences problems when using the tools and these are later edited out, the course collapses for me. There’s an old gag (I think it was about Lightwave the first time it popped up, probably on some Brad Peebler VHS) where a tutor shows a cube and says “and then you click a few buttons and get this” and presents a space ship. Easy, five seconds. Only that you never saw WHICH buttons the tutor clicked. Dealing with problems is key to using tools like Blender.

“Learning” actually IS a walk in the park. I am way over 50 years old and I learn new tricks every single day and I am loving it. I crack on stuff I have never thought possible to tackle, because I get better at learning the older I get. Without constant learning, my life would not be worth living.
Blender is the ONLY software tool I have ever met that – for a long time – seemed to have tried everything possible to make it as offensive, as hostile and as user-unfriendly as anyhow possible. Getting a grasp on Houdini took me a couple of hours, learning Cinema4d (version 1 and 2) was “over a coffee or two”. Blender? No, still today it is giving its best to be as counterintuitive as can be – I have learned that Mr. Roosendaal wants it to be that way because it “makes artists more creative”. Which, from my experience (closing in to dying and not being able to take my Blender skills into another life), is utter Bullshit. 
Blender 3.x is a game changer in that respect. It is still designed to be user-unfriendly in many respects – but hey, Houdini has a galaxy of decades old shit that NOBODY ever uses but who cares? The more Blender streamlines its workflows instead of pretending to be “challenging the artist in me”, the more people will adopt it. I develop software for the movie industry, I know EXACTLY what I am talking about 😀
In other words: To me, a good tutor makes learning FUN and sparks the flame of “I want more of this” in a student. Simply “follow along and do as I do” can not do that, I think. Describing a problem first and then approaching it from different angles, “trial and error” and figuring out what works and thus enabling the student to, along the way, find THEIR “it clicks” way, that’s good tutoring. Personal view here, no need to defend yours 🙂

I tried to give you personal, single-subjective-minded ideas of why your courses did not work for me. Again, no idea if it was all of them or just specific ones, I do not recall any “feedback-option” or “discuss this course with its creator” department or anything. My memory of the courses is that they were presented “eat it or starve” (don’t know if that German expression works in English). 
Yes, I do realize that I am counteracting my own intentions by discussing feedback on feedback without the hope of finding an agreement, since an agreement isn’t required in the first place ^_^ The best I can hope for is that someone at CGcookie, after a few months or years of considering my thoughts, comes to the conclusion: “He, Marc was right all along – he actually IS a complete moron and bullet proof asshole!”

Don’t let me kill the fun in learning for you. Despite what you say, the best thing in life is being surprised by what you can master if you just keep on trying – and have someone MAKE IT FUN FOR YOU.

Marc