A note on tutorials

Hey,

I've been taking a course in Maya this week, and we've basically
created an extremely high poly character of a 12x8 sphere. Quite fun.
I've learn the interface and everything, and learnt plenty in terms of
extruding, clipping, vertex snapping or whatever. But I've already
known how to model for some time, so I wasn't necesarily learning new
techniques. The parts that I've learnt most from though, are when I've
watched the lecturer create his models. It's just amazing, and I've
learnt far more from 3 days of watching him work, than I could have
learnt with a years worth of practise.

I think the same could apply to mapping. Admittedly, it may not be
everyone's cup of tea, but I think it would be a fantastic learning
experience if some of the better mappers here created videos of their
screens as they actually work. Making the transition between amateur
and professional standards is extremely tough, and seeing how more
accomplished mappers approach a particular map would help a lot.

Where are you taking this course?

Oh, and good luck with it! You sound like you know what you're doing.

Harrogate college :smile:

Copy/paste these:

http://www.geocities.com/kingnic2k/images/day1.jpg << Day 1, basic head forming

http://www.geocities.com/kingnic2k/images/day2.jpg << Day 2,
basic body, and the EARS. Jesus CHRIST ears are hard to model.

http://www.geocities.com/kingnic2k/images/day3.jpg << Day 3, Body definition & hands

About to head off to day 4 :smile: I've probably only spent a day or so on
this model, but I've been waiting around for the rest of the class so
it's been done over 3 days...

Ohhh...nice. You go to a college to do modeling? I'm going to college in sept, they don't offer those sort of courses :sad:

KingNic said:
I've been taking a course in Maya this week, and we've basically created an extremely high poly character of a 12x8 sphere.

I can see you've really been paying attention. Is it just me, or are spheres usually the same size in all directions? Or does the 12x8 refer to some other arcane aspect of modelling?

This isn't actually my college - it's just a quick summer course that another college is running. I've been sat on my arse all summer so I just thought, what the heck :smile: . Am doing a Computing course at Leeds College of tech as my main... thingy.

Sumhobo - that means there's 12 divisions in the sphere in one axis, and 8 divisions in the other.

I'm currently working on a model that's gonna feature on the cover of some hot wheels game or something. The teacher here works for a company that's been contracted for it, and the model he recieved was pretty much screwed up. Asked me to sort it out since it's due in tonight and he's teaching all day...

<DIV>Well done, then... sincerely this time. For the teacher to give you that task, you must be doing fairly well.</DIV>
<DIV>On anohter note, I would've thought that something like Maya 5 could handle proper spheres, not just this planar crap.</DIV>
<DIV>.</DIV>
<DIV>Also, nice idea with the demovids. I could probably learn a thing or thousand from the better mappers round here.</DIV>

It does have 'proper' spheres, called NURBS, but you don't get as much control over them. It's much better to make a relatively low poly character and then smooth it over when you're done. That character in those shots is about 4x the polies I've actually designed it with :smile:

If someone would care to point us in the direction of a video making thingummy, and give me broadband and more website bandwidth, then it's worth looking into :smile:

On the modelling module on my course, we did NURBS modelling, with no
regard to polycount. Funnily enough it was run by the computer arts
division as opposed to the computer games tech division. Waste of
bloody time, taught us nothing about game modelling.

Leperous said:
If someone would care to point us in the direction of a video making thingummy, and give me broadband and more website bandwidth, then it's worth looking into :smile:

Yeah that would actually be cool I would exspecially like to see CampaignJunkie and Ferrets videos if they do make them :biggrin:

KingNic said:
Am doing a Computing course at Leeds College of tech as my main... thingy.

Yea, same here, as well as chemistry, media and gcse english :rolleyes:

If someone would care to point us in the direction of a video
making thingummy, and give me broadband and more website bandwidth,
then it's worth looking into :smile:

Remember there were a load of unreal video tutorials floating around? If
someone could find what those were made with, it'd probably do.

what video's crackerjack?
The only video I did in school I animated a 2d version of mario in 3d in maya and put that into a video of me. And mario "followed" my finger and jumped over obstacles ect.

lol you have to make it first silly. Kingnic is suggesting that mappers make a video of them mapping and release it for learning purposes.

Macromedia (Flash makers) sell a program that'll do it for a cheap $499... Capitalist bastards...

Err how do we record VHE movies, then?

You could try http://oss.ipov.org/icord/, or http://taksi.sourceforge.net/

Err, okay, I got iCord... I really have no idea what you people want to see, though. Any ideas for a video tutorial?

EDIT: Okay, iCord officially sucks. Looking for another one right now.

EDIT x 2: CamStudio looks to be a lot better, and was recently sold to
Macromedia I believe. Free version is still floating around though.
http://www.brothersoft.com/Multimedia_Graphics_Screen_Capture_CamStudio_3944.html

iCord is easier if you can figure out the CFG file.

Open it up and set the [v_RESOLUTION] and [v_FPS] to what you want it to be. It's easier that way.

Edit: And taksi won't work with hammer. It's just directX8 and 9

I've done this before with Camtasia, and actually remember creating a thread here suggesting that we have a video section, but Lep shot me down so I gave up. I thought it was pretty cool at the time, but it really boils down to webspace and bandwidth.

Woot, made a crappy little test video. BEHOLD!!

(DivX 5.05 codec required - I would use TechSmith, but CamStudio won't let me. Might consider Bink/Smacker.)

As for recording area: full-screen or limited region? And if so, which
region(s) do you think would be important for learning purposes?

http://snarkpit.com/pits/campaignjunkie/video/vhetest.zip

Full screen would be best I think.

EDIT:: Tha's great. Works under Winamp perfectly. If you do a full one,
remember that it's best to just see how you work normally, not giving
spinning presentations or anything :wink:

Use the program mentioned in one of the tutorials on the site. It can record your screen.

http://www.virtualdub.org/

Didn't work for me... maybe I need new codecs or something.

I think I might have to speed things up x 2 or something for these videos... I map way too slowly! :smile:

Campaignjunkie said:
As for recording area: full-screen or limited region? And if so, which region(s) do you think would be important for learning purposes?

to help keep the filesize down, i'd say use only the screen areas relevent to the tut. if, for instance, it was a tut on texturing, you might only need the 3d texture window and the texture properties box.

maybe use a screen res of 800x600 too.

hmm, maybe thats me had my share of double-posts now

A Flash tutorial would be quite fun perhaps...

Leperous said:
A Flash tutorial would be quite fun perhaps...

and much kinder to your bandwidth?

Well I'm working on making the settings produce small file size +
effective right now. Right now I have it set up to record the area
around my mouse only, as it's not practical to record the whole screen.
Probably end up hosting it on Fileplanet or
something anyway, much like the video tutorials on Polycount.

EDIT: Okay, made a video. Problem is, it's 37 minutes long! and 82 mb.
Looking to make it 2x or 3x as fast with probably less FPS, but need
some decent (free) video editing software. Probably wasn't worth it,
but eh, I'm fortunately quite bored. :smile:

What toic was the video on mate?

If you are using an MPEG compression format (like DivX) it shouldn't matter too much how much of the screen you record. Only things that change will add appreciably to the file size, so showing just the area around the mouse wouldn't make that much difference would it?

oops

www.virtualdub.org is your best bet for AVI compression and encoding, as well as getting screenshots from images and doing a bit of video editing with new filters and effects.