I wanted to provide a place for anyone and everyone to comment on the website or offer suggestions. This is the place. Let me know what you like or don’t like, or if you have any questions or suggestions drop me a note here. This site uses Wordpress as a CMS and is hosted at bluehost.com.
This entry was posted on Monday, July 23rd, 2007 at 12:08 pm and is filed under Web Site. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
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Thoughts on the video:
- I really enjoyed the video. I thought it was very thorough. Maybe shorten the intro a little.
Main Comment:
- Hi, my name is DukeProtocol (weird, I know). I’ve been using Blender on and off the last 2 years. After reading every single post and comment, I realized that this site is something that I was thinking of creating for a while myself. I have hundreds of links in my Blender folder in Bookmarks and about 5 gigs of video tutorials. I plan to soon read/watch every single one and convert some of the written ones into video tutorials and maybe even create some original ones. When I do I suppose I’ll contact you and see if my tutorials are BlenderUnderground worthy.
Suggestions:
- I have used (link)CamStudio before and I think it’s as good as any commercial recorder. It’s great for making tutorials, try it.
- I think you should also do tutorials on software that goes hand-in-hand with Blender like the GIMP. Especially since video tutorials for the GIMP are such a niche, currently.
- Have you thought of using (link)OSDHotKey to show key-strokes?
- I think 640×480 would probably be a sufficient size as compared to 800×600, just to reduce file size.
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protocol.110mb.com
July 23rd, 2007 at 5:15 pm
Hey DukeProtocol,
Thanks for the thoughtful comments.
I’ll look forward to seeing them. Get in touch and I’ll check ‘em out.
I actually used Camstudio for this tutorial, and it worked great.
I hope to do exactly that at some point. I may do some Photoshop tutorials down the road, but I also want to learn GIMP and it would be nice to do some tutorials for that as well. I would even like to do a feature comparison between the two just for fun.
I haven’t even heard of it, but when I get time I’ll check it out. The advantage would be saving time. The way I do it now (manually) gives me alot of control and flexibility, but it takes awhile to do it. Part 1 had over 100 overlays for UI and keystrokes, and it took hours.
I might try adding a lower res version, but to record at 640×480 is difficult, because it doesn’t give alot of screen space to work in. I may try downsampling the full res version and see how it looks.
Thanks again for the suggestions, and welcome to Blender Underground
July 23rd, 2007 at 10:14 pm
Great website. I look forward to seeing more of your very professionally produced video tutorials. I don’t think you need to do any for photoshop. Tutorials are everywhere for that. GIMP, definitely. And maybe Inkscape too.
Can you add a link to blenderuser.co.uk for the british blender users?
Keep it up, man. It’s great stuff.
July 24th, 2007 at 3:55 am
Check out this post from my blog. http://protocol.110mb.com/blog/?p=11
It’s about a video converter I use. You can record a video in standard 800×600 and then use it to experiment with different settings to see which size and bitrate is best for tutorials. E-mail me if you have any questions about it.
July 24th, 2007 at 10:49 am
DaveC, thanks!
Hopefully Blender Basics Part 2 will be up in a couple of days. I don’t think the script is quite as good as Part 1, but it should still be a decent tute.
I wanted to do the Photoshop tutorials for fun, and because I know it pretty well. I also thought that attracting Photoshop visitors to the site might introduce a few people to Blender.
I want to do GIMP tutes, but I need to take the time to learn it, and I have a lot of different things going on. I have a hard time putting it high on the list since I already have so much time invested in Photoshizzle.
One thing I thought would be interesting at one point is a post/discussion about Photoshop and GIMP. I understand that there are some things GIMP does a little better, and it would be fun to compare them; not as a contest really, but just to get an idea about the strengths/weaknesses of the two.
Inkscape would be interesting. I spent a couple of days with it, going through the written tutorials, and it would be valuable to have video tutorials. I’ve forgotten most of what I’ve learned about Inkscape since I haven’t used it too much, but it wouldn’t be any trouble to get back up to speed.
Done. Welcome to Blender Underground.
July 24th, 2007 at 1:57 pm
Duke,
Yeah I noticed WinFF last night when I was poking around in your blog a little. Just DL’d it now, and I’ll do some experimenting when I finish Blender Basics Part 2. Thanks for that. I might be able to get away with a slightly lower bit rate with h264 encoding, but I’ll have to mess around with the settings.
July 24th, 2007 at 2:06 pm
Another idea I forgot to menition was a Graphix Dictionary. I think it would be especially helpful to newbies and some beginner-intermediate level users who don’t know all of the graphics related jargon. I remember when I first started using Blender I had no idea what was a normal map, an alpha channel, and what did UV in UV unwrapping stand for?
Just something that can be looked at quickly for reference instead of watching every single tutorial out there and asking the same question on BlenderArtists for the 500th time.
July 24th, 2007 at 3:42 pm
Sorry to bombard your site with posts, but I forgot to mention 1 more idea. Have you thought of using a video hosting site like MetaCafe or Viddler along with the choice to download the video? Some people like me like to have a video for future reference, but some people like to see the video without waiting for it to download all the 136MB way.
I brought Viddler because it accepts a variety of formats and has a 500MB limit so quality will be preserved. And I mention MetaCafe because of the producer rewards system, i.e. for every 1,000 after 20,000 you get 5$ from MetaCafe, although maybe 21,000+ views might be hard to attain.
July 24th, 2007 at 5:47 pm
Duke,
A lexicon is a good idea. It would be a great resource for Blender Underground. If I understand you correctly, it might be something like this:
Is this what you meant?
July 24th, 2007 at 5:50 pm
Yes, exactly. Some, I hope most, definitions will have a pic or a video link beside them to demonstrate the definition.
July 24th, 2007 at 6:24 pm
I like the website… but you could improve the header graphic…Anyway you have spent your time to make a descent video tutorial…I think its worth making a better header graphic.. Make some kind of character(mascot)…
I hope to see some tutorials on good modeling tutorials…(There is a sticky thread in blenderartists.org in the modeling section named Poles and edge loop.please have a look).
July 24th, 2007 at 9:51 pm
fazil,
Thanks for the feedback. My artistic skills are somewhat limited, so it will have to do for now. After the Blender Basics series, we’ll just have to see where it all goes. Welcome to Blender Underground.
The short term goal is to provide instruction on how to use Blender, but perhaps we’ll branch out from there into good modeling practice. Keep checking back, eventually we may get a better header graphic. It’s something to look forward to. If I were to start with a great header, what would be left to improve upon? =D
A mascot is a good idea, I’ll give it some thought.
July 25th, 2007 at 12:08 am
I’ve just started using Blender 2.44, as a newbie to 3D graphics video tutorials rule, and the best tuts I’ve seen so far are coming from HERE! Keep up the great work! Impressive, most impressive …
Paul Rosk
July 28th, 2007 at 9:18 am
Paul,
I appreciate that. Blender Underground is contributing to a fine tradition of video tutorials begun by others. Welcome to Blender Underground!
July 28th, 2007 at 1:04 pm
In CamStudio, what codec do you use to record and at what settings? Do you do any conversion afterward?
August 1st, 2007 at 10:23 pm
Hey Duke,
I’m using the CamStudio Lossless codec v1.0, at quality 100. I’m using GZIP compression at a level of 3. LZO is recommended for screen capture because it’s fast, but I haven’t noticed any problems on my machine with GZIP.
I have the framerate settings at 100ms/10fps, the Auto Adjust setting is checked. I capture at 800×600.
My audio options are 22.05kHz stereo 16 bit, PCM. Interleave is set at 100ms, and MCI recording is checked.
For my purposes I edit the files in Premier Pro and then add screens and overlays in After Effects, but this step isn’t necessary. Next I render back out to CamStudio Lossless from After Effects. The final step is to convert to XviD with VirtualDub using a 250kbps setting and audio to MP3 56kb stereo.
I may change the audio settings to mono for future recording, but I’ll have to fiddle with it to make sure the audio quality is decent.
Hope this helps. Let me know if you have more questions, I can give more details if necessary. The Premier Pro and AE steps are basically irrelevant to the process because I just render back out to CamStudio lossless at the same settings, so the video is the same format that it started at. My audio conversion process is a little wacky right now, I need to perfect how I handle it. Basically I need a better MP3 codec to have more format options.
August 2nd, 2007 at 12:38 am
Hey Apollos, I tried your setup, it looks good. The sound quality is much better, but now you hear too much like my lip smacks, ewww.
One problem I have is that the text looks kind of blurry on the buttons, it is readable, but just not very sharp. What’s your screen resolution? I have a widescreen 1440×900 (16:10) and I convert to 800×500.
About the noise problem, I think it might be the AC unit in the room next to me (I’m living upstairs at my house). I think I could reduce it by lowering the recording volume of my mic and then playing back the video at a louder volume (lazy way) or extract audio and boost it in Audacity and mix it back (too hard way). But, if you just listen at about 20-25% volume I think it’s not so bad.
I redid the SGI tutorial so that the sound is perfectly synched. And I’m still waiting on Technomono.
I think what we can do is. I’ll put the tutorials on my site and you can just link to them. So that it’s a user submitted tutorial, but you are not liable for anything I do. Does that sound good?
August 2nd, 2007 at 7:54 am
Hey Duke,
I don’t even mind hosting them, I just need to make clear who’s they are, who’s content it is, which is why I was thinking of a submitted tutorials category or something. If linking works better for your purposes, I’m happy to do it too; I’m just glad you’re doing it either way.
My setup picks up the lip smacks too. Ewww. I try to be very conscious of it when I’m recording, but it still comes through so I end up editing it out either in Premier Pro or Audition. Audacity would work great for such a purpose.
My Blender setup is 800×600, which is tight, but it gives an absolutely non-interpolated final result. I start Blender this way: blender.exe -p 0 448 802 602. It’s kind of weird, but the 0 is sets the left side of the window and the 448 sets the bottom. This will be your vertical screen resolution minus the height of the blender window. My vertical res is 1050, minus 602, equals 448. The result is that my Blender window is top left corner of my screen. Note that the size of the window does not include the window title bar.
By the way there’s a tutorial on blender.org that helps with some of this: Making a Video Tutorial in Windows
I use 802 and 602 just to give me a borderless result when I capture. If the blender window is 800×600, sometimes you end up with a window edge a pixel or two wide.
My CamStudio region preferences are set to fixed, left 5, top 34, width 800, height 600.
About the noise, sometimes you can’t help having some. If you listen to the Blender Basics tutes, you can hear teh st00pid fan from my laptop.
August 2nd, 2007 at 11:26 am
Ok, thanks for the setup info. And I was wondering what that whirring in background was. I was actually able to pickup on where you paused the video because one sec it would be at a high RPM and the next it’d be silent.
August 2nd, 2007 at 11:33 am
I watched your Blender Tutorial Part 1 last night. It´s amazing! I´m a blender Newbie (learned the 3d-basics with the Maya Personal Edition before). I finally chose blender as my 3d-Application, after learning and testing Maya, XSI and a bit ligthwave. I also bought some tutorials from Digital Tutors and Gnomonworkshop in the last 2-3 years, when i started .
The quality of your tutorials is at least equal than to the others Really great stuff!
I don´t think, that there are better video tutorials out there for blender than yours.
So please keep going on.
Best greetings
Michael
August 3rd, 2007 at 6:20 am
Michael,
Thanks! Welcome to Blender Underground. I plan on going on until they make me stop.
August 3rd, 2007 at 8:53 pm
I added the “subscribe to comments” plugin to wordpress, but it doesn’t seem to be working.
If anyone notices the subscribe checkbox floating around on a page somewhere, drop a comment and let me know where you see it and what browser you’re using.
August 3rd, 2007 at 11:51 pm
Look 500px below your post (courtesy of Screen Ruler). The box is right under the Preview button, it just doesn’t have any text with it. I’m using Opera 9.22.
How is the subscribe to comments different from the Comment RSS?
August 4th, 2007 at 7:18 am
Thanks Duke, it doesn’t show up for me (firefox) and I couldn’t see it in IE either.
The only difference between subscribe and comments RSS is subscribe sends you email notification if a post that you’re subscribed to gets a comment update. It’s supposed to let you control which posts you want notifications for, kind of like how it works on Blender Nation.
August 4th, 2007 at 1:37 pm
Apollos —
Great tutorials! I’ve been using Blender for a couple years but it was still worth watching the series to review the basics — and to pick up on a bunch of things that I had missed when I was learning!
Keep it up —
— Fred
August 24th, 2007 at 6:21 pm
Hey thanks goldrich! Welcome to Blender Underground.
August 24th, 2007 at 10:26 pm