Busy-ness of life

Animation school through Animation Mentor will in earnest start in the first week of July.

I've been sort of in a very loosey goosey way chronicling the AM Maya Workshop on my Livejournal but I need to seperate school posts and post them elsewhere so I don't bore people out.

Not many are interested in it probably.

To give a little history, I originally found out about Animation Mentor at Siggraph 2005 (the year in came in to existence). I applied a two years after I moved up to Seattle and was accepted and due to financial circumstances wasn't able to start.

I took the Maya Workshop last year and since I was not able to continue, I wanted to retake it to refresh my memory.

A few things have changed since then. The AM syllabus has changed (no more short film production in the last two terms; we concentrate on creating short animations for our demo reels). My computer is slower than molasses (jeebus I need a better one). I am a bit more stoked that I will be actually starting the program this time.

We already in week 6 of the workshop and I have a better understanding of how things work in Maya.

One thing I know is that Maya is very lame in terms of modeling, shading, lighting and rendering. I will gladly use any other 3d package to do those than submit myself to bad workflow in Maya. Animation, though, in Maya is sublime. Very powerful. The graph editor is amazing.

Case and point:
The video below is off a AM ball rig that needed to be animated using only the transform tools and keys and tangents in the graph editor. A lot of fun.



The real fun begins next week. Animating a bouncing ball and a robot arm.