Quote:
Originally Posted by Church
........ And if it explains my obsessive love for animation, even better......
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Yay! someone else who obsesses over animation like I do!
tip for church, If you really want to get serious, start beefing up your drawing skills. No excuses like "Oh, I can't draw" Neither could I when I started a year ago, now, I can draw a few things. But not well, getting there though.
Ok back to this thread.
While I do agree with Mazin with learning the program, doing tutorials, yadda yadda... your eventually going to bore your students. Your just having them model all the them and do exercises. Sure, they will know the program, but you could still produce a crappy animation. Except now you have a really cool car model and scenery in it instead of a crappy car model and scenery.
What your students need to learn is
Animation not 3ds max. Learning animation will take your further than just learning 3ds max because then you don't even need to know a program to make animation.
It there is one way to learn animation and motion, that is through a book. This book I hold dearly and so do all other animators in the industry.
The Animator's Survival Kit By Richard Williams.
If you want to take your team to the next level then.
BUY THIS BOOK!!
IT IS THE HOLY GRAIL OF KNOWLEDGE!!
Now most of the techniques are for traditional hand drawn animation. But that is easily translatable to 3D animation. What this book does is puts you in the animation thinking mode. With this knowledge, you don't even need complex characters to win an AVA award. Heck, you can do it with a series of characters that are dots. Like the Mr. Men show on cartoon network.
Now that you get a basic knowledge of animation next thing you need to pick up is Cinema Photography Techniques. Learn composition, timing, and Narrative story telling. Then you will see why excessive camera movement is BAD!!!
Learn these two things, and you'll be cranking out animations faster then you can say "caca-poopoo-peepee-bottom."