Written tutorials are making a strong comeback these days. Here's an excellent one on creating a beautiful still live by CG Tuts+.
Karan Shah writes:
Today, we’ll have a brief introduction to Blender’s new rendering engine – Cycles. This tutorial will cover modeling a small and easy still life scene, setting up different types of materials used in cycles and then finally lighting and rendering the scene.
Link
6 Comments
Written tutorials have the clear advantage for the somewhat experienced users that they can scan and focus on the parts that are new to them. They need to be quite well written though to leave nothing to guess.
This one does it right.
Fixed that for you.
Those are some pretty nice results. I'll check it out.
And yeah, written tutorials have been making a comeback lately, to my delight. I really love tutorials in the format of video, but sometimes I just want a written tutorial with large pictures with mark-up on them.
I'm also glad they are making a comeback. I don't have a lot of time to first watch a video and then try to redo it in blender. I like being able to skim a tutorial and if it looks promising then I can take the time to work my way through it, or skip to the parts I need to work on.
Nice to see a simple exmaple for noobs to follow for Cycles, even though I've used Cycles a lot myself I wasn't aware of the Sky-Texture option - so yeah, even us longer term users can gleam something from time to time.
I've recently in last year or so got used to video tutorials, like 'em, but used to hate them! esp when I didn't have much badwidth. They're also easier to save to you hard drive. - Every tutorial over the last few years I've liked, I've downloaded to refer back to if necassary.
I guess though that video tutorials do help in other ways, one way it's nice to see others making mistakes, makes you feel a lot better about your own progress ;)
CG Tuts+ has written there "Intermediate level". Actually - this tut looks almost 100% like a beginner level tut.
Nothing fancy, nothing tricky - it tells where to find all needed buttons and other UI things. The setup is very simple - I've seen no layer passes, no experimental materials...
Yeah, it's good but not "wow!"