Using tutorials

[jaredkohrt]

Hi everyone! I’m curious how others utilize video tutorials. I generally follow along, pause to replicate an action or mull over a concept, and repeat until I’ve completed the video. As things get more complicated, however, I find myself getting burned out really quickly. There are exponentially more tweaks to make, and a twenty minute video can take me hours to get through.

 Because of this, I was wondering what other ways there are to use these tutorials–do you watch the video beforehand to make it easier to follow, or watch the video and then do the modeling separately, etc? I’m also curious what methods you feel help personal growth/independent thinking most.  

[William Miller]

I watch the video the whole way through, and then start doing what the instructor did.  If I have trouble, I’ll rewatch part of it.

[Thibaut Bourbon]

There’s different approaches for that. A good way to practice, though time consuming, it’s to first follow along the tutorial, pausing when needed, in order to reproduce what the instructor does. It’s important to stay in a learning mode and not mimicking the videos.

Then, once finish, try to redo it with a project of your own, and if needed check the instructions. It’s a good way to check if during the first time you watched the tutorial you didn’t just “copy-pasted” the instruction without consciously learning something.

It’s time consuming as I said, but very rewarding !

[Jonathan Gonzalez]

Sometimes watching a video through once helps you to better understand what is being taught as a whole. If you’re having to stop every few minutes to catch up you’re probably missing the “bigger picture” since you’re watching it so erratically. In that case I would probably watch the video through fully at first, maybe even backtracking on parts that don’t make sense to you. After that then go through the video again and follow along. 

Unfortunately I don’t know of any way to really streamline this process so that it’s quicker. More complex subjects may just require you to spend more time to really get them. This is true for everyone. Find out what parts of the tutorial give you the biggest issue and try to find some tutorial that specifically addresses it. 

[Aaron Rudderham]

@williamatics  @tbrbn @jgonzalez Thanks a ton, feel like I’ve been having the same problems as @jaredkohrt where I feel like I’m taking way too long to finish videos, at least more practical videos and less wordy videos (for example I’ve been modeling the toy plane for 3 days and I just finished the Main Structure section) so I’ll definitely take your advice to heart.

[William Miller]

@thecabbagedetective Just 3 days?

[Aaron Rudderham]

@williamatics Yeah the past 3 days I’ve been doing Blender for like 2 hours each day which is about double the length of the videos I’ve watched so far so that’s what made me think something was off haha.

[jaredkohrt]

@thecabbagedetective Hahaha, I actually made this topic with that exact project in mind! The plane took me something like 2 or 3 weeks at around .5-3+ hours a day (gotta put college over cg sadly), and man, was I ready to start my own project by the end. I’m just about finished with the cartoon head of modeling fundamentals, which is equally time consuming but has helped me immensely with retopology. They all pay off in the end, so keep at it!

I appreciate the advice from everyone–I’ll give each of your suggestions a try to see what works out for me. 

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