Udemy's Blender Course - Learn 3D Modelling

The intro:
My girlfriend wanted to buy me something 3D printing related for my most recent birthday, so I suggested something I wouldn't buy for myself. The class was $12, for 50 hours of instructional videos — bound to learn tricks or better processes unknown to me. I'm not an expert, having learned most of my skills from youtube or practice. (A brief shout-out to SEABUG - a local meetup for Blender. They know a lot of things, share experiences, and really helped expand my knowledge of what was possible. I found them through Meetup, but they also had facebook...just in case you want to look for a local group near you.)

Short answer: please don't spend $12. Wander youtube, check out people like Miguel Zavala (of the D&D monster fame as mz4250), Zacharias Reinhardt...I still really like inventimark's material — as an intro into Blender for 3D printing it's fantastic. You'll progress a lot further in 20 hours there, than 50+ hours in this udemy "class".

What's the key to delivering a good joke?

An hour into the class, and they hadn't even touched the starting cube. The longer I got into the class, the more it felt like they were stretching out content. 50 hours now seemed like a punishment, not a value. [Timing.]

What's the key to delivering a good joke?

3-button mouses. Share your work on udemy. 3-button mouses.  Share your work. Remove doubled vertices. Do an action. Remove those doubled vertices. Do an action. Remove THOSE doubled vertices. Share your work. [Repetition.]

Bad techniques

It's great (and mostly true) there are tons of ways to accomplish the same thing in Blender. It's also true there are BAD ways of doing things. Inefficient, or delivering meshes that don't work correctly. There's nothing stopping you from mass-removal of doubled vertices. (This is in Edit mode, Control-V to get the vertices menu, remove double vertices - only possibly affects selected vertices.)

In a section where they want to low-poly an object, they want to remove an edge loop that is giving definition - alt-select the edge, x to delete the edge loop, alt-select the edge loops above and below that deleted edge loop, then Bridget Edge loops (I use the spacebar to search to get there.) OR...they could have just alt-select the first edge loop, then dissolve edge. See what I mean by inefficient?

Bad knowledge

It's fine if you want to skip a topic that you're not familiar with. It is bad if you want to touch on a subject you know nothing about, and present it as knowledge. In this case, it was about something near and dear to my heart, 3D printing.

That somehow, you need to move your model so the bottom of the base is at 0 on the z-axis. STLs don't have that. Also, setting your scale to 1. Again, you export as an STL, it doesn't know what scale Blender had it at. (If you needed to, as a Blender file imported into Unity — sure. Object>Apply>Scale.)

The statement of "Is the model closed?" Well, the language is "Is the model manifold?" Is there a hole in the mesh that leads to the "inside" of the model...or are there parts within the model, that aren't necessary for printing that should be removed? (Use the 3D Print Toolbox plug-in to check. It isn't great at fixing it with the magic "Make Manifold" button, but sometimes. It can show you the broken bits with the "Check All" button in edit mode.)

Suggestions

They should have broken out non-Blender things as bonus content. How Unity uses your Blender models. Best practices for backing up your work. Their interest in "LEAN" processes.

Instead of talking about that there ARE different ways of doing things, either stick to your techniques (as an expert), or show the different results (or at a minimum the time/effort it took to employ those different methods. I have limited amounts of time, and would like the least amount of brute force needed to accomplish a task...unless the other end result is going to be that much more spectacular.

Get someone to actually edit their slides - it's vs. its? Don't use periods on bullet points (or at the very least, be consistently bad). Always make sure your screencast keys are turned on.

Summary

I skipped reviewing things that were not relevant to 3D modeling for 3D printing. Lighting, camera, animation, the video game related parts...not 100% that I'll finish the "class" at this point. I learned several small bits of information, but not worth the extreme amounts of filler.