Shafted again

[opnickc]

Originally Posted by Paul Copioli

O.K. so being one of the people "shafted" by the morning awards I guess I should say something.

The WFA on Friday is a great idea. It gave people the entire competition to find me (if they dared) and congratulate me personally. I thought it was a good idea. Many people congratulated me that I didn't even know and I thought that was really cool.

With regards to the animation and inventor awards, I do see a change in attitude toward Autodesk and these awards, but I really don't see how the Friday a.m. awards ceremony was part of this. Plain and simple, these awards are pre-determined so why not give them out first? The awards ceremony is already too long as it is. Besides, the opening ceremony never really was a big audience getter but I bet next year the attendance at the opening ceremony will be much higher.

Ed, I can tell you first hand that Autodesk has placed a bad taste in our team's mouth. Does the Website award tell you what tools you must use? Does the Industrial design award tell you what tools you must use? The answer to both these questions is "no." Do the animation awards tell you which software you must use? You bet. Does the Inventor Award tell you what software to ... oh wait ... Inventor Award. The Autodesk guy was looking at our poster in front of our pit showing our robot design and use of solid models. He asked, "who did all the great Inventor work?" We replied, "we used SolidWorks." What he said next floored me. He said, "oh, that's too bad ... never-mind." Are you kidding me? That is ridiculous. The Inventor Award is a joke to me because it EXCLUDES any team that chooses to use a different set of tools to do robot design. Anyone who uses Inventor to do design, don't get me wrong, it is a great tool and keep using it but the award has an ulterior motive that just doesn't sit well with me.

-Paul

I have to agree with this. I've been forced to use 3dsMax for the animation. What if we'd rather use Maya? Or softimage? Or any number of other 3d softwares?

As far as the importance of the animation competition in the first place, I think it should be more tied into chairman's. Animation is a way of expressing ideas through video and audio produced in a spatual world created in the writer's imagination. For as long as I have been involved, the competition has always been the same; 'what appealing aspect of FIRST means the mostto your team'. What's funny is that almost no animations follow this criteria. Everybody wants something new! Why not 'show what your robot can do' or 'what does your team do in your community'? Why not make the animation part of the Chairman's presentation as well as its own competition? And why only 30 seconds? The regional with the most animations had 24, so even if each animation was 2 minutes it take less than an hour to view them all.

Anyway, kind of went off on a rant there. Hope I didn't offend anybody.