I think Cinema4D is a great example of the effectiveness of spoon-feeding newbies on basic techniques that give them results. C4D has very capable artists flocking to it, these are people who are intimidated by DCCs and yet who have a lot to offer... Designers and other creatives, Zbrush artists and so on.
They have a perception that C4D is easy to use (despite every 3d DCC requiring effort to learn) and that perception is enough to get them to go the next step, viewing easy to find tutorials, in which immediately useful stuff is shown with emphasis on how easy it is. The result - a fast growing userbase of artists, and those art-oriented-people drive a great many jobs. I see designers who do very complex work in C4D who are -still- afraid to try other tools, because what they see are mid to high level workflows straight off the bat. Which is more likely to still be a product in 3-5 years, C4D or Softimage? Is this "cater to the newbies" strategy one worth adopting? It seems very effective... Sent from my iPad On Jul 18, 2013, at 4:25 PM, Matt Lind <[email protected]> wrote: > What’s missing is the tutorials from AD covering the usage of the application. > > There are introductory tutorials for really, really basic stuff. There is > reference for properties and such, which is often vague and sparse, or > self-referential. However, there is a big void in the middle on how to best > use features. > > Yes there are plenty of materials on the internet, but large majority is from > 3rd parties, and many of those tutorials deal with whiz bang features. The > problem we’ve had here is the 3rd party stuff really doesn’t address the > features we need to use, and there’s nothing from AD on the topics either. > Or, if found, the tutorials are so basic they’re not useful. > > Long story short, it depends on the type of work you do. For film/video, > there’s a lot of stuff out there. For games and other markets, you have to > scrape the barrel pretty good to get anything of substance. > > Matt
