Collating tutorials...

Collating tutorials...

I keep thinking it would be great to collate all the tutorials and maybe in future include them in their own area on the Cheetah3D website, rather than just the forum.

I am possibly thinking of creating a tutorial template which all previous tutorials can be pasted into and saved/exported as pdf.

What does everyone think?
 
Excellent idea!

I've been learning to use Modo for a competition recently, and the large amount of tutorials that come with it, make learning a lot easier. Having good documentation and tutorials is doubly important for newer 3d apps, like Cheetah and Modo, as they haven't been around long enough to build up the vast library of reference that Lightwave, Max, Maya etc.. have.
 
Hi,
that sounds like an excellent idea. Until now there have been written only a few tutorials. I wished there would be more.

But the template should be be usable by everybody. So it must be a app which most people own.

Bye,
Martin
 
So what app does everyone think I should create the tutorials in? Like Martin says, it needs to be pretty accessible.
 
Hi,
I don't think it really matters what app as long as it can be opened in preview. .Pdf is always a good one for something like this.

Thanks for doing this,
Greg
 
I was meaning for the creation really, I want a file format where people can download the template and edit the content themselves for tutorial creation.

For download of the tutorials from the Cheetah site, it will almost certainly be PDF.
 
Oh, I misunderstood you. Adobe probobly makes some software for doing things like this. This isn't really down my line of work, So, to be frank, I don't know.

Greg
 
If you want every contributors to use a unique software (not sure that will facilitate tutorial creation), at least choose a free one.

Tell me if I'm wrong. What's important is that the tutorial exists and that they can be viewed by everybody (pdf/jpg). Each contributors as it's own way of explaining things and it favourite apps. "Forcing" him/her to use a given app/template may just refrain creation.

+
p*
 
I think in some ways you are right, but for the tutorials that appear on the website they definitely need to be consistant. Or perhaps we could split the tutorials section on the site with an area for user tutorials (which could be any format) and the general tutorials which would follow a consitant format.
 
What about a sort of online form/template that generated a pdf? I think would be quite flexible, and doesn't require specific software.
 
I think the best option would be a C3D Wiki.

Then the tutorials can become "live" documents that update as features are added and UI changes occur.
 
I'd suggest Cheetah3d have its own wiki ... you can't build a manual on top of Wikipedia (well you probably *can* but it will tick people off).
 
Hi,
to be honest I have no idea how to run a wiki at all. Does it have to be installed like a forum software. Does anybody have experience with that. How spam save are wikis since spamers already caused a lot of heach aches in the forum.

Another solution would be a video tutorial page. I think there are many free or affordable movie capturing apps out there. And movies can also be watched by everybody. Finally hosting movies is very easy.

Bye,
Martin
 
It's almost exactly like setting up a forum. Mediawiki is the software used by wikipedia itself I believe.

Basically, you need:
PHP
MySQL (with a database set up)
Copy a bunch of stuff onto the server and do some configuration

I set up a wiki from go to whoa in 2h with zero experience (I do know PHP pretty well though).

I'd *suggest* that you create two tiers of users -- folks you trust to act as police (to prevent abuses) and everyone else. That said, anything can be rolled back and the community here seems pretty marvellous.

If you want I can set it up on one of my servers. It won't have the cheetah3d.de / .com domain name though.
 
Hi,
ok that doesn't sound to difficult. I'm just worried that I will have one more piece of work to maintain. Installing is no problem. But maintaining is a big problem. Since my actual development time would be reduced even more.

Thank you very much for your offer but I think that it should be on the cheetah3d.com domain.

Bye,
Martin
 
Hi,

I prefer pdf - the reason is, I can print it and read it whereever I want.
Also video tutorials sounds good.

I think an area on this server will be perfect where just links are there with the name of the tutorials - no rights for everyone to write.

Just one person has the rights to fill this links (area) with the tutorials.

If questions and more to a tutorial coming up, we should have a Q&A Area for this.

best regards
Wolfgang
 
Ok, I think the answer is...

For the official Cheetah3D tutorials - downloadable pdfs from the site. These will be designed in a Cheetah3D style and will all be uniform, this in my opinion is the best option in terms of speed of production and usability.

For unofficial tutorials - I don't think unofficial tutorial should be restricted to one particular media. They simply need somewhere to 'live' - perhaps here we could filter tutorials by type (video, pdf, web)

To be honest, my primary concern at this stage in time is the official tutorials.

Martin what do you think?
 
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