Premades

[JamesWu]

I've been looking at people's animations and some of them look amazing. Are some models that you use premade? I'm guessing that they are either royalty free or purchased. Is this legal? Post your opinions.

[jbshaler]

If they are completely free and say you can use them for anything, then it is probably legal to use them, but you're unlikely to find any good models. The real question in such a case is whether it is fair.

I hope that teams stayed away from premade models, as I would feel cheated if some team won because of work that they didn't even do. It would be nice if the rules specified whether you could use others' models.

[Kevin Sevcik]

Heh. This is somewhat akin to using premade assemblies on a robot vs. building it yourself. I think the options for FIRST here are to go the same route as the robot rules or outlaw them altogether. So either there's a price limit and "BOM" on your animation, or no premade models are allowed. And then there's the question of using models made before the 6 weeks or not. A veteran team could work year round on a lot of models and have a large selection to pick from. So I think you should be wary of protests about all this, lest you get exactly what you ask for....

[Eugenia Gabrielov]

With all due respect, I've seen this issue brought up often, whether on robotics forums or simply through discussion with friends. As Kevin said, there are many variables to the situation that you can't truly account for without causing a whole lot of unnecessary and unprofessional issues.

I personally think it is the jurisdiction of the team. Each animation coach and team will have to make their own decision on the use of pre-mades to determine what their stand is and what they'll do. Beyond that, I don't believe there is a way to control that, unless I'm missing a key aspect of the animation competition.

Just my 2 cents.

- Genia