Animation Winners at Nats

[RachelOfMars]

I haven't quite cooled off regarding this topic yet, so my apologies if I offend anyone by being mean here.

There were only two awards, and I think it was a mistake to get rid of the other three; unless there weren't five good animations, which maybe in Autodesk's opinion there weren't. Quite frankly, I wonder whether Autodesk people or Ted Boardman had anything to do with the judging process.

Team #1182 got Rookie award. I *think* I know which one that is -- one of the rookie animations that Ted Boardman showed during his speech on Thursday. Bouncing FIRST logo shapes, right? That was a fun one. Good materials and lighting and animating, good concept, good job. It would've been nice if FIRST had actually shown their animation during the ceremony.

And the Grand Prize winner... congratulations to team #967. Their entry was slick. It was a good concept. They did an amazing job and should be proud of their work, and I'm not just saying that to be nice; heck, their narration was incredible, I would pay that guy money to do such a good job narrating for an animation my team'd do. Only, only, only........ 967's entry wasn't an animation. I'm not even sure if it was 3DS they used for the little animated bits that were there; someone on my team said they it looked like an animation from Inventor. I was too distracted by the fact that it was so primarily not-CG, so I probably missed some things.

I'm... um... confused. When they played the winning animation, for awhile I wondered if they were accidentally playing a Chairman's entry instead of a Visualization one; then I tried to convince myself that the people there were 3D models. Nope. Personally, I thought that either the team with the crayon-animation, or team #103, should have won, at least out of the animations I saw on Einstein. There may have been other good ones that I missed, and maybe if you're better at looking past technical gimmicks, other teams did better. But even if technical skill isn't everything, that doesn't mean it should be nothing.

Anyone else have thoughts on this? Anyone from team #967? Feel free to tell me I'm wrong; I prefer to think that I'm crazy than that the people in charge are. (Although, that does seem to be the theme of the times...)