I'm sorry, but the sudden jump in complexity on this baking subject is ridiculous. It's introducing numerous new terms and…

[alfredschneider]

I’m sorry, but the sudden jump in complexity on this baking subject is ridiculous. It’s introducing numerous new terms and very complicated features in passing with no explanation.

In my past, I’ve written and recorded many tutorials (on numerous topics, and I understand how much work is involved), and if this were my own work, I would totally reorganize the tutorial, rewrite the baking videos, and perhaps even move them somewhere else entirely.

As it is, it may as well be in Chinese.

I don’t mean to be negative. I hope you will take this as constructive criticism. The earlier parts of this tutorial were first class. There’s no reason the whole thing couldn’t be first class too! 🙂

[Kent Trammell]

Hi Alfred – I’m bummed to hear you found this lesson was misguided and overly complex. I’d like to consider how I could improve the content. But “new terms and complicated features…with no explanation” is pretty vague. Can you help me by identifying more specifically which parts were so confusing to you?

[matan]

I’m not alfredschneider, but I felt very similar so I’ll try to explain why. I’m just starting out (never did any 3D modeling of any kind and I know nothing about it). I felt the Blender Basics and Mesh Modeling Fundamental classes were perfect, very well constructed and gave me a very good introduction to modeling in blender. The exercise at the end with the three objects really helped give me confidence in my abilities.

The “Fundamentals of Texturing” class started out a bit more confusing, but it was still okay until the map baking part. I think it would be less confusing if we started out with end-to-end adding some texture to one of the simple box models we built in the first lesson (maybe making it look like a cardboard box, or something cooler?)

The map baking tutorial was super confusing, and I’ll try to explain why:

1) It was the first lesson I couldn’t follow along in blender while watching, because the model itself wasn’t available anywhere (at least nowhere that I could find)
2) The subject of rendering in general was never explained (I’m not even sure I know what rendering means), and the difference between the cycles renderer and blender renderer was never explained.
3) The node view was not actually explained.
4) There were a lot of technical details that were never explained. E.g., why did we choose the geometry normal at 10:43 (of the map baking video)? What does geometry normal even mean? Why do we need to use GLSL? In 11:04 you say “As you remember, GLSL requires a light source” but as far as I can remember, GLSL was never mentioned before in any tutorial.

This lesson actually made me think I’m watching the videos in the wrong order or something. Am I?

[kdorland]

I agree with everthing alfredschneider and matan wrote. The baking videos are too complex and don’t fit in with the previous topics (which where brilliant btw). Either ditch them or expand with more detailed videos that explains the concept in better detail.

The fact that I write this 9 month later than you guys make me reconsider if I should stick around for the rest of the videos..

[Author]

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