# Project 2 — Technique Tutorial **30 points · Weeks 6–11 · Sep 29 – Nov 3** --- ## The assignment Take **one technique you learned during Project 1** and build a tutorial around it. You produce two things: a clean **demonstration piece** that shows the technique working, and the **tutorial** itself — written, recorded, or AI-assisted — that teaches someone else how to do it. The technique comes from your Project 1 technique list. That list already marked what you did not have going in, and by Week 6 you have closed some of those gaps. Pick one that was genuinely new to you and that you now understand well enough to explain. --- ## Why teaching is the assessment You can follow a tutorial, produce a result, and understand almost nothing about what you did. Everyone in this field has done it. What you cannot do that way is **write a tutorial**, because the moment you have to explain why a step exists — why this order, why this value, what breaks if you skip it — the gaps become impossible to hide. Teaching is the cheapest available test of whether you actually learned something. It is also the reason this project follows Project 1 rather than standing on its own: you spent four weeks acquiring techniques, and this is where you find out which ones you actually own. **Two practical payoffs beyond the grade:** **It archives your process.** In eighteen months you will need this technique again and will have forgotten the three settings that made it work. Your own documentation is the only reference guaranteed to be written in a vocabulary you understand. **It is portfolio evidence studios read.** Every studio interview includes some version of *walk me through your work.* Technical artists, riggers, and tool developers are hired substantially on their ability to explain a system to an artist who does not want the implementation details. A public tutorial proves you can do this, and it is one of the few portfolio artifacts that generates inbound attention on its own. --- ## Choosing your technique **It must come from Project 1.** Look at the technique list in your Week 2 research and your Week 6 postmortem. **Good choices** - You marked it *do not have it* in Week 2 and you can do it now - It has enough substance to fill a real tutorial — a specific, transferable process rather than a single checkbox - It produces something visible, so the demo piece has something to show - You hit a real problem with it that cost you hours, because that problem is the most valuable paragraph you will write **Weak choices** - Something you already knew and used again - Something so small it explains in two sentences - Something so large the tutorial becomes a course Bring two candidates to Week 6 and settle it in consultation. **Examples of a well-scoped technique:** double-exposure compositing in After Effects · retargeting mocap onto a custom skeleton in Unreal · building a corrective blendshape for shoulder deformation · a stylized dissolve shader in Unreal material graph · coyote time and input buffering for platformer feel · procedural foliage scattering with a Houdini digital asset · setting up an animatic timing pass in Storyboard Pro. --- ## Format: written, video, or AI-assisted All three are equally valid and graded on the same standard: **can a competent stranger reproduce your result?** ### Written 1,500–3,000 words with annotated screenshots at every meaningful step. Formatted as a real article — headings, numbered steps, code and node graphs in blocks. ### Video 8–20 minutes of screen capture with clear narration. Cut the dead air. Chapter markers past 10 minutes. ### AI-assisted You may use AI tools to help produce the tutorial — drafting and editing prose, generating captions or transcripts, cleaning up audio, formatting, synthesizing narration, or restructuring an outline. **The conditions:** - **The technique knowledge is yours.** AI helps you *communicate* what you know. It does not supply what you know. A tutorial for a technique you did not actually execute is not a tutorial, it is a summary of somebody else's. - **You verify every claim.** AI-generated technical instructions are confidently wrong at a rate that will embarrass you publicly. Every step you publish, you have personally executed and confirmed. - **You disclose it.** Include a short note — two or three sentences — naming the tools you used and what they did. Studios are actively asking about this in interviews; practicing a clear, unapologetic answer is worth the thirty seconds it takes. Used well this is a genuine production skill. Used lazily it produces a generic tutorial that teaches nothing and reads like every other generic tutorial, which is the actual risk — not that you cheated, but that you published something forgettable under your own name. --- ## Milestones ### Thumbnails — 10 points · due Week 7, Tuesday, October 6 Planning for both deliverables. "Thumbnails" is track-flexible — it means your planning artifacts, whatever form those take. 1. **Technique statement** — the technique, where in Project 1 you encountered it, and what you could not do before 2. **Demo piece plan** — what you will build to demonstrate it. Sketches, node diagrams, layout plans, shot ideas, system architecture. **At least 10–15 quick explorations**, or the track equivalent. 3. **Chosen direction** — which one you are building and why it shows the technique most clearly 4. **Tutorial outline** — every section, in order, with the key point of each 5. **The hard part** — identify now, in writing, the step you expect to be most confusing to a reader. This is where the tutorial earns its existence. 6. **Format decision** — written, video, or AI-assisted, with a one-line rationale 7. **Production schedule** through Week 11 --- ### Tutorial — 10 points · due Week 10, Tuesday, October 27 The teaching artifact. **Required elements, any format** 1. **What this teaches and who it is for** — stated up front, including required prior knowledge 2. **The problem** — why this technique exists and what it solves 3. **Step-by-step process** — reproducible by someone with your prerequisites and none of your project files 4. **The why** — at every significant decision, why that choice. **This is what separates a tutorial from a screen recording.** 5. **Failure modes** — what goes wrong, what it looks like when it does, how to fix it. Draw from your own mistakes in Project 1. This section is usually the most valuable one you will write. 6. **Verification** — how the reader knows it worked 7. **References** — everything you learned from, cited 8. **AI disclosure** — if applicable, per above **Publish it.** ArtStation, a personal site, YouTube, Medium, or a discipline community. Submit the live link. Work that exists publicly is portfolio evidence; work that exists only in Canvas is homework. --- ### Final Render — 10 points · due Week 11, Tuesday, November 3 The polished demonstration piece — the thing your tutorial produces, built to a finished standard. 1. **The finished demo piece**, delivered to submission standards 2. **Technique visibility** — a breakdown, turntable, node graph walkthrough, debug view, or before/after that makes the *technique* visible rather than only its result 3. **Process documentation** — the progression from first attempt to final 4. **Written reflection**, 500–750 words: - What you understood about this technique after teaching it that you did not understand after using it - What the available learning resources got wrong or left out - Where you will use this technique next - If you used AI: what it did well, what you had to correct Presented in Week 11. --- ## Grading | | 9–10 | 7–8 | 5–6 | 0–4 | |:--|:--|:--|:--|:--| | **Thumbnails** | Technique well chosen from P1 and clearly justified; substantial exploration; outline anticipates the hard part | Reasonable choice; adequate exploration and outline | Thin exploration; technique not clearly from P1 | Minimal | | **Tutorial** | Reproducible by a stranger; explains *why*; failure modes covered; published; disclosure clear | Clear and mostly complete; some gaps in reasoning | Steps without explanation; hard to reproduce | Incomplete or technically inaccurate | | **Final render** | Technique clearly demonstrated and well applied; strong breakdown; reflection shows real insight | Technique works and is visible; solid documentation | Technique partially working or poorly demonstrated | Not delivered | --- ## The standard to aim at The best tutorials in this field are written by people who had just learned the thing. Experts forget which parts were confusing. You will not — you were confused by them three weeks ago. Write down the thing that stumped you for two hours in Project 1. That paragraph is the reason someone finds your tutorial, and it is the reason they remember your name.