Quote:
Originally Posted by Church
Aside from lots of practice, any good strategies for keeping the team interested and organized? I
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Yes, you need to find a fun project that everyone likes. The safety animation and AVA award aren't the projects. Because, lets face it, the safety animation and the AVA entry are really boring projects.
If you make something wacky and crazy like
this animation I'm pretty sure a lot more students will get involved and see the fun in it. And this style of animation can easily be done in 3ds max. It would require a lot of Photoshop, But when It comes time to animate. Your only moving planes around.
Also, even though its a Robotics program. You need artists, especially in the animation team. Students who love to draw and come up with characters can put every member of the team on the same page. They can paint out scenes and then everyone will know what they have to do. I always find that an animation made by artist is normally far better then one made by students that are technical minded. The tech guys tend to remain in the box and normally end up with an animation that is a advanced form of a picture slide show.
The problem now is that student that are really good at drawing and art tend to not want to learn a complex computer program and normally shy away from it.
which causes a delemia
Another thing you need to do is introduce the students to the joy of completing an animation and having large audience view it. This I think can hook them but it has to be big, like screened in a film festival or played over the comps at the robotics events. This to me is a huge rush, and this is why I make animations. I don't think I've accomplished showing a student the joy seeing audiences view your work. Its a very hard thing to do.
Also books, lots and lots of books at your disposal. Now while it is good to have "3ds max Bible" on hand, its a really technical and boring book. The F1 key in max normally can solve any problem that the book can. What your students need to learn is Animation. Not how to use max, because if they learn animation, Then they only need to know 3ds max basics to produce an very good animation.
One book I recommend is
The Animator's Survival Kit it explains the breakdown of motion.
Another rule I like to impose on is, No Human Characters. Period.
Especially for newbies, Human Characters are hard. Very hard to do. And if they are not done right, they end up looking very very bad. You have to get accross to your students that what they are making is
Animation not, "hey lets copy something and try to make it look as real as possible in 3ds max!" You don't even need characters to have faces. As long as they move well, your audience assumes thats the way you planed it. Like in this
10 second animation i did. and yes, that entire thing can easily be made in max.
This is what I've come to learn after 4 years of teaching 3ds max to students.