[Roushey]

Well the problem lies in FIRST's target audience. The plain and simple fact is, that 90+ % of all students in FIRST are pre-engineers, or pre-Computer scientists, not artists. Essentially, you're looking for the 1 in 1,000 possibility of the artist engineer.(keep in mind I am not insulting the creativity of engineers and CS students, just their artistic ability.) What you should be doing is recruiting people from an art background, and then after the fact mention that it just so happens to deal with robotics. Since the Animation portion of FIRST is so far removed, you should treat recruiting people for it in the same manner. I think another problem is that 3ds gets confused with inventor and other similar CAD programs, so people think that it is all about technical drawings and whatnot. From my own personal experience, whenever someone asks what I've done a particular animation in, they always ask “is that like inventor or something?”

(On a side tangent, teams should also recruit art students for such things as full time PR members, and whatnot. This would more closely emulate the “real world” where companies have professional designers do their logos and PR work.)

Solution: More art students in FIRST!

Rant: Complete