First of all I want to say that the videos I have followed are really helpful. Please, keep them coming!!
Here's my constructive feedback: I'd like to hear more explanation of the steps I am following. I just did the lavalamp tutorial and although I have created something really cool which I wouldn't have known how to do on my own, I still don't have a great understanding of what the reasons were for many of the steps in the tut.
For example:
That copying and scaling of glass, air and liquid layers....I understand that it was all about making the materials visible through each other, creating refraction and allowing the lights to shine out...but I didn't get a good feel for why some materials faced one way, and others the other etc. A few choice words along the way would have been really helpful
Likewise with the particle systems, I didn't know what effect the many variables in the particle system and the wind had. I could make a guess at some, but it would have been a great time to say "this makes the particles float up", "this gives them some turbulence", "this makes them fuse together when they get close to each other" and so on. As it was, by chance I built my model at roughly twice the size of the one in the tut, so I had to experiment to make it work for me.
At the end of a good tut you've got a model which looks like the one in the vid. Whereas at the end of a
really good tut you know
why it works and how to tweak it.
I know that in all of this I can just experiment, and I do. But I am totally new to LW, so it might take a few people like me to ask those questions and ask for those features or comments that you experienced folk who create the vids must know as second nature.
...I'll probably find this has all been addressed in the vids I haven't downloaded yet!
