Trying ... constructive critics on tutorials

Question

Hi,

while having been a complete failure when trying to get into Blender (again) when I joined your site, I am now, slowly (with B 3.5 and 3.6) making progress on my own side projects (yeeha) - to an extent that puts Blender, after almost 20 years of me trying my hands on it, into my toolbox. Finally. 

That said, I would like to leave a few suggestions on your tutorials, each one being minor and unimportant, but summed up together they made me stop my subscription to your site. MAYBE other users can add their salt as well. This is NOT meant as a rant at all, but as an attempt to "give back" other than mere money: Helping you get better.


  • don't hide mistakes. Your courses often are edited in a way that as soon as the instructor hits a roadblock (which Blender is famous for), the video is obviously cut/edited and the instructor continues either elsewhere or magically solved the problem "behind the scenes". NEVER do that. Always show WHAT to do in order to fix issues. Blender is the most issues-rising application ever invented, tutorials need to deal with that.
  • explain what you're doing and why you're doing it that way. Instead of claiming "there are thousand ways to do xyz in Blender, I'll do it this way", always explain WHY you do it this way and show alternatives and their respective pros and cons.
  • get your audio right. Often, your videos have some background music, very faint, but clearly audible. Get rid of that, never bother a student with distractive noise. Set up your recording room to eliminate most echos and audio issues. Use standard software to clean up your audio (Ozone, RX or whatever). Don't mumble, better do a voice over than recording life (life recording often is hard to focus on since you are dividing your own attention between what you do on the screen and what you are talking about. FOCUS!)
  • use proper terminology. When your tutors talk about a single "vertice" (something that simply does not exist, what they mean is a "vertex"), it always throws me off. It's like talking "we are having this delicious pizza" and at the same time showing a Currywurst (sausage with hot sauce). It's just WRONG - same goes for other misnomer and misunderstandings in how things work (colour workflows come to mind).
  • Provide chapter jump points instead of arbitrary video chunks. Especially in courses where the tutor records every single mouse move, literally taking hours to do repetitive jobs and makes the student watch through it because you never know if the tutor might say something important: Give sumups of all the important nuggets you dropped in between at the end of the chapter, provide jump-points (e.g. "sculpting one leg vertex done, continuing with the left two vertices of the knee") so that one can find spots again that one wants to revisit.
  • consider providing timelapse videos additionally to explanatory videos. Like the above, don't show the tediously long process in the SAME VIDEO that explains fundamentals or professional "nugget type" tips. Instead, put in timelapses where they speed up the UNDERSTANDING, maybe add a secondary "real time no talk" video to follow along (for those who create their portfolio by copying tutors' work instead of doing something of their own). It's really the same as above from a different angle: Don't "force" your students into this modern-times "copy actions and pretend it's their own doing" behaviour, but TEACH them the tools and make them (us!) try ourselves.
  • consider showing/explaining the tools you are going to use in a chapter BEFORE you use them. Not much to add here, really: Explain, which end of a hammer you grab and which end you hit the nail with. THEN do it. Don't first do it (see above: People are blindly following along) and then mumble under your breath that "there are thousand other tools in the box you could use a screwdriver or a shovel but ...". Explain the (basic, fundamental) tech behind a tool. "I am an artist I don't need to know what I am doing" type of students can easily skip such vital infos, but those of us who want to LEARN are left frustrated when tools are just "dumbfold-applied".

There's more, but I know I am pissing people off anyway, so I'll leave this as a starter. Since I don't get any notifications about responses/replies or whatever, please do feel free to contact me if you like.


Marc Albrecht

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  • Adrian Bellworthy replied

    Hey Marc,

    Sorry you feel that CGCookie has not met your Blender training needs satisfactorily. I will try to provide an adequate response to the points you raise here.

    • The first four points you make seem to refer to standards 

    The instructors hold them selves to high standards on the courses they produce, higher than the standard of the majority of tutorials on some YouTube channels for example.
    The courses available to CGCookie citizens often take many months and even years, as is the case with the HUMAN course, from initial idea through research and development to polished course. Creating the high quality, regular content expected from CG Cookie members is a huge challenge for a small team of instructors, whilst also maintaining an affordable subscription cost for citizens.

    • The remaining three points you make seem to refer to style

    All instructors, across varying platforms and disciplines, have their own unique style of teaching. We see the same from students, a variation in learning and knowledge retention. Over many years of experience, as both a trainee and a trainer, I believe the adage, no two students are the same, holds true. We all learn differently, sometimes over longer periods of time, sometimes the same thing explained differently can be beneficial to some students.

    Finding the right learning technique for our self, is as important as the teaching technique.
    Techniques can be taught, however when it comes to the copied results you mention, a seed of inspiration can be planted, but artistic variation evolves from each and every individual.


    A comprehensive understanding and competence in the fundamentals of any given subject is foundational to successful learning.
    CGCookie has developed, and continues to redevelop and update the fundamentals series of courses. We highly recommend new students to Blender, and existing students if necessary, complete and understand the fundamentals.
    Courses/Lessons can and should be watched/followed multiple times until the knowledge/technique being taught is understood. Repetitive learning is often the most effective.
    Learning Blender is a long journey, not a walk in the park. Learning Blender will take hours and hours of practice, over days, weeks, months and ongoing into years.


    To help us improve further and meet the high standards expected of us, would you be kind enough to elaborate further on your experience with more specific examples (course/lesson) in the areas you mention above.

  • Marc Albrecht(malbrecht) replied

    Hi, Adrian,


    thank you so much for your response, I appreciate you taking the time to address points individually!

    My idea was not so much to start a discussion, but to give feedback about WHY one user has stopped paying for courses. Before I get into my typical babbling, let me stress: I am not saying your material is bad or not worth the money you take for it. I was trying to give you feedback, personal, honest, and with the necessary time having passed to really come from the heart, not from an instant "meh" kind of feeling.

    --- electronic nibble-here ---

    While it is understandable that you "defend" (no offence) your perspective, my own life experience says that swallowing feedback like this and letting it settle for some time, THEN giving it another think (maybe if others chime in with similar feelings) most often is the more productive way of handling initial frustrations with someone's moaning and whining (I have been told to be a disgusting whiner many times before - including Mr. Roosendaal - so I obviously must be one). :-)
    Yes, most of your material stands high above Youtube stuff (although that isn't saying much - I usually don't watch videos on Youtube as that most of the time is killing lifetime that nobody can ever give you back).
    My intention was to make it better, not just "better than youtube" :-P

    That said, above notes I put down while watching your tutorials about a year ago or so. As I couldn't simply download the tutorials, I was forced to skim through them online (I discussed the negative user experience of that with someone at CGcookie before, we simply do not share the same perspective there). It is very likely that my notes do NOT apply to every single course but have been very specific single-point-issues. I can't tell you, for example, which course had nerve-wrecking almost-unhearable-but-still-too-distracting background music noodling ALL THE TIME. It doesn't matter, really, because: It is FEEDBACK, it is a suggestion. It's absolutely possible that CGcookie thinks this is COOL and is happy to not cater for students that prefer their own background music while listening to tutors! I am fine with that - yet, you can only consider this opinion if you have HEARD it.
    I don't know who kept talking about "this vertice", I do remember it made me stop watching the course though. To me things like that sound like the tutor simply doesn't care - and my personal reaction usually is that I join in and don't care either.
    Audio quality: I do agree that - judging from memory - the audio tracks on your material are above Youtube standard (I have censored my own cynic sidelines on this here), "highest standards" they were not. I am not interested in "highest standards", I was giving feedback on things I noticed (room reverberation for example, varying noise level / amplitude, little things like that which can easily be corrected by a single run through a tool). This is, obviously, not IMPORTANT - like I said, it's the sum of little unimportant things that frustrated me.

    My point about showing mistakes, dealing with bugs and overcoming issues in the software to me is the most important one, really. No matter how good a course is: If the tutor experiences problems when using the tools and these are later edited out, the course collapses for me. There's an old gag (I think it was about Lightwave the first time it popped up, probably on some Brad Peebler VHS) where a tutor shows a cube and says "and then you click a few buttons and get this" and presents a space ship. Easy, five seconds. Only that you never saw WHICH buttons the tutor clicked. Dealing with problems is key to using tools like Blender.

    "Learning" actually IS a walk in the park. I am way over 50 years old and I learn new tricks every single day and I am loving it. I crack on stuff I have never thought possible to tackle, because I get better at learning the older I get. Without constant learning, my life would not be worth living.
    Blender is the ONLY software tool I have ever met that - for a long time - seemed to have tried everything possible to make it as offensive, as hostile and as user-unfriendly as anyhow possible. Getting a grasp on Houdini took me a couple of hours, learning Cinema4d (version 1 and 2) was "over a coffee or two". Blender? No, still today it is giving its best to be as counterintuitive as can be - I have learned that Mr. Roosendaal wants it to be that way because it "makes artists more creative". Which, from my experience (closing in to dying and not being able to take my Blender skills into another life), is utter Bullshit. 
    Blender 3.x is a game changer in that respect. It is still designed to be user-unfriendly in many respects - but hey, Houdini has a galaxy of decades old shit that NOBODY ever uses but who cares? The more Blender streamlines its workflows instead of pretending to be "challenging the artist in me", the more people will adopt it. I develop software for the movie industry, I know EXACTLY what I am talking about :-D
    In other words: To me, a good tutor makes learning FUN and sparks the flame of "I want more of this" in a student. Simply "follow along and do as I do" can not do that, I think. Describing a problem first and then approaching it from different angles, "trial and error" and figuring out what works and thus enabling the student to, along the way, find THEIR "it clicks" way, that's good tutoring. Personal view here, no need to defend yours :-)

    I tried to give you personal, single-subjective-minded ideas of why your courses did not work for me. Again, no idea if it was all of them or just specific ones, I do not recall any "feedback-option" or "discuss this course with its creator" department or anything. My memory of the courses is that they were presented "eat it or starve" (don't know if that German expression works in English). 
    Yes, I do realize that I am counteracting my own intentions by discussing feedback on feedback without the hope of finding an agreement, since an agreement isn't required in the first place ^_^ The best I can hope for is that someone at CGcookie, after a few months or years of considering my thoughts, comes to the conclusion: "He, Marc was right all along - he actually IS a complete moron and bullet proof asshole!"

    Don't let me kill the fun in learning for you. Despite what you say, the best thing in life is being surprised by what you can master if you just keep on trying - and have someone MAKE IT FUN FOR YOU.



    Marc

  • Paul Caggegi replied

    Hi Marc! As one of the instructors here at CG Cookie, I take suggestions on board so that I can improve how I can better deliver content. Every instructor has their own style and we strive to allow some individuality in each of our teaching methods, but at the same time, try and create an experience which makes us a unique and respected voice in the Blender education space.

    Your feedback is valid, and these are points which do come up often, so they are worth addressing. If you'll permit me to comment on a few of them here?

    Don't hide mistakes

    Perhaps in a live-stream, or a more casual presentation where a customer or student is not paying for the service some mistakes are permissible, but it really does damage the credibility of the instructor if they show a lack of awareness of where the pitfalls are. If I am selling a course or a product, I want it to be as clear and correct as possible. In the process of creating our course, we talk to the other instructors, as well as Instructor Assistants (such as Adrian above), and if something is overlooked or can be done better, they will often suggest this and we correct it. That said, if there is a method or technique which has an obvious caveat, we do try to highlight that!


    Explain what you're doing and why you're doing it that way.

    Some techniques have many uses, this is true. We cannot predict who will be coming to any given course. Some students might be beginners; some might be pros wanting to freshen up a skill. What is explained is often approached from a technical standpoint. How you use that technique is so subjective, and discovery is sometimes part of the fun.


    Use proper terminology.

    Vertex/Vertice can be as fraught with debate as Gif vs Jif. We will strive to correct and use better terminology, and have been pulled up on pronunciation on multiple occasions! The pronunciation of Passepartout is one such example we've had meetings about! We will try to do better.

    Provide chapter jump points instead of arbitrary video chunks.

    How work is presented is always an evolving process, and this is one idea that has been floated. I personally agree with this method of presenting some content. Others in the team may not, and ultimately a compromise gets reached. Please know it does get suggested!

    Overall, there are some good suggestions here, and we are always striving to improve how we teach as much as finding subjects which are inspiring to teach.

    Cheers,

    Paul C

  • Jonathan Lampel replied

    Thanks for the feedback! Our whole world is making tutorials, so I definitely take it to heart and try to always be improving. 

    As I couldn't simply download the tutorials, I was forced to skim through them online

    If you have trouble downloading courses in the future, let us know! It should work to download the lessons from the video player: https://support.cgcookie.com/article/292-how-to-download-course-lessons