I've been enjoying my time learning Blender here on CGCookie. It's been very easy to follow and apply what I've learned.... that is until recently. I've almost finished "Fundamentals of Texturing" and I've found that the difficulty has increased almost tenfold and it feels like I'm missing a lot of prerequisite knowledge needed to follow along.
Am I expected to understand everything in the course or do just go along? Will it become more clear as I advance in the working flow? Do you recommend that I rewatch until it sticks or just go along?
Hey qqeshmer , thanks for the feedback! We've gotten this comment a few times, so we will be sure to improve the flow in the future so that there's no uncertainty. You definitely don't need to understand everything in the course in order to get the most important parts. The fastest way to learn is just jump right in, and rewatch a video if you forget something (which is why we try to keep them short). It will become more clear as you progress with other courses as well. 3D is not an easy thing to learn, but stick with it and you'll do great :) If you ever need help, feel free to create another post like this on the Community. Hope that helps!
I finished the fundamentals flow early this year, and I agree that the texturing is one of the more difficult portions. It also dips a lot into the 2D art portion of CG and, since I had never used GIMP/PS before, it was a bit of a struggle to follow along.
How I ended up approaching it was simply skipping the final exercise (the axe) and completing the rest of the course. You get to be a bit more familiar with how blender works as a whole and, once you make some projects of your own, the UV unwrapping will seem much more logical. Referring back to the videos frequently, like Jonathan said, also helps connect the dots between the different parts of blender.
Keep it up, it'll all start to come together with practice, I promise!
Awesome. Thanks Jonathan!. I think understood enough of the unwrapping portion of the course to get on with the challenge. It's just the rendering stuff that confused me, the difference between Cycles/Blender Render and so on. But it's good to hear that it will get clearer with time. That's all I wanted to know.
Thanks to you as well, jaredkohrt! Comforting to know that someone feels the same.