Useless tutorial for 2.8+

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

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.

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).

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.

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"

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

-- Winston Churchill

"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

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)

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.....

Thanks Kent; I bookmarked that link.

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.

sorry you are feeling like blender is the only software to suffer from this.

Here’s my two cents:

I have worked in many software over the years, I can wholeheartedly say that every software I have used has moved stuff around and shifted the UI, added and removed features, hidden gems, or taken them out altogether.

blender being free is not rid of those problems.

autocad suffers from this, susbtance suffers from this, zbrush suffers from this. Microsoft excel suffers from this.

I haven’t used maya, 3ds max, or others but I am fairly certain many many people can empathize with getting lost on where things are in just about every application out there.

Going to a paid application doesn’t mean you won’t equally be lost the next year the company decides to rebrand the UI, but maybe the experience is better and it comes with your annual subscription.

My personal experience is that CGCookie keeps up with the UI and feature changes fairly well on their new content and they are always making it top notch with beginners in mind for most of the content that blender changes and adjusts.

Another great aspect worth noting is the community here is great to ask questions when you get stuck. If you are struggling and need answers where a tool ended up or why something is no longer working then don’t suffer in silence. We’re here for each other and are happy to lend a hand.

Shawn and Kent, Thank you for your perspectives as well.

I have no doubts any complex software suffers from this issue to some degree. However, that degree still can be very different between different products. Having worked with many complex (sometimes unnecessary) products before (not 3d related), I've almost always found commercial software to be more predictable when it comes to the changes, and the changes themselves are usually better documented. That doesn't make Blender bad or not serious or whatever. On the contrary, it is excellent and astonishingly successful software, and we all are lucky it exists. However, the open source development model has peculiarities that impact the end result. Again, it's not bad, it's just what it is.

Completely agree with the points about the community and CGCookie specifically.

I actually haven't touched Maya for more than ten years since my student days, so it would be an interesting experiment. I don't expect it to be a silver bullet or holy grail, I just hope that it has less of what annoys me at this stage.

For sure iigoris. If you make the switch to another software I'd love to see your progress regardless. Sharing the journey is important in my opinion, not necessarily the vehicle you use on the journey. I'm on the CGCookie discord most days since it is a cool place to hang out (when I have free time away from my non-art day job) and ask questions or just share what we are working on.

I personally use way more programs than blender in my workflow: Zbrush, Substance, Nomad Sculpt, CozyBlanket, Affinity Suite, OBS, Procreate all have their place in my "auto shop" of CG art workflow. I just tend to use blender most because it got over that massive learning curve finally and I am in a comfortable place with it. CGCookie collabs actually got me over that hump. I'm soo grateful they decided to try that.

Okay I am deviating a little. Just because you pick a non blender software doesn't mean you are not a member of this community. No enemies here just because people prefer to use their favorite tool and it's not blender.

blanchsb oh I totally forgot about the Discord channels. Yeah, those are great to keep an eye on. 

Anyway, that was more of a rant on my part than a serious comparison between particular programs. In any case, a lot of stuff explained here in the tutorials is applicable to most modern 3d software to large degree. That’s why I love CGCookie as they don’t just explain which buttons to push, but also why and how it works. For example, you open up Renderman and you basically see the same Principled BSDF shader. There are some different parameter names and slight idiosyncrasies, but you still understand what’s before you.