I am absolutely loving this course and having a fantastic time with it! Thank you so much for creating it and making it so incredibly awesome!
I noticed that a fellow student posted a pretty simple, low poly block model to the Q&A area, and mentioned that it took him 1 hour and 45 minutes to create that model. (Ugh!)
That inspired a couple of thoughts:
1 - Make a short video demonstrating how to post questions to the Q&A area and how to post work to the appropriate Discussion area, and include it in the intro section.
I posted a question to the discussion area myself, not realizing that there was a separate Q&A area, because I didn’t find the link to the Q&A area until I was part way into section 3, believe it or not, even though it was right there in front of me the whole time.
2 - Add a challenge for the section 2 wrap up that exercises everything taught so far in as short and sweet a way as possible.
I attempted that same simple block model that that fellow posted, and it took me about 13 minutes on the first try. I think that’s probably because I’ve been pausing the video and just doing exactly the same thing I just watched the instructor do as the lecture was going, so by the time I got to a challenge, I’d already had some experience dealing with the Blender interface, trying to get the same result the instructor was getting as he was getting it. A fair amount of the time, I basically already had the challenges done by the time I got to them.
So just going through a proscribed set of motions really can make an enormous difference. Because you do the thing and you see what happens, and you run into what happens when you don’t do it right and you figure out how to fix what you did wrong. Just getting that much accomplished is more than enough to bite off before going after anything creative at all.
3 - Add an optional “speed modelling” challenge, for people who want to “get fast” at the basics:
Walk through a specific step-by-step method (including specific keystrokes, etc.) of producing the model in the wrap up challenge, and challenge students to repeatedly walk through that script until they can do it in 8 minutes or something like that. And challenge them to come up with their own speed modelling “script” for producing a similar model.
After writing down a keystorke-by-keystroke script for producing that simple block model, and going through it a couple of times, I got it down to 2 minutes and 48 seconds.
So that’s great for that model, but I don’t have to do any editing at all to make that model. I’d really like to have some kind of script like that just helps me practice everything.