Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Todo

This page is for suggesting and tracking ongoing maintenance for the book "Blender 3D: Noob to Pro". If you want to add another suggestion to the list there that isn't already there, go ahead. If you have a problem with one of the suggestions or want to remove one, please discuss the reason why on the talk page first.

Pages to take care of

Simple

Every Tutorial in Unit 2, 3 or 4 with a status/stage short under the 100% has to be taken care of. Unit 1 is very good and Unit 4 has some good sections but also very bad or non-existent sections. The points given below are too outdated to even read. Animajosser (discuss • contribs) 18:22, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

Unit 1 and Unit 2

• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/FAQ The page is outdated and the answers are not very good. The FAQ page does not fit well in the scope of the book. We could use a FAQ about the book itself though. There are better FAQs around. Suggestion: rewrite the page to make working with the book easier.

I rewrote it to be clearer about its (the page's) purpose and make it more readable, without changing the content. I think it's a worthwhile page, though not really a FAQ per se. We could possibly rename it About This Book or something. Dolsson5 (talk) 05:18, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Introducing Meshes This page is very confusing and redundant, repeating information found in many of the other tutorials. Suggestion: break any non-redundant info into the Modeling a Person tutorial or other related tutorials.
• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Curve and Path Modeling The page is useless, and the scope is not clear. Suggestion: add examples and show what we're going to show.
• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Intro to Bezier Curves Suggestion: remove the noob notes and include them in the text. Add images for the second part. There is an edited version of the page, check that and eventually replace the text.
• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Making Your Creation Smoother Wrong title, little content. Suggestions: rename the page to "Working with MetaObjects" (or similar) and add content.
• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Materials and Textures Little content. Suggestion: add examples and show the general way to go. There is a nice tutorial page at de:Blender Dokumentation/ Tutorials/ Texturen/ Texturtypen in German, so the images could be used. This tutorial is in English already in the manual, so maybe we don't need it here.
• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Procedural Textures Little content. Suggestion: add content. Either de:http://de.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender Dokumentation: Prozedurale Texturen or more tutorial like de:Blender Dokumentation/ Tutorials/ Texturen/ Holz.
• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Image Textures Very little content. Suggestion: add content. It would be an important tutorial.
• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Creating Basic Seawater Practically no content. Suggestion: remove the page or, but more preferably, update heavily.
• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Texturing Basic Seawater No usable content. Suggestion: remove the page or, but more preferably, update heavily. Note: This page has been merged into Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Creating Basic Seawater.
• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Mountains Out Of Molehills 2 Screenshots would be useful. Suggestion: add screenshots of the settings.
• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/The Rusty Ball Too little content. Suggestion: add content or remove.
• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Procedural Eyeball Needs images. Suggestion: add images.
• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/UV Map Basics Version unclear. Suggestion: Add version notes.
• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Realistic Eyes In Blender An image file is missing. Looks great though. Suggestion: create the image file again and upload it with clear copyright.
• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Light a Silver Goblet Wrong position in the manual. Suggestion: move to lighting.

Unit 3

• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Beginning Lighting Very short page. Suggestion: This is an important yet extremely difficult page to write. Would need examples for different light setups. Or we just leave it as an introductory page without any real content?
• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Adding Lamps Not so good example images at the beginning. The purpose of these examples is unclear. Suggestion: there is a quite good introduction to lighting in the manual at , so maybe this article is not so important.
• Missing page: Shadows!
• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Faked Gi with Blender internal Quite a good page, but maybe a bit more text would be useful. Suggestion: Reword the noob notes, put them directly in the text.
• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/OSA The different OSA types are not explained, the information could be more complete and more precise. Suggestion: add more information. Images could be used directly from de:Blender Dokumentation: Anti-Aliasing, text would have to be translated.
• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Basic Animation This page has much too little information. Suggestion: the manual is much better in this point. Leave the page in the state being? Or rework completely, though it would require a blender master to do it properly.
• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Basic Animation/ScreenLayout Very little information. Suggestion: add content, would be useful.
• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Creating Basic Water animation It may be difficult to follow. Suggestion: add images which show the settings and give more information. Maybe use de:Blender Dokumentation: Die erste Fluidanimation this tutorial in German and translate it? Nice thing about wikibooks: you don't have to upload new images but can simply reuse existing images from other wikibooks.
• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Flying Through A Canyon Argh, no images. Suggestion: add images.
• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Simple Cloth Animation No images. Works with Softbodys, not with the cloth system, so the title may be misleading. Suggestion: move the page (better title). Add images.
• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Soft Body with wind Missing image of the result. Suggestion: create a new one and upload it.
• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Your First Test This is about the game engine. Suggestion: move the page so that it gets a better title.
• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Match Moving The article is marked as a stub. Suggestion: rework the page. Maybe there is no good internal solution, so that a listing of external solutions is useful here?
• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Beginning Modeling Final Project Purpose of this page is unclear. It is not very specific. Suggestion: add more specific advice, it may be a useful page.

Unit 4

• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/HDRi This and the following page is in the wrong section. It belongs to lighting. Suggestion: move the page to the appropriate place.
• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Realistic Water using Fluid Sim and Yafray This seems to be a better fluid sim tutorial. Suggestion: merge with the first FS tutorial.
• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/BBB's Particles -- New 2.46 Particle System Content is already at another place. Suggestion: remove the page.
• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Advanced Tutorials/Advanced Modeling/Textures Page has practically no content. Wrong pagename. Suggestion: Remove page.
• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Advanced Tutorials/Advanced Modeling/Bump Mapping Page has practically no content. Wrong pagename. Suggestion: Remove page.
• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Advanced Tutorials/Advanced Modeling/Normal Mapping Wrong section. Suggestion: rename page and move it to another place in the TOC.
• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Advanced Tutorials/Advanced Modeling/Texture Normal Mapping Wrong section. Suggestion: rename page and move it to another place in the TOC.
• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Advanced Tutorials/Advanced Modeling/Color Map Normal Mapping Wrong section. Suggestion: rename page and move it to another place in the TOC.
• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Advanced Tutorials/Advanced Modeling/Light Mapping Page has practically no content. Wrong pagename. Suggestion: Remove page.

Suggestions

• Standardize the commands and instructions to one keyboard layout and operating system (i.e. Linux QWERTY United States English) and break out the alternative options (e.g. differences on Mac or DVORAK) into side boxes so they don't interfere with readability. The troubleshooting and alternative command options interfere with the readability of instruction steps because you have to wade through excess irrelevant information. these alternatives should be migrated either to the end of each article/section or to some offset side boxes with labels like "Troubleshooting" and "alternative command sequences" so that each set of instruction steps stands alone, so it's easy to separate the actual instruction sequence from the side notes and easy to pick out the differences between your system and the system the book/tutorial was written for. Alternatively make each page devoted to one OS, and do other pages, e.g.: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/Making_Fire?linux etc. (note: other OS's will have their own ID, such as linux, win, mac, etc., these should be self explanatory). This link will obviously lead back to the ordinary page http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/Making_Fire.

OS separation is neither useful nor necessary. Only a few pages about the interface would contain any real differences. --SoylentGreen (talk) 19:51, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

• The ideal layout would be completely writing out and capitalizing the keys, like Control-S, Alt-V, and Super-Q. "Meta", "Windows Key", and "Command" should not be used, but the difference (as stated above) should be in some little box called "Formatting Conventions" near the beginning.. "Keystrip 5" and "Numpad 5" would be a good way to differentiate between number keys, and letter keys should always be capitalized if they are being instructed to be pressed.
• Always provide the regular Menu path to get to a command (at least the first time) or note that a regular Menu path doesn't exist. Too often the only option provided is a key sequence and the location of the command in the menus is not shown/known. Hot keys should be more along the lines of optional to learn, though obviously in blender it's good to know some of your standard keys, and some key commands possibly don't have a menu equivalent, but Menu paths should always be provided (if they exist) at least the first time a command or key is used/introduced.
• The intro of the book states that beginners need to read the chapters in sequence but there is a lot of repetition of the beginner information in later tutorials. Again this reduces readability because one must wade through irrelevant information. Remove the beginner explanations from later tutorials and instead include a disclaimer at the top noting the other pre-requisite tutorials.
• The inter linking of many pages does not fit to the TOC of the book, this should be fixed.
• Cleanup the "beginner" tutorials section of this book, many tutorials do not seem that beginner and are not even that clear.
• Redo the beginning section to have a continuous sequence of tutorials.
• Remove most of the chapter style links connecting unrelated tutorials and instead list the tutorials by subject matter (similar to this)
• Have a link in the modules going back to tutorial indexes sorted by difficulty and / or subject (i.e.:"back to beginner tutorials list" instead of "next chapter")
• Remove the "noob note" discussions on the modules and move them over to the talk pages.
• Link to related content that helps readers locate tutorials that explain topics which the current one assumes knowledge of (similar to {{Template:Japanese related}} for the Japanese wikibook)
• Add a version note to each tutorial and each image. For the images this should be done by the uploader.
• Move the mostly unfinished (or unreadable) articles into a development section (similar to How To Assemble A Desktop PC/Development), then move them back into the book once they reach a more complete / understandable state
• Move all the external links to the tutorial links list, or remove them simply, because they didn't belong here anyway.
• Create a page about the scope and the purpose of the book
• Add a flag for excellent tutorials, that may be used as a guideline on how to write tutorials.

Done

• Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Particle Systems Note: The first example could be more useful if it would show a bit more and give some tips about working with particle systems. Suggestion: add more content. Added a first, complete, simple tutorial. --SoylentGreen (talk) 14:01, 7 April 2009 (UTC)
• Removal of all links to INDEX page --Bullercruz1 (talk) 15:36, 12 April 2009 (UTC)
• Rewrote and linked to Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Modeling a volcano Morrolan (talk) 15:16, 1 September 2009 (UTC)
• I rewrote the Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Flying Through A Canyon tutorial, it is now updated and has pictures.