Safety Animation Released
 

From Usfirst.org


2009 Safety Animation Contest

Contest Information

You are invited to participate in the 5th annual FIRST Safety Animation Contest. The winning animation will be highlighted during the FIRST kickoff on January 3, 2009 and shown at each regional event.

Theme: Safety…share it

Object: Encourage FIRST participants to share safety at all stages of the competition.

Criteria: Animations should:

Be created using the software provided by Autodesk for the 2008 or 2009 competition season.
Be 15 to 30 seconds long
Contain one or more of the following attributes
Exhibiting gracious professionalism by helping teams struggling with safety and safe behavior.
Sharing your team’s experience and expertise in applying safety tips and techniques.
Reminding everyone of the importance of safe behavior at all times. For example:
Wearing safety glasses even when it’s hot and uncomfortable
Wearing safety gloves when lifting your robot or working with hand tools
Using the team approach to lifting a robot and other heavy tools/equipment
Operating tools and equipment so there are no regrets
Avoiding horseplay in the work and competition areas
Portray Gracious Professionalism and/or good sportsmanship
Be recorded on a DVD that is labeled with your team number and entry title.
Submission: Mail your animation and entry form to: FIRST Safety Animation, ATTN: Nancy Beringer, FIRST, 200 Bedford St., Manchester, NH, 03101 USA

Deadline: Animations must be received at FIRST by Monday, December 8, 2008

Please note that your DVD and the right to use and display your animation will become the property of FIRST.

Re: Safety Animation Released
 

Thanks for posting this.

Re: Safety Animation Released
 

Thanks again for the post, now to get brainstorming, and get the programs on the computer...this is going to be an interesting 2 months for more.

Re: Safety Animation Released
 

thanks for the post can't wait to try and make some kind of animation since its my first year even touching animation programs

Re: Safety Animation Released
 

that's what last year was like for me! as a general pointer, if an idea sounds way too basic/simplistic, its probably your best shot. Actually, that's what its still like for me :P.

Re: Safety Animation Released
 

And please, for the love of all things holy, don't do human characters if this is your first attempt at animation. They are hard to make them turn out right.

Re: Safety Animation Released
 

well its my first year never heard of the program but at my school i am taking a animation class. i'm doing some pretty cool things in there. of course tracing the pictures helps too lol

Re: Safety Animation Released
 

I feel like I should warn you all.

Animation is not something you can crank out over night, or even a week. Ok, wait, lets take that back a step. Good animation is not something you can crank out over night, or over a week. Be prepared to spend a LONG time in front of a computer.

For "The Most Extravagant Credits" It took me 3+ hours of work to get one second of animation with ted boardman. That doesn't include modeling, texturing, rigging, yada yada yada. Also leave a week for rendering.

You should all be making your characters for the AVA right now. Then you can have really good rigs on them and then use them for the AVA to fit the theme. I would really love to see a team have a purple cat with a yellow T-shirt on as their character then a "Realistic human" or "The Teams robot" or "The playing field" or "Generic bipedal Robot"

Re: Safety Animation Released
 

So True..... Humanoids are the bane of existence. In my year of animating, they are by far the HARDEST to make look halfway decent. I still fail at it.

Again, True. We (58) took all 5 and a 1/2 weeks (minus most Sundays)or whatever it was for last year's normal competition (about 720 hours or so, I can't do math tonight, so that's probably wrong) and it still didn't turn out great.

Re: Safety Animation Released
 

However, don't let any of this scare you. While 3dsm has a VERY steep learning curve, you also get very tangible results out of it. When I succesfully UVW mapped something properly for the first time, I felt awesome. When our AVA entry was done, I was happy, even if it looked bad and as a result of a last minute mistake on my part the camera ended up going through a wall :). So just remember to have fun while you're banging your head against the computer screen. Trust me on this one, you'll enjoy the headache more.

~Setsanto

Re: Safety Animation Released
 

Word.

I remember the excitement I had when I got a sphere and a cone to act as the same object when I first started out with max. Wow that was a long time ago, I was working with max 5.

Re: Safety Animation Released
 

Max 5? Man. That's old school. I started messing 8 on my first year in FIRST; then we finally got enough interest in it to merit a "team" of 4 people (3 students and 1 mentor). Thus our first animation was born last year.

But yes, simple is the way to go....Now if only I can relay that to the rest of my team...

Also, YAY! 2009's done downloading on my computer!

Re: Safety Animation Released
 

I still use max 8, Nothing drastic has really changed on max.

Re: Safety Animation Released
 

i love working on animating stuff i can sit in the computer for ever. i game for like 10 hours straight so thats not a problem for me. just makes it so i have a life lol

Re: Safety Animation Released
 

I say get off your gaming addiction, The last game I seriously played was.....hmmm... windwaker? but I never beat it. Ever since I got off games I've been pumping out animations left and right and getting REALLY good.