Well, its all over....
 

Well, now since the animation portion of the competion is now over untill judging, how are you people looking back on this? What are you going to do different next year? Were you happy with your results? What were your problems?

I never did get to finish my animation, but I am not that unhappy, personally I think it was a great learning experience, I spent a lot of time learning new things (such as reactor) and hope to use what I learned this year; and make a very good animation next year. I know that one problem was the fact that I needed to learn a lot of new things and I think that my orgininal plan was a little too ambituous for what I could do at the time. But now since I will be working on this 10-15 min animation this summer, I hope to learn a ton of new things and be able to refine my skills and get things done quicker.....

Re: Well, its all over....
 

Well, overall, I think that our team did the best that we could. Especially when I'm the only one on the team that does animation. If I had more time or if I had used my time more wisely, I think I could've done better than what we have now. But, I'm happy with the output and glad that all of the hard work is over,...for now.

Re: Well, its all over....
 

We did pretty well, but we REALLY underestimated rendering and all. Even with simple geometry and low polygon counts (we're newbs) and few reflective surfaces we still churned out some huge render times. Anyways, we didn't submit for the award but be on the lookout for next year, it's gonna be a killer!

From another rookie
 

For the SparX this was our first year animating. We had a team of four for animation and pulled off a pretty impresive short, for rooks anyway. We tried to have a story with our and sheer away from displaying words and following them with 3-4 seconds of animation. It worked really well except we tried to cram to much story in only 30 seconds. Anyway good luck to all @ regionals and nationals.

Re: Well, its all over....
 

i'm a senior
this was my first year
this was my last year
I was the only one that worked on it
I did it how I wanted to do it
I don't really care that I did it, just something to occupy my break

Re: Well, its all over....
 

My last year too-
I think we did alright. We did a better job at "remixing" last year's animation, but the actual animating was overestimated and the renderings were a little too quick. All in all- better quality, but if we done things a week earlier, we would have realy done well.
Our animation isn't really for competition but for the other animation and the public to see. We didn't want to do the default "show our bot" or "kiss up to FIRST" thing.
But I'm uncertian on the quality of next years animation however- I had the strongest desire to animate on the team and well the rest... I guess they need to practice more so the editing process than their moddeling phase. When push comes to shove, I hope we enter a quality piece.

If not- It wasn't me :D

Re: Well, its all over....
 

Need to pre-design things to use in the animation instead of wasting time struggling to build them during the six weeks and learn how to download files from Inventor to 3D Studio Max.
I am so very temped to use flash to animate our cat Xavier. Making a character in 3-D Studio Max is a major headache.

Re: Well, its all over....
 

Is it legal to predesign? We had our storyboard ready last year and were waiting untill the kickoff event...

Re: Well, its all over....
 

I was hearing about teams starting animations in the summer. We don't even have our team together til October and they aren't assigned to teams til after kickoff. You could probably start next year's animation now if you wanted to. How would FIRST know and why would they care?

Re: Well, its all over....
 

I'm completely satisfied with Cyber Blue's animation entry this year - I had one goal and that was to top last year's animation in quality, and I feel like we did that. However we do at regionals, I'll know that animation has come a long way within the last few years on our team, and it can only get better :]

Re: Well, its all over....
 

On the subject of animation over the summer...

GRT was going to do an animation training thing over the summer, and our community outreach people had the idea of turning it into a second animation competition. the idea was to spend 6 weeks during the summer making an animation as a "practice" FIRST build. The rules would probably be different (like letting you use whatever software/codec you wanted), but the intent would be similar: make a 30 second commercial for your team, mostly as training for next year. I'm not exactly sure how judging would go (possibly a bunch of people, selected from teams near us), but I think that it would be a fun thing to do and a good way to prepare for next year's competition.

So how many other animation people would be interested in doing something like that?

Send me email if you are interested, so that I can start trying to organize this
ekessler@gunnrobotics.org

Re: Well, its all over....
 

I think our team did ok. Could have been better though. Everybody on our team were utter n00bs, including me. Our final barrier was stitching it together. And doing a final render. And since I'm a senior I won't be coming back next year to help out again. Oh well. At least there was someone on our team who will be back. I hope he does a lot better job next year than we did this year. Just a warning to all teams. LOOK OUT!! We'll be back next year.:)