Gir
 

I can't say much except that FIRST has wasted all the hundreds of hours of my time, my years of practice and anticipation, my dedication, my team's confidence, and my respect.

BAE Animation Judging Area
 

Attached is a shot of the "ideal" judging area in NH. On the other side of the curtain is the playing field with the pits behind. My student animator, with the yellow Buzz shirt seen in the middle, agrees 100% with what Lev said.

I want to see what happens and observe the process again at UTC this weekend, which is our second regional in the Northeast Conference (checked off BAE Regional only). Will our animation be on the video tape? Will they let us judge again -- will ask but would not do it -- not Graciously Professional?

By the way, we rendered even frames after asking Autodesk what they would use for judging -- VCR/TV or PC (posted their reply on this forum weeks ago) and it still looks lousy.

Hey Buz- I have a bug in the ear of the UTC coordinator for the regional. I am working on getting better conditions than what we've heard of and/or experienced this past weekend. The answer to your question (At least I thought it was a question) is (from what the latest update that I read on the subject)- you will be entered in all conference regionals and I would guess that you'd be able to vote there as well. Here is a copy of the message send via the March 6th EMAIL BAST Update that FIRST sends out:

Greetings Teams:

Qualified entries for the Autodesk Award for Visualization will be judged at all the regional events in the Conference your team selected on your entry form. Your team must be attending at least one of those regional events.

If your animation wins at a regional event your team did not attend, you will be notified by Autodesk that your team has won and is advancing to the professional round of judging. Best of luck!

This does not explicitely say that you will be judging in all regionals as well, while the original rules state that you will be judging only in the regional you choose to for being judged (not an exact quote)- there is an inherent flaw that was never addressed. I supposed there could be a problem with teams that have more money (ie the ability to attend more regionals) having more votes. We are attending UTC as well as the Philidelphia regional ourselves. So we'll get a first hand look at the situation as we experience it.

Good luck to all. This is just the beginning- It only gets better from here.

Just a thought i had about a new way to Judge the animations:

What about if FIRST would play them between matches on the big screen. The majority of the audience is out watching the matches, so why not play the animations out there, so they could be seen by everyone?

Our team was thinking the same thing while they were cleaning up and getting ready for the closing ceremonies, so we all started yelling "ANIMATIONS!!" in unison, and after about 5 minutes they decided to do so.

here's some food for thought. I was reading another thread where somone was saying robot construction was harder than animation. Fine it is, I don't care. But think about this....I've been involved in robotics for 4 years and have gone to 6 regionals thus far (another two this year). As I think back, I can remember every single public speaker that we've ever had at a regional. I have never once even heard of one of these speakers mentioning animation...never. Even Some of the FIRST directors brush of the animations as well. For the 3 years I've done animation I can never remember even Dean (no offense) talking about animation. Why is that animation is cast aside? Is it because we don't work as hard? Is it because we won't have an impact in the world? Is it because this really isn't what FIRST is about?

Sorry I'm really pissed right now. I spent more hours than a can count on this project as well as spending my own money to make a good animation and to have my product dealt with this kind of respect (even if it isn't going to win) is a shot in the nuts. Literally.

I was thinking that you could play them durring lunch. Since nothing is on anyways might as well fill up the time (not sure if they still demostrate fll at competitions anymore).

They were running the animations first thing in the morning at Buckeye.

They played the animations at VCU to fill time while preparing for closing ceremonies. So thats something.

By the way, we contacted Autodesk and they responded. It seems they have been reading our posts on Chief Delphi and appear to be commited to increasing the quality of the competition next year.

I think the reason for student judges was the sheer number of animations they had to judge before. In theory they now have the students weed out the good ones, then their professional judges and max experts judge the ones that win.

While it might be a little to late this year to improve the animation competition at all the regionals, I get the feeling that it will be much different next year.

Keep posting comments and suggestions on Delphi. They are watching.

Well here we are at the end of the UTC New England Regional- Heres What happened. Thanks to all the feedback that I go from last weekends competitions, I contacted the UTC coordinator for the Regional- ahead of time. She was able to move the Judging from the PIT where it was planned to be to a Quiet location in the Hall way to the back room where the VIP's/Judges hung out. Yes it was a Hallway, but the location was limited on space and it was quieter than the PIT would have been- So i'll take it!

The Autodesk Rep didnt show up till 11am on Friday so there was no previewing of the animations on thurs (as the rules stated-from what I remember)

They told us they changed the rule to allow three people judge the animations from each team but they had to collaberate on the one ballot.

Then they played the animations which went one after the other with no collaberation time allowed. So When they were getting ready to kick the teams out for the next 2-teams to come in and judge, I convinced them that it would be better to allow them to sit on the side and view the animations again so that they could score them properly. (The Rep Agreed)

Then I had arranged for the runnerups to be announced, but at the last minute it was pulled from the awards list because the Autodesk Rep told them that the runneruops werent being sent to the championships for judging. Now the rules I read stated clearly that tis was the case- so this is a case of Autodesk Reps not representing what autodesk actually is doing (or what they said they would do, Or maybe they dont know either)

So- The UTC Regional experience was great- Autodesk just screwed up the rest of it. The animations were later played continuously for the rest of friday and all of sat, at the PIT admin table, next to where the scores/rankings were being displayed- this seemed odd at first but became very visable and everyon got a chance to see them.

Thanks to all of you for you comments- If your regional hasnt happened yet, please try to make a difference ahead of time. Hopfully they will listen to you as well.

Chesapeake
 

I was also at the Chesapeake Regional and agree with Lev that the conditions of the animation competition were terrible.

First of all, I want to repeat a couple of the things that I found demeaning about the animation competition:
- About 90% (according to my extremely rough calculations) of the animations will never be judged by or even reach the eyes of professionals or the FIRST crowd in general. My team's animation will probably never be viewed out of my school again (aside from by the occasional internet downloader) after the Philadelphia Regional unless it passes through the extremely subjective judging system. That means that my animation team and I will have done days and days of work for maybe 20 people at most outside my team to see it, unless we're lucky enough to make it to the nationals. Even at the nationals, I doubt that FIRST will publicly spend any more than 5-10 minutes on animation.
- The judging system is really awful. They could have at least given the student judges a rubric or something or divided the scoring into more categories. "Earning" a certain number out of twenty or forty can never tell you how good your animation was or where you need to improve.
These are only 2 of the degrading things about the animation competition, and there were obviously several more discussed earlier in the thread.

Secondly, I have come to believe that FIRST and most of its competitors see the animation competition as a waste of time and animation in general as a worthless skill to be pursued only by artsy-fartsy people who don't like science and math. This is totally wrong. Many of the principles of physics, math, programming, and design, the things that seem to be considered most important by FIRST, are embodied in the animation process. The principal animators of my team are among (if not) the most intelligent and knowledgeable student members on the team in each of these fields.

1) Physics - Take the curve editor for example. When using this tool to animate, one must consider distance vs. time, observe velocity as the slope of the line, and make the acceleration between starting and stopping physically correct. Another example is the use of pivot, or center of mass. In order to realistically portray and object in motion, one must consider its center of rotation. We personally considered physics (including torque, dynamics, friction, centripetal/fugal force, center of mass/gravity [pivot], etc.) throughout our animation.
2) Modeling objects and buildings in animation is a lot like designing a robot in CAD: one must consider (to a slightly more limited extent) scale, structural accuracy, and functionality in motion. A lot of the skills used in modeling carry over into CAD, not to say that animation in itself is not a useful skill in the real world.
3) Programming is usually not directly used at least in the most basic and obvious forms of animation, but the two processes are very similar. In 3dsm, one must constantly consider various functions and commands that affect multiple variables which can represent object orientation, position, scale, etc.

As for animation being harder or easier than designing, building, and programming a robot, I think that each can be more difficult in certain respects.
1) In the design aspect, animation can be equally difficult depending on the amount of detail that one is using in modeling and physical properties.
2) Building a robot is comparable to rendering an animation. The computer makes rendering a whole lot easier, whereas building a robot requires extensive physical effort and therefore more time.
3) According to my friend Mike (mikeXstudios), another member of the animation team who is highly experienced in both programming and animation, animation is significantly more difficult. In animation there are tons of modifiers, sections within the modifiers, and then details past that which can lead to larger windows of details, not to mention lists and lists of creation tools and details for hierarchy. Compared to 3dsm, PBASIC stamp has relatively few commands that the user must be familiar with to achieve functionality.
Taking into account the way in which these three aspects of designing a robot are partitioned among many people and the way that animation is assigned to only a few, it is easy to see that animation can be equally or more difficult. On my animation team (and probably the majority of others across the country) there was really no professional help available and the animators had to work alone with an occasional reminder to stay on task, whereas the students who helped construct and program the robot functioned on the most part under the guidance of engineers and experienced teachers.

Considering all of these aspects of animation, I think that it should be taken much more seriously by FIRST. It uses processes similar to those of designing a robot and requires extensive knowledge in physics, math, design, and aesthetics. In an organization that is trying to promote brainpower over athletic and physical ability, it seems that a new division has come about: the production of the robot and the production of the animation. Sadly, FIRST has chosen to support the more physical side of the competition while basically ignoring the "virtual" (so to speak), even though both require equal amounts of effort and skill. FIRST's hypocritical attitude towards animation really needs to change.

The question remains: What are we going to do about it?

I agree- I have worked on changing the view of our team over the past couple years. Now they are constantly looking for updates and information about what we are doing. This followed through with the right people hooking me up with the right people to make a difference in THIS YEARS UTC New England Regional Comp.

You have to start on your team and get the support to flow upward to the top. Dont sit in the corner by youself (or worse)dont sit at home by yourself, and do your animation and not be involved in the rest of the team and expect to make things change.

The one problem with the PAW room is that it is a seperate room and none of the kids in the PAW room have much to do with building the robot and thus are segregated from the rest of the team.
There is really no soloution to that problem.

151 and 166 had a problem with our Animation team being hidden away in a locked room last year and the year before. Then our Animation mentors left and were replaced, and this year there were students and mentors from robotside coming in all the time. This freaked me out 'cuz of all the pressure to get things done, until I learned that the only reason people hadn't invaded the Animation room last year was because our old mentors wouldn't let them. People do like the animations -- it's cool, even if it's not robotics. And the more exposure kids get to seeing what the weirdos in that side-room are creating, the more likely they are to want to learn 3DS, even if they don't fully switch from robot-work to animation-work. :cool:

The other side of things, getting Animation people out with the robot, really depends on the students in the Animation team. This year all but myself were Animation-only people who didn't even show up for Animation that often. I for one would have done more robot-work, but I didn't have the time since I was doing so much of the animating. :rolleyes: