3d community... yes or no?
 

Does any fellow 3d artist feel like they feel as though it's a good idea to have a community of people in the FIRST competition to help learn, teach, and practice our skill making us stronger as individuals as well as as a group?

I'm not an animator, but I think having a place to get good FIRST-related animation tips, info, and ideas would be a good thing.

As 3d Max goes...Well writen and easy to follow tutorials are hard to come by. I think a FIRST 3D community is a wonderful idea, creating a database of High quality learning materials and of free models would be a great service to the FIRST commuunity.

Maybe you folks could get together and get some money to Ed Sparks so he can up his bandwidth to allow for 3DS files..

Right now, there's no folks :) , but I understand what your saying. I envision a place were everyone (including Mr. Sparks) could contribute with 3d models and files. You brought up a good problem though, for the potential community- money for our site. As for money is concerned, I guess I'll make the initial investment and receive donations to keep things up. Since Mr Sparks seems like he knows what he's doing, I think that he could be a great contributor to this. The more talented people we have on this project, the better so please spread the word.
thanks for the fast response-

There is already a Yahoo group .

whoa, thanks a lot, maybe we could merge our forces. The group, however, seems pretty to themselves.

Btw- If anyone seriously wants to help me out, you can IM or e-mail me.:)

No actually it seems sparsely attended. It needs to be brought to life in the worst way(i.e. new blood!)
Join up fellas!

Ed is right, I am in the group and rarely check it / hear anything about it. So put some stuff on there and contribute.

It looks as though many want to help and join this community. I'd like more input from others though- this will be by and for 3d artists; there will be nothing if there's no support. It seems as though I'm a start this with the creation of a committee that will plan out everything we want to have.

The place does need some renewing. I fyou check out the files they are from as far back as the 2000 season.

Then it's up to the new blood (us) to relight the fire.

w00t!!!! /me looks around, um guys what do we do first????

(cheap rip of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (the whole witch thing))

Well, how do we find out what we need to do to see if we need a new animations group? umm umm....... Well, what is something that used to be used in 3ds max but stopped once version 4 came out??? A CD? no. A Monitor? No! A hardware lock!!!! Precisely!!! So if we take all the hardware locks ever produced for 3ds max 3 and put it on a electronic balance, and weigh all of the people interested in this group and weigh them on an electronic balance, and they weigh the same....... then................. we need to restart a kick a** animation's community in FIRST.

/me collects all of the hardware locks and all of the people interested, weighs them and finds out that they weigh the same. Hooray!!!!!!

Thanks everyone, spread the word to other teams you know. It seems as though I just the thumbs up from my fellow animators. I'll make a thread about a meeting for all interested in creating this community shortly.

Make a nice & informative thread regarding this community, and I will lock it & stick it at the top of this (and/or the animation) forum, so it doesn't get lost.

JabzX has asked me about a number of things before I showed him the ChiefDelphi forum.

I'm sure just about everyone here is familiar with Lev by now. His animaiton "team" was just him and one other. I talked to the other -- nice guy. We got to talking about some really nice advanced techniques, and it was refreshing to be able to be frank about things of the sort. So, I think any great tutorial/information emporeum should not only be a forum but also directly linked with a powerful knowledge-base handled by the gurus of the trade so that everyone, n00b and veteran, can get some juicy insight.

I suggest (JabzX, I've told you most of this already):

1. Build a forum like The Asylum. Around here in ChiefDelphi, the forum is a little too cluttered. For anyone who is interested, the Asylum is actually one of the very first forum-only sites that was a big big success. So that has to say something.

2. You'll notice at the bottom of every page there are four buttons at the bottom. Hit the Guru's Network. This is a great example of how FIRST "Animation Gurus's" advice should be handled. Only the best tutorials are given out, and only after discussion in the tutorial forum where graphics and editorial standards are carried out strictly. Content is also packed. For example, see this incomplete cropping tutorial. Notice how it goes over just about anything that anyone could possibly ever ask for. Amazing.

3. Keep a gallery of success stories. CGTalk provides a good eample here. In their case, there is even an award to shoot for.

4. Keep a database of everyone's animations. Set stricter restrictions on file format and size. Keep lo-res versions archived if possible.

5. Give out our own awards for regional and national competitions (though they may be no trophy involved). Second, include lots of different awards for different achievements. Robot teams have 16 chances at winning somehting, why not animation? Also, there needs to be a ranking list.

There are many more things wrong with the current system that can be addressed, and then some that have never even been thought of yet. Look over what Lev from 116 had to say about the VCU regional competition (first post). Finally, thanks for your time and consideration.

It seems this has all been about Animation.. what about us 3D cad people? I'm not too good with animating, but I'm good with AutoCAD.

Sorry about that, I say animator but I mean 3d artist. All CAD users are welcome. And texture people too:)

{new edit}
btw I have created a new post (yea, another one) about the community.
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...threadid=19296

Yeah. Sorry about that. I think we're just using the word "animation" because of the competition. Titles don't mean anything in the end anyway though.

I welcome a CAD knowledge-base. i might learn a thing or two.

Responses to my previous post?

nother idea
 

Ha ha, I guess u silenced everyone with your other post. You give good sources and I hope that people use those links.

Like always, you have a great idea about our own awards system. I hope to get sponsors (like maybe Discreet or Autodesk) to possibly donate software to us. That'd be an awesome idea.

Another idea that I had in my original plan for everything (planing things out during the NASA/VCU regional), I thought about everyone getting together to do a super project. Kinda like how some groups of people make stories by passing the torch form person to person. Only I'd like this to be more of a group thing. My original idea was also thought of with a smaller population in mind though, but I think it could still work. We get people contributing models and textures and skills to come up with a well executed animation... Oh yea... that'd b nice. We'd learn and have a good time in creating it.

If you didn't already know, there's one at Turbosquid. At that site, there are tons of models, animations, pictures, textures, file formats from 3dsmax, Poser, Lightwave, Kaydara, etc. but most of the files there require you to pay a certain amount of money to download it. Some as much as $200!!! The only thing is, you must join to download and upload files. You can even choose to give your files for free, or for money.

If you want just a FIRST related one, etc., I'm all for it.