Creating the grid and the end of tutorials

Well, it's certainly been a long time since my last video. Here's the first part of the tutorial that accompanies it:

I had actually planned on stopping doing tutorials, or at least 'ramping down'. I got a job in November (unfortunately not related to 3D or graphics), so my spare time is a little more precious now.

In the past year, without realising it, the effects I make have steadily becoming more complex as I attempt more ambitious ideas. I think it's natural that that should happen but it means the tutorials have become a lot longer to accommodate all the extra processes and all of this has started to take up a great deal of my time. The effects have gone from taking a few days to complete to needing about a week, mainly of troubleshooting, and the tutorials have steadily crept up to the 1hr mark (edited down from 1hr 40min of recorded material).

Because of this I've actually done very few modelling projects in the past year and for someone who wants to be a 3D modeller, this isn't great. So, all my time has to be focused on modelling now and tutorials have to take a back seat for the minute. This isn't the end of the tutorials, but certainly they can't be a priority any more and this tutorial marks the end of any frequent videos.

Knowing that this would be the last tutorial and frankly, looking forward to getting it out of the way so I could continue modelling, I certainly hadn't bargained on this being the most complex tutorial I've ever done. Longer, harder ideas to explain, harder to edit, everything was more complex. And it took a whole lot of time to complete.

Turns out explaining programming is pretty difficult, some of the concepts start to seem a bit abstract when you sit down and try to explain them so I had to create extra graphics to try and visually explain them and extra annotations for things I'd simply forgotten to mention. Suffice to say that with all this added up, the tutorial was long enough that it seemed beneficial to split it up, so this video is part 1 of 4, each to be released weekly.

It's a shame, because I like coming up with projects for tutorials, I even started thinking about the next project I wanted to do. But, like I said, that has to take a back seat. If I get some time to work on it, which I hope I do, then great.

Ray.