Time to start working on tutorials

[Christian Walther]

Considering the number of German and other non-English speakers around here, translating tutorials from English to other languages seems like a thankless job. Asking for personal help in your own language, effectively causing the translations to be made "on demand", is probably more efficient. I can only repeat that I gladly explain things in German that I know or can infer from English documentation.

Or course, the other way around works too - if you'd like to write a tutorial, but have trouble with English, write it in your own language. Finding someone who can translate it into English should be the least worry.

[Sarah]

My trouble with the tutorials I've tried (both the ones here at GoW, and the famous "Noob to Pro") comes from the changing Blender versions. That shouldn't be a problem, because well-behaved app developers don't eliminate features during minor updates, but there you have it--you frequently can't follow a step-by-step tutorial for Blender, if the snapshots were taken in an earlier version (I guess the jump from 2.45 to 2.46 made all the UV texture tutorials obsolete, for instance).

I'd love to be able to go through the "First (Real) Age" tutorial from start to finish, with all the instructions working on a current Blender version, that would be really nifty!

[Lontahv]

Really, the GoW ones are to teach you PyPRP-specific things for the most part. Even though the wiki says:

Learn Blender either through the Blender Noob to Pro tutorials, or the GoW Tutorials, which focus on Age building.

...this isn't the case. It's very hard to write tutorials when you can't assume someone already has been taught something. It gets very complex, this is an example:

First version: "First, start by making a UVSphere with the segments and rings both set to 20." Me: I need to make this easier.

Revision 1: "First, start by pressing the space-bar or SHIFT-A in the 3d-window to pop up menu. Click the UVSphere item in the menu that popped up (Add->Mesh->UVSphere). After that pops up set the "Segments" to 20 by clicking the "<" arrow in the dialog. Now you need to set the "Rings" to 20. Follow the same procedure as you did for setting the "Segments"." Me: Still this could be difficult for someone who hasn't started Blender yet.

Revision 2: "First, start Blender (you should follow your OperatingSystem's program-starting protocols, for Windows double-click on the Blender Icon on your desktop, for Linux using Gnome navigate though the menus until your find it, then single-click on release the mouse button to launch it). If you do not have Blender you'll need to choose the right version for your machine. [omitted long instructions telling how to find, download, and install Blender] Now, start up Blender. You should be greeted by a splashscreeen. This varies depending on your version. The big gridded screen in the middle is the 3d-window. [omitted some stuff] Now, press the space-bar or SHIFT-A in the 3d-window to pop up menu. Click the UVSphere item in the menu that popped up (Add->Mesh->UVSphere). After that pops up set the "Segments" to 20 by clicking the "<" arrow in the dialog. Now you need to set the "Rings" to 20. Follow the same procedure as you did for setting the "Segments".

I'm not trying to make fun of the new people here by saying they need tutorials written like Revision 2 but if I were new this is what I'd want. I think reasonably there's only one place to start with learning to make ages and that's a simple tutorial about Blender itself. This way, tutorials don't have to repeat everything again and can be written faster. This sample tutorial is about how my tutorial-writing goes. It's just I usually never get the completeness that's shown in even Revision 1 .

I'm going to do some wiki changing to try the fix the notion that the GoWs can provide everything you need ('cause it can't).

[Chacal]

A good idea would be to include, at the start of every tutorial, a list of required skills.
For example:
Blender interface and basic operations
Create, resize, and move a cube in Blender
Create a material and import a texture file in it

[Lontahv]

http://www.guildofwriters.com/wiki/Gett ... th_Blender

This has replaced the line talking about using the GoW tuts to learn Blender with.

Note: URL to wiki may be liable to change.

[Aloys]

I'm drifting slightly off topic here, and I'm probably going to get some flack for what I'm about to say because that idea has already been refused, but I need to say it again:
This problem (which is a pretty serious and recurrent problem, even for the dedicated writers) comes from the fact that we have to cope up with Blender's never ending evolutions.. (Please note that I say evolution, not progression.. as roughly 90% of the additions or tweaks in Blender are nothing that can be included in Ages. Blender is first and foremost a software for animation and pre-calculated rendering..)
If we had a dedicated tool, problems like this would be gone, tutorials would be much easier to write and maintain, and as a result Age creation as a whole would be *much* easier..
In the end it's a win-win situation, and a great help to the community as a whole, the only barrier would be to create that tool (or rather to adapt an exisiting tool, Blender, for this).

[Chacal]

Yes, I remember that discussion, and I still think that a GoW interface over Blender would solve the problem without sacrificing capabilities.

[Lontahv]

I think this is a real possibility with libPlasma at the stage it is (fun, supporting most every Plasma class under the sun and waiting to be used for the next greatest thing ). I guess the hardest things would be a) dealing with a group of coders all fighting over how it should be made and b) coding in all the mesh tools that we've (I at least) have grown used to using in Blender.

I'd love to have a native interface rather than the odd and sometimes very buggy Blender rendered-all-in-OpenGL one. I think tending toward the 3dsMax interface would do a lot of good. Of course, it's import that this not be 3dsMax or Blender but rather something users of both can get used to fairly quickly (ie. not deprive me of my Blender mesh tools ).

I really shouldn't be continuing the offtopic-ness especially since I'm a moderator.

[Aloys]

I think I'll go bump that old topic then.