Tutorial

[antoine]

ctdabomb is working on an article for Blender Art Magazine and Hiker suggested basing a tutorial(s) on it. The article is included as an attachment. Read it and let's talk about what a series of tutorials would look like.

These quotes are From the other post:

This article would be a very good start for a tutorial ... but imho a tutorial should just be on the wiki (easier to make sure everyone has an up-to-date version of it, and to cooperate with more people).

You also support the article for Blender Art, right? Because to make talented Blender artists aware of the cool tools STK has made, they have to actually come in contact with them. The article can state plainly that as Blender APIs continue to change, it is necessary to update the scripts. We can then provide a link to the wiki tutorials and script downloads which should always be current. It would be nice to have the tutorial series also finished by the article's submission deadline.

Perhaps splitting this into several pages/tutorials

Good idea. The audience reading the wiki may not be proficient with blender, so smaller chunks with a specific purpose would be less intimidating. People can feel like they've accomplished something as they work their way through each tutorial and this will help them persevere to completion. We could also give them encouragement at the end of each tutorial. I can help out with this project.

Ideally this would be written while actually designing a track - so we could include the full result at the end.

That's a much larger project and could slow the process down. Let's write it now, while there is momentum, and then ask a level designer to take pictures during their design process and retrofit those new images into the tutorials.

I assume tracks take a while to complete? Is there a level designer willing start work on a new level ASAP?

[ctdabomb]

don't pay that much attention to my article, I basic copied stuff from the wiki and pasted it into open office, resulting in a confusing long messy article. I was not planning on actually finishing this, but if people really want me to, I can redo it and make it decent.

about splitting it into parts, I think that would be nice, but the way that the issues of the magazine are spaced out, I don't think we should do that. and I don't think that the difficulty of this tutorial would be too difficult for people reading this.

maybe I will take another whack at making it :P

[heyda]

How can we make a better cooperate editing? What do you think about the wiki to let people contribute?
Or when more features needed/easier to use, what about Google Docs/Etherpad?

I like your intention to do the start But maybe we need to ask BlenderArtMagazine first, how much space we get and as you said if we might need to splitup into more tutorials. Maybe the first one only about cars (as they have less details and the designers might get introduced to the Blender STKaddon in this first step)?

I remember that they had very specific restrictions on screenshots etc. to protect their cooperate design: http://blenderart.org/contribute/
The next topic is "Imagine the Possibilities". Not sure if STK would fit into that one?

A idea list and a distilled table of contents sounds a good point to get the raw outline?

[hiker]

How can we make a better cooperate editing? What do you think about the wiki to let people contribute?

I think wiki would be a good platform for the tutorial.

Or when more features needed/easier to use, what about Google Docs/Etherpad?

That might be better for the article, at least when getting closer to the end.

I like your intention to do the start But maybe we need to ask BlenderArtMagazine first, how much space we get and as you said if we might need to splitup into more tutorials.

This sounds like you would want to publish the tutorial in the BlenderArtMagazine? I don't think they would be interested in a tutorial about a game, since their focus is blender. So imho the article and a good tutorial should be two completely different things.

Maybe the first one only about cars (as they have less details and the designers might get introduced to the Blender STKaddon in this first step)?

Even karts should be split in at least two parts: first creating the kart etc., then the animations. After all you can be perfectly happy with driving a kart without any animations in STK, so we can easily provide a first success early on.

I remember that they had very specific restrictions on screenshots etc. to protect their cooperate design: http://blenderart.org/contribute/
The next topic is "Imagine the Possibilities". Not sure if STK would fit into that one?

Not as a tutorial. The possibility of using blender as a all-in-one art pipeline might be interesting. From their web page:

In this issue we are going to look at your personal projects and goals for 2013. What do you hope to learn or accomplish with blender this year.

We could fit into that by saying that we want that many people will be using blender to create tracks for STK. Or perhaps 'Using blender to get more animated tracks' or so.

What about asking them?

Cheers,
Joerg

[antoine]

Guys, this is the thread for discussing the wiki tutorial(s), not the Blender Art Magazine article. I should have created two threads, sorry. It is getting confusing about which one people are talking about. I'm creating a new thread for discussion about the article.

[heyda]

Oh sorry, I missed that you splitted it into 2 different things.