kaveh, you are exactly right. Time saved = time saved. If I can shave even 10% off of the time it takes to produce a good quality tutorial, it’s worth it. The time it actually takes to produce each hour of tutorial is substantial. If I were paid $25 per hour spent on each tutorial, I would have made…a lot.

I do have one problem with you, though. All this sticking it to “the man” business is just not going to work.

YOU ARE THE MAN!

You are very kind. Rest assured, my top priority is that people are learning, so if that is the case with you and yours, I couldn’t be happier!

kaveh’s point is well-taken however. The more time spent laboring on details, the fewer tutorials produced. I need to find a balance, and if it works out that I’m able to continue past the Basics series (I certainly plan on it) then effort spent saving time but keeping the quality high is worth it.

I certainly don’t intend on mass-producing these, but I need to find clever ways of reducing production time and keeping that “Apollos Production” feel.

If you were to stop doing it the same way, it somehow wouldn’t be an “Apollos Production”. Sure, there are many tools that can produce good content, but nothing beats the hand-made in quality and respect. Things that are hand-made usually are far more coveted than mass produced goods partly because we know it is one of a kind and there will be nothing exactly like it again. Another part that adds to the hand-made mystique is the amount of mass produced goods these days makes finding hand-made items a rarity and something to treasure.

I have shared these with friends (and pointed them to this site) who had no idea Blender existed much less someone willing to share their knowledge about it. I, for example, only picked up Blender about two weeks before stumbling onto this site (a link in Blender Nation to your tutorial). I tried desperately to use other tutorials but it just wasn’t sinking in. These hit home with me and I still use them to this day. Please, don’t ever let anyone talk you out of your current formatting since I can say that to a great extent, it is the formatting of them that makes these work for me.

If nobody else appreciates these, rest assured that I always will!

There are such utilities, and a few have been recommended by readers.

However I can’t seem to let go of the control I get by doing it manually; I feel I get several advantages:

First, I can customize certain overlays, like making ESCAPE read: “Cancel Cut” or “Cancel Move” depending on the situation.

Second, I can use a custom graphic that fits within Blender’s interface nicely.

Third, I can control the location of the overlay on a case by case basis, so they don’t block action or key interface elements.

Fourth, I can choose which keystrokes to show and when. For instance, in Part 3, I’m beginning to limit the amount of times I display “Move Object: G” or “Edit Mode: TAB” since they are used often, and are already familiar.

Fifth, they aren’t baked onto the video, so I have the option of changing them in any of the ways listed above.

None of these items is singularly important, really. I just appreciate the flexibility I get, and the quality of the manual method is terrific. However, it is a lot of work and I may opt for an automatic method eventually. Perhaps after the Blender Basics series is complete I can change the style without feeling weird about it.

It may also be that there is a utility for PC that does most (or all) of what I list above, I just haven’t spent very much effort looking. All these manual overlays are taking too much time