Starting Work
 

So, how many teams out there have already started working on their animation? Our team is already working hard at creating the models(obviously not our robot) to use in next years animation, so I was just wondering if many other teams start working this early.

ummm..yeah..right...sure, we didn't even have an animation group this year, which resulted in no animation for us. We are unable to find anyone willing to learn the software and actually do an animation.

um, yeah, riiiiiight. we haven't started on the real animation yet but we are trying to do some modeling practice and we are also thinking of possible story lines that wouldn't use our robot that we could start working on. I personally don't like most animations with the peoples own robot as it seems slightly boring and monotonous (if you've seen one animation with a robot you seen most of the others.) We try to focus on a story line ( or lack thereof). We prolly wont do as well this year as we lost our head animator to CILS. Its a horrible desiese that affects millions each year. Its caused usually around the 18th year of life but starts earlier. Its sadly College Induced Learning Syndrome :( NOOOOOOOOO!!!!! Oh well, we'll still try :)

I agree
 

I agree with you that animations which focus on the robot are not very good, because I interpret the goal of the animation award is to demonstrate exactly what FIRST means to the team, and unless a team is full of entirely robot crazy ppl(they would not even have an animation probably) an animation should not focus on just demonstrating the robot. We are probably going to have only a few seconds of the animation with our robot in it, to show that building and operating the robot are important aspects of our team but not the only thing we feel is important about FIRST. I don't know I'm remembering correctly, but it seemed like the winning animation last year could have been done 90% ahead of time.

This could also be attributed to the fact that we currently have more involved students on animation than any other team. I think we have around 7 members(on animation) and we usually get alot of people interested. So really, its not very wierd for us to be starting this early as animation will probably be focused on equally as much as our engineering team next year. Also, we are trying to avoid the debacle we had last year where I spent the entire last night rendering stuff on 5 computers, only to end up with 22 seconds of animation and no time to do more.

Re: I agree
 

[quote]Originally posted by Chris Nowak

This could also be attributed to the fact that we currently have more involved students on animation than any other team. I think we have around 7 members(on animation) and we usually get alot of people interested.[quote]

We have 2 people! Me and Mike, and thats it right now, but we should get more when school starts and the new people join.

We have no kids or even leaders that have any clue how to use it. Well, I kinda know how, but I'd rather build the bot than animate it :)

Yeah I kinda started this is my first year doin it even though I am a junior and I have no contact with my leader or team but I am making models.. I heard they give u a theme to do it or summin I don't know I am just playing around in XSI

Maybe you guys should make promotional videos to show at your school. Just put flying text to some cool music, and maybe show some cool shots of previous year's animations (from the compilation tape). If you wanted to, maybe throw in some animations from your fav. video games. Shouldn't be too hard, even if you wanted to use MAX to make really cool flying text.

If you have noone interested in animation enough to do that, maybe you should show the winning animations from previous years(from the tape) at the kickoff meeting to get people interested. Seeing cool animations can be inspiring.

nah. We would like them so much that we would subconciously make the same thing.

We currently have no one for 3d S Max and 1 person for PBASIC Programming.

[sigh] [/sigh]

Awww yeah, we started
 

We at team 108 have our storyboard and have started basic modeling on the scenery...i just hope that FIRST dosent change the objective of the animation competition

To let you all know, I've got about 8 people on our animation team (this year its being led by a sophmore [me!]). About 3 or 4 of us know max well enough to be able to just bang something out without having to use tutorials and stuff, and we're teaching the others. What I'm still trying to find is some people who really know audio well, cuz that always seems to be one of the downfalls of most animations (the music, sound fx almost never sound good). Three of us know premiere and four of us know photoshop, so we're pretty well off. By the way, if your a south florida team, and need help, Let me know! (Nothing a like a field trip from school to help another team...specially if it gets me outta doing work for the day! hehe)

GO TEAM 108!!!!:D

------------- http://payfoo.com/108/

good to hear that Jim, since you've got such a headstart I guess I can reassign some of your members to soap. They always complain about not enough manpower and not enough time.

All I have to say in reply to that is "DOH!"


and btw, i guess you didn't hear, my whole team already is.... I'm still a little confused as to how they tricked me into that one...something about "We'll let you guys use our pretty, shiney dell's with p4's" I cracked under pressure....IM SORRY ANIMATION TEAM!!!!

GO TEAM 6C (That's Hexadecimal!)

I've been doing pre-planning work, but being the whole team and having job + heavy class load doesn't make it that easy. 'Sides, even if they have "opened" it for pre-season work I still think it's lame do work outside of the set timeframe.

We haven't even started the school year yet so we haven't even recruited any kids to replace departed seniors and assign the kids to their teams.
We won't know until November.