We are a seperate room but we are connected. I understand if you are not in adjoining rooms- that is difficult to concure. But in the past our animators were as well known and respected on the team because they were involved. They would be at the work tables with tape measures getting dimentions and design info for the animations. They often finished the design on the computer before the builders finished. This year we didn't have our Robot in the animation and that didnt detract from our guys being involved. Every one of the animators were known, liked and respected on the team.

in our case the adjoining computer room is also where the Web designers work (which I also oversee) and most of the computer work from Cad to newsletter to pre-competition scouting (from the web) all took place. So there was a flow of traffic of involved people. And the interest was generated so even those that didnt need computers still took 5-min every now and then to see what was going on.

The more you keep them informed the more they may be curious. We were part of the weekly team meetings as part of the team updates/progess reports. We also had roughed out the animation at verious timed to work on the timing of the Voice and the cuttaway sections- so we actually had stuff to show people that were interested.

Oh man.........did you guys ever have problems with people who wouldn't leave you alone though? Some people just wouldn't leave our room, I got sooo sick of saying "everyone here not on animation leave NOW" cuz some people just didnt get it, even after I said that. Its not that we dont want them to get exposed to animation, its just that they we're in our room when they had other stuff they needed to be doing....and they became kind of a distraction at crunch time.

Yah we have kids comming in distracting the animators.
Some of them wanted to see what we were doing and others just wanted to visit their friends.
I don't mind that as much as when they just want to go goof off on the animation computers. We have other computers in the room for that.

Dag, I'm sorry I didn't see the thread sooner, but yea, the regional event spoke up the idea for all of us animators to band together:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...threadid=19213
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...threadid=19219

Like I said in another thread, I emailed someone who emailed someone... This is the response I got back from FIRST, regarding the issues that we've been discussing here:

> Thanks. I rarely read CD but I did review this with the Autodesk
> contact. We will try to improve some things but many venues do not have
> good space available. We will try to make some corrections this week but
> I am not sure it can be done everywhere since we frequently have to spec our
> space needs when contracts are drawn in the summer. Unfortunately getting
> another room is not straight forward.
>
> We discussed the conference method and Autodesk is adamant. They want to
> have the top animation win and some events only have five or six
> submissions. There is a lot of issues the teams do not understand and
> they do impact the judging.
>
> Definitely lots to review at the end of the season

I totally agree with Eugene Marinelli. His striking arguments have been carefully contrived, and he has throughly presented many great points.

In robot designing and building, students have mentors and engineers helping them, while students working on animation usually do not have mentors or anyone with an astute knowledge of the program. Students have to take it upon themselves to meticulously learn the program and produce an animation all by themselves! Usually, the animation team is encompassed by no larger than 5 students. Throwing a few callow students into an industrial 3d modeling and animation program, and telling them to learn and build an animation in less than 6 weeks is an impressive task to accomplish.

The importance of the animation should be held at the same level as the other wonderful aspects of FIRST.