On Why too much help stunts your growth
polycounter lvl 19
I often get asked for help and how to's, can I give advice on portfolios, where did I learn, can I point to tutorials, what are my tips and tricks. In essence, it sometimes feels like people think I can be some sort of mentoring figure to them and that this will actually help them progress faster!!
This is a mistake.
Not simply because I'm am a grumpy Scotsman with a short fuse in regard to 'young folk' who are expecting me to give up time with my daughters and my own artistic dreams to help further theirs...
No.
It's because too much help stunts our growth as an artist.
Heres the rub. I can tell you how to do something, I can tell you why to do it a specific way, and you might even understand a little. You will no doubt have questions as to why I do A when I could do B and B seems quicker and I can explain that doing A avoids the problem of C,D,E occuring down the line.
The real problem with this is that you learn another persons workflow without understanding why it works. Its like an unfinished sentence, such as 'I went to the store to get a product BECAUSE I needed it to replace the one I had'.
When you are told what to do in order to avoid mistakes you miss out on learning why, you lose the word BECAUSE from your sentences.
This means you are further away from creating your own workflow, from coming up with your own solutions to problems, because you don't fully understand the problems because you never experienced them, because I or someone else helped you avoid them!!
You need to make mistakes, you need to fall on your face and learn how to pick yourself back up, we have no choice about how we fall, we only get to choose how to get back up, whether we will or not, whether we will need someone else to do it for us.
It's like parenting, mothers want to catch their kid before they fall, fathers want them to fall so them learn to be careful. I'm generalizing about the fundamental nature of the masculine and feminine philosophy of parenting, the notion that mothers teach their kids how the world should be and fathers teach their children how the world is. Of course the roles change in each relationship...
The point is, you need to get your hands dirty, you need to understand why things break and the ways in which they do so in order to come up with your own solutions to these problems. It's all about dirty hands, thats what experience is, experience is what makes you a better artist, leveraged greater pay and so on and you don't get it by borrowing another persons experience because it will hold you back more than push you forward.
When I first started hipoly modeling here, I knew nothing, I read no tutorials, I had to just get in there and screw up, which I did, often, in spectacular fashion for a good while. Now before I started, I was lucky enough to have the heavyweight hipoly guys here in the office show me some stuff first, Kevin and Danny took an hour each to show us noobs a few tricks.
They explained they did A to avoid B, edge constrains, turbosmooth over nurms, ffd modification of a plane followed by shelling and edge constraints... stuff like that and it was impressive and useless to us because none of us noobs knew why that way worked well because we didn't know the ways in which the alternatives worked badly!
So when I had time to screw up on my own, I got to learn much more quickly and the same is true for everyone. It's good to have feedback, feedback is great, the more points of view you can get, while still of course staying true to your own vision, all the better... and thats what we have polycount, zbrush, cg talk and so on ... dozens of editing communities, take your pick, its all there for us.
Sometimes, the best help we can truly get and share is inspiration, simply showing , sharing and seeing what is possible. Honestly, what helped me most, besides screwing up a lot I mean, was simply seeing what was possible, getting a look at the wireframes... of course that made me shite myself, but it gave me a yardstick, the rest was up to me.
Its your sweat that will take you there, if you rely on anothers then you are helped short term and screwed long term. Again the parenting analogy demonstrates that if you let your kids learn to pick themselves up after a fall then they learn self reliance, if you catch them, they learn to need caught!
It's ok to fall down.
This is a mistake.
Not simply because I'm am a grumpy Scotsman with a short fuse in regard to 'young folk' who are expecting me to give up time with my daughters and my own artistic dreams to help further theirs...
No.
It's because too much help stunts our growth as an artist.
Heres the rub. I can tell you how to do something, I can tell you why to do it a specific way, and you might even understand a little. You will no doubt have questions as to why I do A when I could do B and B seems quicker and I can explain that doing A avoids the problem of C,D,E occuring down the line.
The real problem with this is that you learn another persons workflow without understanding why it works. Its like an unfinished sentence, such as 'I went to the store to get a product BECAUSE I needed it to replace the one I had'.
When you are told what to do in order to avoid mistakes you miss out on learning why, you lose the word BECAUSE from your sentences.
This means you are further away from creating your own workflow, from coming up with your own solutions to problems, because you don't fully understand the problems because you never experienced them, because I or someone else helped you avoid them!!
You need to make mistakes, you need to fall on your face and learn how to pick yourself back up, we have no choice about how we fall, we only get to choose how to get back up, whether we will or not, whether we will need someone else to do it for us.
It's like parenting, mothers want to catch their kid before they fall, fathers want them to fall so them learn to be careful. I'm generalizing about the fundamental nature of the masculine and feminine philosophy of parenting, the notion that mothers teach their kids how the world should be and fathers teach their children how the world is. Of course the roles change in each relationship...
The point is, you need to get your hands dirty, you need to understand why things break and the ways in which they do so in order to come up with your own solutions to these problems. It's all about dirty hands, thats what experience is, experience is what makes you a better artist, leveraged greater pay and so on and you don't get it by borrowing another persons experience because it will hold you back more than push you forward.
When I first started hipoly modeling here, I knew nothing, I read no tutorials, I had to just get in there and screw up, which I did, often, in spectacular fashion for a good while. Now before I started, I was lucky enough to have the heavyweight hipoly guys here in the office show me some stuff first, Kevin and Danny took an hour each to show us noobs a few tricks.
They explained they did A to avoid B, edge constrains, turbosmooth over nurms, ffd modification of a plane followed by shelling and edge constraints... stuff like that and it was impressive and useless to us because none of us noobs knew why that way worked well because we didn't know the ways in which the alternatives worked badly!
So when I had time to screw up on my own, I got to learn much more quickly and the same is true for everyone. It's good to have feedback, feedback is great, the more points of view you can get, while still of course staying true to your own vision, all the better... and thats what we have polycount, zbrush, cg talk and so on ... dozens of editing communities, take your pick, its all there for us.
Sometimes, the best help we can truly get and share is inspiration, simply showing , sharing and seeing what is possible. Honestly, what helped me most, besides screwing up a lot I mean, was simply seeing what was possible, getting a look at the wireframes... of course that made me shite myself, but it gave me a yardstick, the rest was up to me.
Its your sweat that will take you there, if you rely on anothers then you are helped short term and screwed long term. Again the parenting analogy demonstrates that if you let your kids learn to pick themselves up after a fall then they learn self reliance, if you catch them, they learn to need caught!
It's ok to fall down.
Replies
There is a great line between help and actual learning. Words and guidance can only express so much, it is ultimately failure and persevering that really sets folks out. That's where I find so much inspiration, folks who are better than me or contain a unique style that I want to pick up on.
It goes without saying though that this industry has some of the most caring and finest individuals that really do go above and beyond to help others.
At the same time its folks like you that really spark inspiration and you can't blame others for wanting to learn from you
joking aside i agree, I just spent 2 weeks struggling to understand why my bakes were looking crap and as much as tutorials can help I tried 5 different methods to build a particular kind of model and arrived at the best way to do the model and bake it myself.
"If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants." - Isaac Newton
There is a difference between showing and enlightening.
this seems to be something that's been on your mind for quite sometime Kevin hope i didnt unleash it haha
A. Teaching a method
What I dont think is particularly useful is when people ask for very specific thingss like "I need a tutorial to model rocks" or "I need a tutorial to paint wood" or "how do i bake a normal map for <insert oddly specific item>". These sort of things I feel have very little value, as the user is just learning a few very specific things related to a very narrow goal.
B. Teaching a mentality
Whenever I give advice or write up mini tutorials and such, I like to try and always do so in general terms, that will apply to a vast array of situations. Whenver someone asks me "how do I bake XXX shape" I always try to first teach the basics of how baking works, normal direction, etc etc. And when someone asks "how do I paint XXX material" I always try to explain that the important part is studying reference and material properties, not following a tutorial or workflow catered to the specific material.
So for the first type, I really agree. However, when we come to teach concepts that can become a foundry for a workflow, not just "tips n tricks" I think its entirely different, and of very much use.
Frustration because I've been exhaustive in how much I've 'enlightened' and shared in each thread where I've shown my work or commented on others work. I have always had issues with people viewing that as an invitation to directly come to me and say ' give me more'.
If you want to stand on a giants shoulders, well go find one, that shits uncomfortable for us regular folk... oh and newton was quoting someone else
The first few chapters speaks to character and environment artists just as well as it does animators. It underscores one of their key principles that drives the school, and is a core factor in artists success. Its not about what buttons to push, or what tutorials to follow or what scripts to download its about learning to observe, recreate and expand on what is all around us. Observing a tutorial and doing a bit of monkey see monkey do is not the same as actual observation. It often puts off developing that skill, and its one of the reasons you see people complain after putting in 3-4 years, "I know how to work the apps but what I make is crap!? WHY!?" Observation.
It's a skill that can be hinted at and nurtured but if it doesn't grow naturally the artist will stall out and never hit the point that they can stand on their own, they'll always be relaying on other people and tutorials for MORE!!!
Fuck the tutorials, fuck the tips and tricks, learn to observe and have empathy for the objects and people around you and you'll unlock an entire skill set that you never knew you had.
In another book I read it was put this way:
What do you see?
A fire hydrant?
Wrong, what do you see?
A dog peeing on a fire hydrant?
That's getting closer... what do you see?
I don't know!!! Why don't you tell me!?
I can't, because you won't see it even if I do tell you, now draw it and maybe you'll see what you aren't seeing.
Granted the guy was making a case for why artists shouldn't help each other, "only the strong survive" which I think is an extreme view and flawed but it was a good point. Observation is best learned when heavily practiced. Relaying on others for their skill is just delaying the development of that critical skill.
It's one of the reason I stick to mostly to critiquing newbie work, (that and I'm only slightly more qualified to offer them help ha!) With a few helpful insights they will either start to see it or they won't. If they can see it and they can start to find things on their own then its going to have a profound impact on their work and suddenly, they'll be asking for a lot less help and making huge improvements.
A good community will be a few pros hanging around the bar in a bowling alley, offering a few tips when they think they'll help the person.
A good community isn't the bumper lane where the gutter is lined full of tutorials aimed at being a crutch for the person who can't keep the ball out of the gutter. A good community will often tell the artists whoever they are, its good but you can do better, push it.
I love a community that has balls and will stand up and say "you know what, I probably can't do better than this right now, but I know you can". Just rolling over and licking someones balls is all fine and good, everyone likes that, but ultimately it isn't useful to anyone especially the artist who seems to be at the top of their career. Guess what everyone is at the top of their career, that is why we always keep pushing forward. Even those that look like they've "arrived" still have places they need to go. If you can nudge them toward that goal, then the community services everyone's needs. But also be wise with what you say... talking down to someone who can wipe the floor with you isn't a good idea... trust me on that... be real with your skill and don't talk nonsense.
With all that said I do like helping people out and seeing that ah-ha moment kick on and they take off running.
Long post short: "Observation mother f*cker, do you see it!?"
True story!
Everywhere I read posts of Vig, I keep thinking.. I need a sign that says, "I'm with Vig ^"
Great write ups though, learning things the hard way is awesome.
A mans reach should exceed his grasp or whats a heaven for
Mark: Interesting story, Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes was inspired by his professor at medical university who used to mess with new students by showing them a beaker full of nasty stuff, he would dip his finger in, put a finger in his mouth to taste and tell them to do the same as he had done.
They would, they would nearly retch and yet he was fine.
Then he would explain that if they had paid attention they would have noticed the finger he dipped was a different finger than the one he sucked on.
He used to say ' you see , but you do not observe'...
Also, theres a meditative doctrine I read about once called the White fury where they have to practise the art of a total description, a full observation in order to understand the paradox of the statement ' I am ' and then dwell on that truth.
The point being, a chair is not a chair, it is a wooden construction by a carpenter designed for sitting our arses on that was previously an acorn that grew into a large enough tree to be cut and carved. Everyone makes the mistake of calling it a chair, so if we can't even understand what a chair is, how can we understand what we are?
If that was the case, i don't think people could even use normal maps and all the fancy stuff.
I agree that people shouldn't come to you by mail. At my poor level, i already had tons of questions because i had an item included in TF2. And well, I DON'T HAVE TIME.
But, just put the limits, politely.
Now i also find a bit sad that everyone seems to do the same thing because of very close worflows and idea on how things should look like. But sharing workflows makes everyone progress faster, oh yeah.
if you haven' t got the time make the time, because thas how average artists become top notch.
I remember one art teacher who liked to do total descriptions way back in high school, I thought she was off her rocker but after it was all said and done I learned so much from her freaky and cryptic ways. I still think back on some of the stuff we did in her classes and think "What The Hell Miss A!?" I'm sure I'll do something that will make that stuff click but I'm not there yet or she was just crazy insane those days.
It's awesome how much things that seem totally unrelated to art end up relating. Take the scientific method and apply it to art and problems artists face and suddenly its not some stuffy BS someone made you write a paper on in grade school, but its a frame work to deal with those "oh shit" mountains that pop up.
When you get an answer to a specific problem you get a tiny window into a much bigger conversation. If you take the whole thing in, your better off than just learning which switch to flip. Which is why you'll see people point to long threads with a lot of back and forth, rather than just blurt out an answer.
So many people seem to stall out and just stare at the mountain with seeminly no tools available to scale it. They probably have those tools they just don't realize it. It's being able to identify those tools and deploy them that helps the person take that first step.
Honestly sometimes I think people are more scared of trying and failing than they are pinched for time...
Sometimes people don't have an art problem or a technical hurtle, but lack of problem solving skills. Others who have come at those problems and attacked them can suggest ways to try but honestly finding out WHY certain things don't work is more valuable than finding out which rocks are sinkers and which are floaters.
It's kind of a "give a man a fish..." thing. People post helpful stuff in hopes that others learn to fish.
1. open 3d app
2. model an effing tree
The more VIDEO tutorials WITH audio, the more people show you how to do things, the more you will get done and know how to do.
No one ever taught themselves the ABC, how to count to ten, or the capitals of the 50 states - someone had to show them.
People who learn things on their own make many mistakes and work inefficiently.
The more people teach, the better.
A forum is a place to ask things - if a person is too high to answer, I don't want their answer, but they don't really belong here anyway.
ESPECIALLY in this line of creativity there is rarely ever a way to try on your own and you need someone else to tell you what is going on in a given workflow or whatever.
I fully disagree and this attitude is exactly why things are so closed and weird, in both the professional setting, and the open source setting. Help each other, or you suck. Go above and beyond to answer even the dumbest or easiest questions, or you're a pathetic prick who really just doesn't want to help and as such doesn't belong on a forum anyway.
I don't care if a person wants to know how to drag out a CUBE. I will still tell them. Because I am a helpful person and I recognize questions as desires to learn.
In the simplest way I can put it; If you can't teach someone something quickly and easily and have them fully understand, then either of two things are true:
1: they are retarded.
or
2: You do not understand your own advice.
The only possible way someone still doesn't see what you show them is if you yourself fail to explain it, or if they themselves fail at comprehending it.
And forums are for help - no matter how small = you're in the wrong place to be so elitist.
That's the biggest oxymoron I have ever heard. The exact problem with a lot of people trying to learn is that they are trying to ride rails to achieve results. NO, you don't follow someone else's workflow because you don't learn nothing from it.
If you UNDERSTAND someones workflow then you have an idea and spark some creativity, in turn you experiment and begin to develop a PERSONAL workflow. Something that works for you.
Your response is not very tact. Kevin has every right to feel the way he does because he has been doing exactly that, helping others. Why help others when they don't want to bother to help themselves?
Then figure out why you did what you did.
You help others so THEY can help others like them and Kevin doesn't have to keep saying the same things for example. You help others so everyone knows, so it's not just a few people.
The act of posting in a forum and asking for help is an act of helping the self. It is only one aspect of growth, not a stunting of it.
At the end of the day, ESPECIALLY in this medium, teachers are required, and in a world where no one can even afford to go to school, a medium like this with such complication, asking how to do something is the only way.
Take yourself back to before you knew how to bake a normal map. Now try to pretend you would figure it out completely on your own... "ha" to that notion. :P
This isn't painting on canvas, it isn't something that you do any way you want to. The fact that there is really only a few right ways to do something means:
either:
1: you guess for 10 years and never get it right and are always a crap artist who no one ever notices
or
2: you ask for help in a place designed for it, a forum like this for example, you get help, enough to head you on further learning for yourself, and you are a better artist overnight.
Oxymoron? Think again. This isn't painting on canvas. There are right ways, and there are ways that work that are actually wrong ways.
I have a huge library of bookmarks that show me how to do X, and I haven't read a lot of them, I will probably get around to it some day but that will be mostly to mine them for tips and tricks. Honestly, I dislike most video tutorials, most of the time they aren't well planned out, or they just waste your time rambling. Stuff that has a high production value to it like the stuff from Eat3D or Gnoman is helpful but ultimately is hard to search back through when you need to remember that one switch or setting. They're great for general theory but horrible for step by step.
This thread is also a bit of an explanation as to why some threads go unanswered or with very little response like Justin pointed out.
Mortolhuman: you recently asked how to make a view weapon. I've never done it before but I'd probably go ahead and make two arms holding a gun. I'm sure if you made an attempt and posted it people would give you advice.
If someone knows the answer, has some spare time (on a forum, after all), and doesn't, then they are ignorant.
@Justin: Yea, I don't like doing things wrong. If I don't know the right way to do something, I shouldn't do it, because it won't be correct anyway.
Hell, I could probably take this time to answer any questions you have about why people like me will not lift a finger until we see "how it's made" or "how to do it" first.
fire away, I'll try my best :P
In the words of Dr.Cox"help me- help you- help me- help you"
"If I don't answer, people will think I do not know" - maybe it's something I shouldn't do, or maybe others are just tired of doing it and I haven't gotten there yet :P
And now you can make sure others don't make the same mistake... Because most people are probably like me: I'm not doing anything until I know how to do it - I'm not making mistakes and wasting my valuable working time. No, instead, I'm coming to a place like polycount full of people who know how to do things, and asking them.
The "stunting growth" remark I believe is referring to spoon-feeding people information, something I have found people seem to expect from a tutorial or a teacher of any kind. When you spoon feed people information, they do not learn to think for themselves, and thus don't find their own way. As an educator, or just someone helping someone else, it's a fine line between being vague and spoon-feeding.
So, mortalhuman, teachers are indeed very important and yes you do need people to pass on information, but it does nothing unless you yourself learn to take that information and use it in your own way.
However,
I consider the act of posting for help to be helping yourself :P
maybe people do not wait to ask as long as me, for example I didn't ask about that UDK FPS player model thing until I was exhausted on google finding nothing directly on the subject of player models in FPS.
I googled to help myself, got no help, asked here - before I ever begin to pull polygons, because you must plan your moves, and if you don't know what you're doing, you can't make a plan, so you must ask, if you can't find it already out there on your own.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=80724
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=80718
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=76238
I spend quite a while on my own before I ever post a thread, I do not pull polygons or do anything like that without a plan, if you don't know the plan, you cannot act. Otherwise you act in ignorance, which is a waste of time.
The whole point of these kinds of forums is to not make the same mistakes others made.
Doing things wrong is not an important part of learning, it is an important part of DISCOVERY. :P
BEFORE forums all this thought perhaps would have flown... but in the age of the internet and forums and the ability to save your fellow man from the same mistakes you made, this just looks like "I am better than you, I'm not helping you, it's hard enough to keep a job as it is!!"
greets racer, put your tuts back up because for a long time they helped me answer a lot of people's questions just by linking them :P
If one learns, all can benefit. It wasn't always like that. But if one knows, and you can't figure it out on your own with your own existing skill set, then you gotta ask - why make mistakes when you know for a fact you are not inventing/discovering anything, you are just doing something that the ONLY way to do it is to know how to do it?
In other words; how can anyone just sit there and watch other people bang their heads on the same walls they did without helping them? It's pathetic, or at best, elitist. Especially when forums are designed to ask and get answers.
My greatest expeirence with this was years ago while modding for crysis. I spent days trying to figure out how to produce parallax occlusion maps for the game while nobody else had. Crytek had no info on the subject. I must have saved 100 variety formats of the same texture. After all of that I got it. I ended up doing a step by step tutorial for it for the community...
Kevin is known for his art and work flows, because i'm sure he put ruthless hours trying to figure it all out.
[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]
"Practice what you know, and it will help to make clear what now you do not know.[/FONT][FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]" [/FONT][FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Rembrandt' [/FONT]
And btw, I'm not offended, I feel like a better person actually, because I won't let people bump their heads on the same walls I did, and I don't have any reservation about asking others for help before I waste my own time.
Why would I, for example, make an FPS controller than won't even work in UDK? Why would make stuff that isn't even going to work?! This stuff takes time - time is precious - just like knowledge - without asking questions, you will not find answers. Even if the question is asked of a search bar in a user manual, the question was still asked.
I ask questions when manuals and search engines fail me.
Telling me to figure out an FPS controller on my own (as example) is like telling a person who just installed blender for the first time to model suzanne from scratch...
Give it a go, I didn't actually see any content in amongst your previous posts.
It might also be worth checking out my back history, I've been writing tutorials and sharing how I did what I did since 96. What have you contributed here that makes you more pious and less elitist than I?
@kevin: I'm not doubting your feats, I'm only doubting the attitude that everyone should go over the same humps as you did. You have the ability to save people from those humps, and it might be boring or feel like crap sometimes, but when you have the time, if the time permits it in your own schedule, it should be rewarding in itself to show people how to do things.
As I alluded earlier though, you might just be tired of it :P 96 was a long time ago, maybe you already answered most questions you see repeated all the time :P
For example, I saw like three threads here "how to model rocks?!?!" in the past few days. I understand the way you must feel about that, really. But the person probably didn't post their thread until they exhausted themselves :P Maybe they were lazy, for all I know, but in my case, I won't ask of others until my own processes fail me, so I tend to look at it that way from others.
Thank you for the encouragement, I do experiment a lot, I try on my own a lot, and all I ever really end up with is useless stuff.
Maybe if I went to school or something, but there isn't one near me and no one but the rich kids have $$ for that :P
MAIN POINT: I do not see how it is possible to teach yourself something in a craft which is this new and this complicated without working with others, asking questions, and discussing how to do things, before you go build bad habits by yourself.
If no one blazed trails how would you get anywhere if you only traveled on well worn roads?
If everyone thought like you did, there would be only one answer anyone could ever come up with. It wouldn't be the best answer it would be the only answer knew.
PC has always been a place where people experiment and try things. It isn't a university where you go to learn how to do something one way. Game art in general is very situational and you might approach creating an object 7 different ways depending on the situation. The people who get laid off are the people who can't really adapt all that well and have trouble creatively solving problems.
If you can only follow 123 steps to make X object then that's easily replaceable. If you can come up with a way to make X object that no one has ever seen or heard of, then you might stick around.
In fact, the people who blazed those trails also basically designed the tools, or were designed to meet their needs, and now it's a mystery to new people that gets bigger and bigger and harder to understand without some direction.
At the end of the day, if I can help someone, I will. And I won't tell them they are stunted for it, I will tell them they did the right thing by asking, because the act of asking a question is the first ingredient to learning.
Save this noob and other noobs like me, you will be a better person for it :P heh
Also, I do not want to innovate or create new things for basic things that should all be pretty much the same anyway.
back to the FPS player model as first example:
Why should I experiment when what I WANT to accomplish is already done? COD player model is correct, the rest, IN MY EYES for MY GOALS, are done wrong. So, why would I guess at something other people already know? When just by being human they can help and not let me waste time, as I do for others when I know things they do not?
COd player model is correct, and all other FPS controllers have something different somewhere that makes them suck (BFBC2 controller is crap, for example). Why would I go make mistakes when what I want to do is very specific and would require knowledge of how it was done in the first place, so I can make a proper FPS controller, since that's the only proper one.
UHH WHAT?
I have run into people like you in this industry that actually had jobs. Always looking for the right answer, quick work around, fastest way to get from point a to point b.
My answer. JUST FUCKING DO IT. TRY.
Why do people need a clear cut this is the way to do it. Honestly in our industry there are so many ways to do things. Everyone works differently. If your workflow is insane but creates great results in a timely manner at the end then great. If it is slow then figure out why it is slow.
Don't expect to be spoon fed.
Do you think athletes are spoon fed on how to be good. you think just because someone showed Tiger Woods how to swing a golf club is what made him good. No it's fucking practice. Just do it. Fail. Take notes. Try again. Fail. Make Adjustment. Try again. Check results.
Don't get me wrong. I ask a shit ton of advice. More than I should. I do try and fail a lot though. All the time actually. So try to stop calling out guys like Kevin that have seriously done more for this community then you can ever hope to.
and that's the problem, the only way to know something intimately is to do it, you are paralyzed by doubt in your own abilities. The only way to learn and grow is to challenge yourself.
teach a man how to fish, feed him for a lifetime.
There is a fine line between teaching and showing how to do something. A good teacher gives you just enough for you to have the "AHA!" moment and figure it out on your own.
A bad teacher shows you every little pain staking detail so you never truly develop into an artist, just a copy of him.
No, the more video tutorials, the more you mimic what someone else has done, not actually learning how to do it yourself.
This is the same as muscle memory, it is simple repetition, not making art, or development of a skill
there is a lot wrong with this statement, for starters making a blanket statement on teaching is never a good thing, every one learns at different paces and through different methods so by saying that people are dumb or you dont understand what you are doing implies a bit of ignorance and is a bit degrading.
EDIT*
Wow I guess I had that thread open wayyyy too long before deciding to reply.
Cause I don't want people to tell me how to make the assets, I want to know what the asset itself expects/will expect.
Does that make more sense? To want to know what the asset needs, and then to do it myself once I know what it needs?
If you don't know what the asset needs, how can you even go poking around by yourself?!? you cant. You cant make a car for GTA SA without knowing what the rig needs to be like. You can't make an FPS model without knowing what it needs.
I don't think anyone will end up "doing it one way" and I don't really look for art guidance, I am having trouble with technical stuff that I likely will not have anything to do with - but that my art will have to be prepared properly to work together with. I keep using the FPS example because someone brought it up earlier, and it's a good example.
If I wasn't planning on it working in UDK, I would do it all myself and say "I don't care what you expect, this is my model, here is how it is rigged. Make it work correctly in your code". If I want this to be in UDK projects, then I need more information... I'm not lazy for that, I'm very smart for asking and not banging my head on a wall...
To me there is only one right way to do something. in 2011, the only good third person engine is Rockstar's.
in 2011, the only good military/gun FPS is IW's Cod games.
etc.
I have google my butt off :P I cannot find any white papers or documents or anything that shows exactly WHAT that is on the screen so that I can go ahead and yes, make it myself. You can make something that looks like it easily- but if you want to make it the RIGHT way, you need to know WHAT you are looking at, not just what it looks like :P
I am QUITE SURE I came to the right place FULL of people who have worked on all kinds of stuff like this - in my case, and in yours if you try to find it, there is nothing for what I need, so I have to ask the pros. :P
Maybe some of you want to be kind-dick when it comes to modeling, want to innovate, want to change things, want to invent things, AWESOME and I support you,
but me? I want to take what already exists, understand WHAT is is, not just what it looks like on my screen, and use it myself. I do not seek to reinvent wheels or innovate the industry, or be looked at as some genius. I want to use the genius things I enjoy for my own projects. So technically, this thread never applied to me anyway, and as such, I probably simply don't understand where your coming from, when my needs are not to be a held hand, and require asking questions on a forum to move forward....