Useless tutorial for 2.8+

[Michael Smith]

No intensity in Voronoi Texture, is there a fix – for the tutorial ?

Someone else asked the question a few months back. And the response from the author is “Thank you for sharing the fix”

After going through some tutorials, It looks like it is safe to screen out JLampel tutorials and Tremmel tutorials.

[spikeyxxx]

Blender changes very fast. It is impossible to update all tutorials and still make new content. You can always ask here if something is unclear.

https://cgcookie.com/community/8558-solved-voronoi-in-2-8-x#answer-31935

[Michael Smith]

Understood. Thank you for explaining why even paid tutorials cannot be updated.  Guess its the most popular business model all over the world with every subscriptions and prescriptions. 

So this is like subscribing to the yearly flu vaccination. You paid for the vaccine only 99.99 (after 50% discount), but when signing for the consent before the injection, hear it may or may not work, because its impossible to update the vaccine, because the virus changes so fast, because the awesome fella who made the vaccine is playing golf on the other side of the country, but, the next available  doctor/ specialist/representative will help you with all your questions, even if s/he can’t give you all the answers. Yet the CEOs & the administration keeps wondering why people are showing such hesitancy towards the good ole vaccines.

[spikeyxxx]

Seems you missed the part about making new content (not updating the vaccine but making a new one that does work against the new flu).

[Michael Smith]

New vaccines, old vaccines. Its all the same `whine` in a different bottle. 

There used to be an old saying in the country – The vaccines will only get as good as the company/feller that manufactured it.

If you cookies are soo good, why not make some rigging tutorials ? Even if it fetches no income, you still can learn to rig the elections 2024 and re-animate the Donald.. xDDDuck.

[Kent Trammell]

Hi Jane – It’s evident that you’re having a rough go with CG Cookie courses and for that I apologize. Hopefully you will be encouraged that thousands of students have learned lasting skills from our courses and I’m confident you can too.

You’re not alone in assuming that a video or course recorded with a previous version of Blender is “outdated”. However Spikey is absolutely right that Blender updates way too fast to keep all of our 3000+ videos up to date with the latest Blender version. If we tried to do that we would be perpetually caught in a loop of re-recording every video and never recording anything new. This is not only a problem for us but also for every Blender instructor on the internet.

Luckily this problem doesn’t have to impede your learning progress because the most important part of learning Blender / 3D is not the buttons pressed. Instead it’s the concepts and workflows that transcend Blender versions. This is why we maintain courses recorded with older versions of Blender unless the concepts taught in a course truly reach a state of obsolescence. We’re retired many courses over the years for this reason.

Trust me, we all know very well how frustrating it can be to learn from a video that uses a different version of Blender. I wrote an article with some helpful tips about coping with this issue.

[Michael Smith]

It is so sad to see some good artists who disappeared from this 3d cooking site because the (tools) Pots and Kettle for cooking 3d cookies have become old and dented.  It seems the new instructors can’t figure out how to do the old cooking techniques with the new cooking tools.

It is nice to read your explanations, but there is still a glaring flaw in the reasoning. 

If it is the concepts and workflows that transcend the blender versions, why retire the techniques and tutorials? Instead why not just retire the authors not complying with your company standards to recycle and update the workflows and find another artist to retain the concepts and workflows that transcended the versions. Or better yet, you update the technique to its latest incarnation ? You are right, its not the buttons clicked or the self praise instructors do that we subscribers want from you, we only care about the techniques & concepts you are trying to sell to us. So blindly retiring courses without taking the initiative to update the technique to the latest blender tools only makes the campus..or Kingdom a breeding ground for one trick ponies.

Here is another perspective at the issue to think through, but unfortunately it will make sense only if you have attended any professional schools or post graduate training. People don’t choose to go to campuses like MIT or Harvard because they do `awesome new trick courses` every year. Instead students swarm in from all over the world to join those campuses only to learn the techniques and concepts conceived by great scientists, to be guided by current experts, hoping to learn the G-old techniques with the current tools. 

Also, making excuses like “Blender is changing so fast” or “its not just us but every Blender instructor faces the same issues” are good examples for the old English Proverb – “A bad workman always blames his tools”

[Michael Smith]

See, Americans will do the right thing after they do everything else.

— Winston Churchill

[Hermes Trismegistus]

“It looks like it is safe to screen out JLampel tutorials and Tremmel tutorials. ” 1) Kent Trammell & Jonathan Lampel  are some of the best Blender instructors in the world. 2) As far as old, outdated versions of Blender I wish I could find old Jonathan Williamson tutorials because even when he was using really old versions of Blender he still teaches you an enormous  amount of invaluable tools that you can always use for any version of Blender (he is a master of modeling & topology) 3) Some Blender artist actually prefer the older versions with its Blender Internal render  engine & finally 4) I think you just need a hug or something I don’t know. Guess some people are just never satisfied

[Kent Trammell]

We sincerely appreciate the support, Hermes 🧡

I couldn’t agree more about Jonathan Williamson’s tutorials. Great teaching is timeless. I often think about the iconic Joan of Arc character modeling tutorial from 2003 (or earlier). The workflow and concepts are as relevant today as they were almost 20 years ago.

PS: We still have some Jonathan Williamson courses in our library and retired others to our “Classics” youtube playlist.

[Shawn Blanch]

I have found many gold nuggets in older content once I have familiarized myself with the blender interface enough to know where tools are. The teaching is truly great no matter the year. I agree that it would be better to have the videos updated but I have not seen any instructor do that to all of their courses for blender even outside of CGCookie. It’s a disappointment that holds true for CGCookie as well. To me I still go back and learn on the old stuff because there is valuable training there. I just have to know the tools a little better before I use those older courses. (same goes for youtube or other courses outside of CGCookie)

[Matthew Fricker]

If you get stuck , why not just politely ask the crew and community for help here and I assure you that you will get your answer. It seems to me that your frustration gets the better of you and you immediately just want to start a war instead of just asking the relevant question, especially when you start it with things like “After going through some tutorials, It looks like it is safe to screen out JLampel tutorials and Tremmel tutorials” And then you shoot everybody down when they try to be helpful – all this because a texture won’t work…..  You’re going to run into issues like this with any online teaching school , or free youtube vidoes so I suggest you just get on with things rather than being so militant with every issue you come across. 

As everyone keeps trying to explain to you, Blender is hugely complex and is changing all the time so it is impossible to keep every tutorial up to date and also keep creating new ones. Instead , old tutorials are retired but still kept accessible whilst new ones are created to keep learning current. If every tutorial ever made was to be kept 100% up to date at all times to keep you happy then they would have to be re-recorded on a daily , if not weekly basis , which realistically , isn’t happening in any online school , anywhere I’m afraid….. just go with the flow and appreciate that Blender is an awesome free program and that we can so easily learn how to use it with the wonders of online learning from amazing schools like CGC.

Back in the day you would be relying on reading a book to learn a program and moaning that a completely new version wasn’t being printed on a daily basis…..

[Hermes Trismegistus]

Thanks Kent; I bookmarked that link.

[igoris]

For anyone reading this in 2022 (as the link to the answer is no longer active): to replicate intensity from the old blender, in 2.81+ take distance output and square it.

While some of the messages in this thread are problematic for many different reasons, I somewhat understand the frustration of the topic starter. However, the problem is not with CGCookie or instructors, but with Blender itself. I constantly see claims that Blender is a great tool to learn for the beginners because it’s free, has tons of tutorials, and can do a lot. To be honest, I think only the “free” part is actually helping the beginners. My biggest problem with Blender is that they move shit around all the time without any explanations. And having a lot of functionality just means having more shit to move around. Yes, there are tons of tutorials, but Blender itself is so unpredictable, that you have to fight it every time you are following a tutorial that wasn’t recorded like yesterday.

All this makes me want to pull a plug and switch to commercial software. Maya Indie is like $300 per year after all, around the same as CGCookie subscription. It’s not guaranteed to be better, obviously, but those companies will have at least some pushback from their customers for such behavior. Maybe it actually makes more sense to learn core concepts in something like Maya and then, when you know what you are doing, switch to Blender or use it to fill the gaps in your pipeline.

[Martin Bergwerf]

Thanks @igoris ,

squaring the Distance to get the ‘old’ Intensity…interesting..I can see where that would be coming from, as the Dot Product of a Vector with itself is the square of the Vector’s length…

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