Torque School: What is the value?

Many of you may or may not have seen the announcement that Torque School is now open for class registration. Until Sept. 30 we are offering an introductory rate of $80 for a class. This is an incredible bargain, so I encourage you to take advantage of it while you can. Now that the "sales pitch" is out of the way I'll move on to the topic I want to talk about: value.

From the posts that I have read regarding Torque School, I get the sense that many people are wondering "What do I get for my money?" Or in essence, they are questioning the value of what Torque School is offering. There are also some misconceptions about what is being offered at Torque School, so I will attempt to clear up some of these issues now.

Documentation vs. Instruction
One of the more negative posts about Torque School that I have observed implied that Torque School was simply a venture to sell a "manual" for Torque. To me this statement came from a fundamental misconception that Torque School was simply providing documentation. In actuality, what Torque School is providing is instruction. Understanding the differences between these two concepts is fundamental in understanding the value of what Torque School provides. Documentation will tell you how something operates, at a basic level, and the options available to you in using the device in question. Instruction moves one level "above" that to tell you how to use the device effectively to achieve different results and how choices made in operation of the device can affect the results.

For example, let's say you go to a hardware store and buy a saw. Most of the time you will simply get the saw with no documentation. Maybe, if you're lucky, you'll get a small paper showing you how the saw can be used to cut something. However, nothing will tell you how to be a carpenter or how to build things effectively. This is the different between instruction and documentation. I know the other instructors, like myself, have reviewed their materials multiple times, constantly asking "What does this teach?" Everyone at Torque School has done their absolute best to ensure that we are conveying the thinking behind the actions we are talking about or recommending.

Now you may be saying, "That's great talk, but does your course back it up?" That's a perfectly valid concern. In my Introduction to TGEA course I have constantly striven to teach the underlying principles of the technology. This stems from my belief that in order to use a piece of technology to its full potential, you must first understand how it works on a fundamental level. A lot of the frustration I have observed regarding TGEA, I believe, stems from users being asked to make decisions that they don't fully comprehend. They are using pieces of technology that they don't fully understand and therefore cannot make the correct choices to make it do exactly what they want. So, to hopefully prove my point, I will show another "sneak peek" of the TGEA 101 class, highlighting what I think is a good example of documentation versus instruction.

The subject at hand here is Wave modifiers to texture animations. Here is what TDN has to say on the subject:

Wave
This is a modifier flag for the $scroll, $rotate, and $scale properties. It can be controlled with the waveType, waveFreq, and waveAmp parameters indicating the type, frequencey and amplitude of the wave. An example of it's use is:

new Material(WaveMat)
{
   baseTex[0] = "demo/data/shapes/spaceOrc/orc_ID1_skin";
   animFlags[0] = $rotate | $wave;
   rotPivotOffset[0] = "-0.5 -0.5";
   rotSpeed[0] = 1.0;
   waveType[0] = $sinWave; // This could also be $triangleWave or $squareWave.
   waveFreq[0] = 0.25; // the time in seconds for the wave to complete one full cycle.
   waveAmp[0] = 1.0; // the 
};

Is that documentation? Absolutely. If one fully understands time-varying wave functions, along with wave frequency and amplitude, then it makes perfect sense. But what if you don't understand what a time-varying wave function is and how it can possibly affect texture animation? Here's 1 of 3 pages of what Torque School has to say:

Wave Animations
The Wave Animation settings are not a texture animation unto themselves, but act as a modifier for Scroll, Rotate, and Scale animations. To understand how the Wave settings work, a picture explains things much easier. First, observe a graph of a Sine wave.
Try to block out any horrible flashbacks you may have from your school days and focus on this from a gaming, texture-animation perspective. A Sine wave is just a function that defines how a particular value can vary over time. It starts at 0, moves up to its maximum value in the "positive" direction, then moves down past 0 to its maximum value in the "negative" direction. For each type of animation, a different aspect is affected by the wave function. For Scroll and Rotate animations, the direction and speed are affected. For Scale animations, the size of the image itself is affected as well as the rate at which it changes. Getting back to the Wave settings, these allow the texture animation that they are applied "on top of" to have its animation change over time. For example, if a Sine wave were applied to a Scroll animation, then the texture would start scrolling slowing picking up speed, just as the Sine wave slopes upward. Then the scrolling would slow down until it comes to a stop, just as the Sine wave slopes down to 0. Then as the Sine wave moves from 0 downward, the Scrolling would reverse direction, and repeat the same pattern. So, where a "standard" scroll animation moves in a single direction at a steady pace, with a Sine wave applied, it will appear to "oscillate" back and forth being slowest at the "edges" and fastest in the middle. If the Sine wave were applied to a Rotate animation, the same kind of pattern would apply, except on the direction and speed of the rotation. The rotating starts in one direction, picks up speed, then slows down and reverses. For Scale animations, the Sine wave simply determines how the size of the texture changes over time. However, unlike the Scroll and Rotate animations, the Sine's negative portion appears to be ignored as the Scaling never makes the image smaller than it was originally. There are also two other types of wave functions that can be applied, however once the effect of one type is understood the others are simple.

That's just one small piece of technology? Do you really understand Normal Mapping, or Specular Highlighting? How about creating terrains in L3DT and exporting them to Atlas format? I didn't know about these things when I started working with TGEA, and through a bunch of hard work, I learned. Come to Torque School and you can learn about them too.