I agree with Bart. Remember folks, the price of Blender training is a reflection of the value of *your* skills in the marketplace.

Might be wise to take a look at who is doing the training, to see whether it’s worth the cost. Is the trainer anyone with any credibility in the Blender community? Red Hat High had Jonathan Williamson and Bassam Kurdali, among others, providing training with roughly the same curriculum. That was free.

@willie: remember though that Red Hat High was strictly for a select few Jr. High students. I think it’s great to see training seminars like this popping up! Like Tony said, the fact that people are charging substantial money for Blender training gives off a very professional vibe. Take a look a look at the CGSociety workshops, relatively speaking they’re about the same costs.

@Jonathan, I know that, and I’d like to think that this workshop would be of similar quality. CGSociety workshops are, for the most part, taught by experts in the subject taught, not johnny-come-latelys who pop out of the woodwork. While I agree that expensive trainings give off a professional vibe, they do so because the people attending the training expect to get good value for their money, the companies funding the training expect their people to come back with something substantial under their belt. Now, many of them will take a flyer on something untried, but they won’t do it again if it doesn’t work out.

Take a look at the trainers. Do you recognize any of the names? Are any of them active in the Blender community? On the Blender Foundation Education mailing list? Published in BlenderArts magazine? Do they, in fact, know about Blender and how it works, know the workflow tips and tricks that make expensive expert training worth the price of admission?

I actually agree with Bart: expensive, more professional training is good for Blender. I only question whether this qualifies as to the “more professional” part. It takes more than a fancy Florida hotel and a slick website to make a training more professional. Now, if you could leave a message here saying they’d hired you to do the training, well, that would convince me it would be a worthwhile event!

@Willie, I think you’re right that an expensive course needs to offer good value for money. Obviously this course will succeed or fail based on whether they can attract and satisfy students. But there are a lot of highly skilled and professional Blender users who may not have high profiles in the Blender community, so I think that you can’t judge entirely based on whether you already know the person. The instructors may have been active in the community 5 years ago and focusing on professional work lately. Not to mention the fact that some of the most helpful and knowledgable people in BlenderArtists are essentially anonymous. Heck, Fligh could be teaching this and who’d know?

One of the reasons that courses like this are expensive is that in many cases, the students themselves aren’t paying. Their employers are paying. Anybody can still learn Blender for free if they’ve got the time and motivation, just like mostly anything else, and they’ll always be able to do so. But if you work at a studio and your boss says “learn Blender” you expect the boss to pick up the tab and make it worth your while. Courses like this I think are mainly targeting that kind of client.

In the end, the market decides what’s a reasonable price for training material and courses. It’s not really a matter of opinion. If people pay, it’s cheap enough.

@Tony: In those eight years of heavy use of Blender in his studio’s production pipeline, and regular writing for two Linux based magazines, he has written one Blender specific article I can find, about using Blender’s NLA for compositing. The reason I posted in the first place is, after taking a look at the trainers, I didn’t see a whole lot of Blender specific depth there.

I realize the reason the course is expensive is that the employer is paying. I believe I mentioned earlier, though, that the companies who send their people to expensive trainings expect those people to come back and hit the ground running. If you look at the course outline, it appears they are going to make a model, texture it, uv map parts of it, and do a camera fly-by animation.

This is the curriculum you can find in many community college Intro to CG courses in the US, albeit for 3dsMax or Maya or Lightwave, where students would spend maybe 60 hours of class time and maybe $200 for the fees. This offering proposes to take 40 hours to do something very similar, and raises the fees to $3000.

If Fligh were teaching this and they chose not to publicize that fact, then Fligh would be working for someone who (let’s be polite) was very poor in marketing.

@JimC: I certainly hope your class went well. School Districts can be cheap sometimes and school teachers are notoriously underpaid.

If people pay, it’s cheap enough. If people overpay, Blender gets a black eye. People who pay to send employees to trainings have professional meetings and conventions every year. Word gets around. As Blender moves into the mainstream of commercial CG, people will want to take advantage of this to make some money. Some of those people will be legit, some will not.

Just as we are aware there are people selling Blender knock-offs on EBay and we give them no credence or support, we need to be aware that other ways to make money from Blender may not warrent automatic support.

I’m not saying this offering is a con. Don’t get me wrong here. I am saying that writers need to exercise a little bit of jounalistic scepticism, do a bit of research, and do a write up that mentions some of the legitimate efforts, such as Blender Foundation Education. Perhaps this might motivate the legitimate trainers who haven’t yet gotten involved in the Blender community efforts to do so. Dan Sawyer may not yet know about the Blender Foundation’s efforts to certify trainers, but BlenderNation authors certainly do.

Thanks for the comments Willie

The classes went well. I ran a 3-day class in June and again in August. Classes were mixed Central Dauphin School District employees and a few from other districts and business. June was better attended with 5 outsiders while August only had 2 outsiders. We were supposed to have 3 more from a publishing business, but they backed out at the last minute due to some problem with them missing a business deadline.

I wonder what the bootcamp is using for training materials… they don’t break that down on their website.

Hey Willie… If they’re using the Blender Basics book, that explains why the price is so high for the class! (ok… a little self promotion there ;-)