GummehBear
11-16-2009, 07:18 PM
How to write a good tutorial
I have written this guideline for anyone that wants to learn how to write proper tutorials, I daily see useless tutorials. Simply because everything has been explained many times before, or just because the reader doesn’t learn anything from the tutorial.
If you want to learn how to write proper tutorials, read on!
The most important part for a tutorial is that reader learns new techniques and things they can apply in other signatures.
That’s why a lot of tutorials these days are useless in my opinion, they focus to much on the used render, or the C4D’s you used and you can never get the same result when you apply the same steps with different renders.
Some examples:
Bad:
now add some lighting in your signature near the top
Good:
Lets add some lighting into our signature. but first you will first need to determine where your light is coming from by looking at your render.
You can almost always easily determine this by looking at the shadows on your render.
A great way and easy way to add a light source in your signature is by selecting the brush tool and using a soft round brush of around 300px.
Simply click once with your mouse and a color that matches your signature (white always looks good) to create a source of light.
Remember the idea of a tutorial is not “look how I made this signature”, but more like “see what techniques I applied to create the things you see in this signature, learn them so you will be able to apply these techniques into your own work”.
Also rememberer to show pictures between each and every step, of brush settings, custom gradients, tools used etc. Also provide any renders, brushes, fonts or other resources you use.
Nothing is more horrible than reading a tutorial that says “now smudge a bit around your render”, without actually explaining how to smudge and with what settings!
Global Tutorial Layout:
(You don’t need to follow this, but it’s the layout I always use)
H1 Intro
Short intro of a few lines telling the user what he will learn, and show him the final result
H2 Resources
Provide the resources (renders, brushes etc.) that where used in the tutorial
H3 Background
Explain how the background was created, for example if smudging is used, explain what settings to use and what to properly smudge.
H4 render, effects
Where to place your render, what makes a good render, how to blend your render, little effects to enhance your render like explosions etc. Filter effects also go here.
H5 lighting, depth, flow.
Different techniques to add a light source, where to place it and how to make it look real. How to make the signature look less flat by techniques like, blurring / sharpening. How to generate a nice flow in your signatures
H6 finishing, text, border, adjustment layers, coloring
How to make the text look good, where to place it.
How to create the border
How, when and why to use the various adjustment layers
H7 ending
Overview of what the reader learned in the tutorial
Good tutorials that you can use as an example:
http://www.sigtutorials.com/tutorials/basi…sic-grunge.html
http://www.sigtutorials.com/tutorials/abst…act-smudge.html
Why not to create image tutorials
It is the standard nowadays to create tutorials as one big image so you can simply upload the tutorials and add it to your thread.
Tutorials like this are ok to be posted on a forum, but are bad when used on a website:
-the tutorial takes up lots of webspace and bandwith
-the tutorial takes longer to load
-search engines can’t “read” the text inside a picture so you will never get visitors from search engines, one of the most important ways to get new visitors.
I have written this guideline for anyone that wants to learn how to write proper tutorials, I daily see useless tutorials. Simply because everything has been explained many times before, or just because the reader doesn’t learn anything from the tutorial.
If you want to learn how to write proper tutorials, read on!
The most important part for a tutorial is that reader learns new techniques and things they can apply in other signatures.
That’s why a lot of tutorials these days are useless in my opinion, they focus to much on the used render, or the C4D’s you used and you can never get the same result when you apply the same steps with different renders.
Some examples:
Bad:
now add some lighting in your signature near the top
Good:
Lets add some lighting into our signature. but first you will first need to determine where your light is coming from by looking at your render.
You can almost always easily determine this by looking at the shadows on your render.
A great way and easy way to add a light source in your signature is by selecting the brush tool and using a soft round brush of around 300px.
Simply click once with your mouse and a color that matches your signature (white always looks good) to create a source of light.
Remember the idea of a tutorial is not “look how I made this signature”, but more like “see what techniques I applied to create the things you see in this signature, learn them so you will be able to apply these techniques into your own work”.
Also rememberer to show pictures between each and every step, of brush settings, custom gradients, tools used etc. Also provide any renders, brushes, fonts or other resources you use.
Nothing is more horrible than reading a tutorial that says “now smudge a bit around your render”, without actually explaining how to smudge and with what settings!
Global Tutorial Layout:
(You don’t need to follow this, but it’s the layout I always use)
H1 Intro
Short intro of a few lines telling the user what he will learn, and show him the final result
H2 Resources
Provide the resources (renders, brushes etc.) that where used in the tutorial
H3 Background
Explain how the background was created, for example if smudging is used, explain what settings to use and what to properly smudge.
H4 render, effects
Where to place your render, what makes a good render, how to blend your render, little effects to enhance your render like explosions etc. Filter effects also go here.
H5 lighting, depth, flow.
Different techniques to add a light source, where to place it and how to make it look real. How to make the signature look less flat by techniques like, blurring / sharpening. How to generate a nice flow in your signatures
H6 finishing, text, border, adjustment layers, coloring
How to make the text look good, where to place it.
How to create the border
How, when and why to use the various adjustment layers
H7 ending
Overview of what the reader learned in the tutorial
Good tutorials that you can use as an example:
http://www.sigtutorials.com/tutorials/basi…sic-grunge.html
http://www.sigtutorials.com/tutorials/abst…act-smudge.html
Why not to create image tutorials
It is the standard nowadays to create tutorials as one big image so you can simply upload the tutorials and add it to your thread.
Tutorials like this are ok to be posted on a forum, but are bad when used on a website:
-the tutorial takes up lots of webspace and bandwith
-the tutorial takes longer to load
-search engines can’t “read” the text inside a picture so you will never get visitors from search engines, one of the most important ways to get new visitors.