Tips & Tricks; How to make Metallic 3D Text - No Plugin Required.

The workflow is fairly well explained. Background music in tutorials is usually distracting, I would get rid of it.

It might be more helpful if you use multiple views to show how to arrange lights and position and animate the camera. That's a lot more efficient and easier to manage.

You might also want to use the keyboard shortcuts and explain how to use them. For example, material options on the text layer are available by hitting the hotkey for Anchor Point ('a' on an English Keyboard) twice. It would also be useful to show how the search bar works in the Timeline. 

The use of 4 Parallel lights is a very odd workflow. It would be a lot more efficient to use one parallel or one spotlight and some ambient light. Not only will it render faster, but it is a lot easier to set up reflections and highlights.

I would also show the Options for the C4D rendering engine and explain that previews and setup will be a lot faster if you drag the quality down to 1 and set the comp to Fast Draft while you are setting up the scene. There will be almost no delay in manipulating controls with most systems.

Your Reflection comp could have been created with one shape layer with multiple rectangles + the effects, and that would also render faster and be easier to manipulate later.

I would also use 4 views to animate the camera position because it is much easier to edit the curves in the motion paths if you can see all 4 views, are showing all keyframes, and use the Pen tool. 

All in all, it's a pretty good tutorial. 

You might want to consider doing a tutorial where you set up a standard 3D text layer, ambient light, and maybe a point light and a spotlight, add a Camera, then export the AEP as a Maxon C4D file. You can then bring the C4D file into After Effects and, then open up C4D lite and have a lot more options for extruding, animating, texturing, creating reflections, and environment maps than you would have in AE using the C4d rendering engine. You can then set up C4D to use AE's Centered comp camera and do all kinds of camera moves very quickly in AE. The final render will also take less time and it will work better in the Adobe Media Encoder than a comp sent directly to the AME from After Effects.

You might want to download this comp. One camera with 2 position keyframes, Two lights, One Text layer, One solid only the Fractal Noise Effect, and a few adjustments and you have 3D Metalic Text. A really great tutorial simplifies everything first, then if needed shows how you can add more features. Most of your time should be spent explaining how Environment layers work and what kind of things can be used as sources. Then spend some time explaining the material options in a 3D layer and how they change the picture. That would turn your pretty good tutorial into an excellent one. Note the curved motion path for the camera. 4 Views is a lot easier way to set up a camera move.

If you download the AEP file be sure to check out the options settings for the C4D rendering engine.

Down on 3, you should be able to quickly move around in the comp and make adjustments without any delay. Set the options up to 30 or 40 for final checks and then maybe up to 60 for the final render.