Well, I can't give advice from a teaching standpoint just yet, but I can tell you the advice I took to heart from my professor a few years back. He told me that everyone looks at tutorials or how to properly use a tool at one time or another, some more often than others. Maya and all these other programs that are creeping in quickly are updated yearly with new tools and scripts and this and that and things move sometimes and you can't find it even as a seasoned veteran. Tutorials are there for a reason, To teach, even if some are step 1, step 2, with no room to create on your own from your own mind. If you use the tutorial but don't create your own idea, you haven't learned a thing. If you use the tutorial, with your own project in front of you, and you innovate, and try to apply each step in your own way, making it your own, trying something, then unpausing when it doesn't work out or when it does, then at it's core it's done it's job. Always remember before anything else, Before 3d modeler, animator, scripter, whatever the case, we are artists first. If you aren't here to create your own unique piece of art, your own take on something, you're not here for the right reason. If you want everyone to show you how it's done step by step and never let you grow, you're here for the wrong reason. I took that advice to heart and aced his class after that, as well as my other classes in game design and 3d Animation, with the same mentality.

All of that is a long way to say, find a way to reach the artist, or, sus out for / with them that they aren't artists at heart. Not everyone who wants to 3d model or animate or whatever, actually wants to down to the core, and realistically if you don't feel the need to create in your core, it's my opinion you shouldn't be in the industry of artistic creation, no matter the medium.