What Tutorial Videos Should We Make?

I will say. As a fairly new guy in babylonjs world, with not very high level skillset, that I also think that videos are good way to go, as a developer and 3D artist, I basically live on google, and almost the first thing I do when I have any kind of problem, doubt or whatever is look for video of that on youtube.

Now in case of Babylon that’s not happening, of course, we have amazing forum here and playground is awesome tool, and with that said, I indeed never needed a video tutorial to find a solution or guidelines for Babylonjs.

But my humble opinion is, that the first thing that people who are in this type of work, (and I know a lot of people like that) will do is go on Youtube and look something about certain topic. That’s how I familiarize myself with any new technology, library, asset, option, function, or whatever. I will type something in google, I will get million results, but first thing I will do I will go on Youtube and watch a video about it if possible. So even tho, videos ARE old-school approach, I believe that the way that someone will find about Babylonjs, familiarize him/herself about the engine, and DECIDE to give it a shot, is through videos.

And as Deltakosh said, I believe that with the growth of the popularity of engine, video content will be made by a lot of people who are not in the core of the engine development, as It happens with almost any popular technology today. And I think that’s something that needs to happen.

A month ago, I was sitting in front of my computer, and I was thinking about the babylon server-side, and I gone to Youtube, looked for something in that context, and I found some, old videos, that barely touch the topic, and I was thinking “wow, it’s so sad that there is almost nothing about the Babylonjs on Youtube”. And when recently I saw that Inspector tutorials came out, I was really excited, because I thought, yes, this is it, tutorials are beginning, I will have a lot of new material to watch. And then this thread came out, and yes, I was excited again.

And, I am not sure if it is just me. But when something is not on Youtube, like for example I was using Konva.js for a while, and I found almost nothing on Youtube about that. My instant thought was, this is not popular at all, I will find some other library. I believe that is what’s happening in people brains, in young people brains, that live in the era of videos, of watching the screens all the time, while drinking coffee, smoking a cigar, eating food. Nobody wants to eat and scroll through 200 lines of code. I am saying this from psychological perspective, especially of today young people who are on the internet, on the youtube from the literally first year of their life. You never know, who will stumble upon Babylon video and that will change his/her life.

So even tho we don’t need it maybe, or it is not new epic way to spread information. I think it’s crucial in making Babylon more popular among new people who are still searching what they want to do and use, among infinite number of possible technologies nowdays.

Sorry for the long post, Maybe I am not someone whos opinion counts, but there it is.

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Videos for the win. I have a lot of time watching videos on my mobile in the train.

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Agree with both of you guys!

what if there were video tutorials with either a playground tutorial to go along with it or the code to the tutorial so you could follow along if you wanted to?

I think one day, someone will make a lot of money doing that. I am subscribed on a lot of Youtube web development channels which have a lot of subscribers and views, who do exactly that, crash course videos with the code to follow if you want (I am watching one as we speak). So, you never know. I, myself, have intention in doing something like that, one day, when I find the courage to say that I know what I am talking about. This is not the day.

I kinda want to make some tutorials.

I just gotta sound like I know what I’m talking about. Then it wouldn’t be so bad.

Crash Courses for babylon.js would be great, just like the ones for history and science.

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as a young people, i enjoy a good couple of lines. 200? sounds like a lot though :grin:. jk

Seriously though, i think youtube videos would be a great addition to this community.

Although this community is already OVERPOWERED.

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I’m glad I found out about this library and community, otherwise I’d be stuck with three.js.

Three.js had almost no community, no specialized forum, meh levels of documentation, no integrated physics engine, and not much of any sort of api documentation. Documentation is in my list twice, but the ones they did have were poor.

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There is a logical solution to this.
Youtube videos will be wildly more popular.

However if you want to see playground based tutorial/html/js/webgl tutorials, then be the change you want to see and create them @Wingnut

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Can’t agree more!

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Yes. I wanted to note that in the comment, my intention is not to say that I don’t enjoy it myself. Every 10 minutes I click on the forum and read what’s new, and go through many playgrounds, examples, and stuff. It’s really fun to my also. And I like that, and I will continue to do that no matter how many videos are out there. And I know there are a lot of people who enjoy that. But as I said, someone new, who want’s to check out this amazing library, would rather watch some videos to see what is all about, then read through the code that’s barely understandable to them.

One more advantage I think is that, in the playground you can see bunch of cool stuff, but no one is there to walk you through what it is possible to do and what does that all mean or how can you expand on that idea and stuff like that . When I watch the videos, even some basic stuff of HTML for example, a guy who made the tutorial can say a lot of stuff, or give a lot of cool advices and references that I had no idea existed at all.

That’s exactly what happened with the inspector tutorial series. I always knew there is inspector tool, and I use it often. But when someone says, oh look, you can do that and that, and see that, and when you do that, you can do this. It’s way more interesting and appealing that way, at least for me.And it’s not limited. A lot of times, I just go to playground, and I type camera and put dot after, and just see what method and properties are available on that, and that’s the way for me to expand my knowledge and to answer “what can it be done with this object” question. And even then I don’t know what half of those means (of course there is always documentation). But videos can be very useful in that way.

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yes i agree, just wanted to share my view on the reading lots of lines :smile:

(i too come here often to read through whats new with babylonjs)

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hmmm idk ive seen you around the forums, youve got the guts.

Believe in the me that believes in you.

Heart in the cards.

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ok but seriously i think that pygame had it the best. There was mix of video and tutorials.

http://programarcadegames.com/

This is pretty much where i learned to program, or at least program with lines of code(and stack overflow of course).
It was easily one of the best resources in my arsenal back in the day. Most of my classmates would have agreed with me as well.

I think babylonjs shoud do something like this. Heck il set something up as an example sometime if i ever get time…
(i still need to push my contributions, to viewers like you)

The doc has already a lot of tutorials to be honest but they seem not as visibile as I would love.
Same for PBT, we already have a good deal of them but not a lot of people use them

Do you know if the docs are getting views/clicks or whatever, people visiting them?

Im not sure what you mean by as visible as possible

I see the analytics for the documentation website (And I also see all the question we have here on the forum). It is a fact. People don’t usually read the docs :slight_smile:

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I think both docs and playgrounds (especially the docs) are used by people who already opened their code editors and begun working on something or testing something out. But again I will say that someone who want’s to check Babylon out will probably not do that. It’s much more interesting to see Deltakosh coding the spheres and assigning materials on them (like here Understanding Materials and Inputs - Babylon.js Documentation), and comment along the way, and probably say something about shaders and webgl that someone like me have a little knowledge of, than go through bunch of text and hope that you will understand what’s happening.

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oh so not many people go to the docs.

When the videos come out make sure to put the main resources in the description:
docs
playground


etc…

That will boost it i bet :smiley:

I think youre right about people going to videos on thier own first.
However i think, we should make videos, then the videos link to a doc relating to the video. Then the doc links back to the video.

The home page doc: https://doc.babylonjs.com/ is mostly a block of text, if we added a simple how to video to it i think it would be recieved better by newer user(speaking from experience :slight_smile: ). We wouldnt need a how to for every video, but some basic then some more advanced. Or whatever works i guess…

This way the docs have more ways to comprehend the material, and they get more visibility.
On top of that the videos will pull in the new users.

If it is done well enough i think this would be a good intermediate level high school course, then babylonjs gets way more visibility… but thats kinda thinking way too far ahead.

Also its important to introduce them to our community :smiley: because its awesome here!

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