Well, since the award has the exact same criteria as last year (offical 2005 docs up on first website) its time to get cracking. Seems that this is going to be a one-man job for me, but I got someone who is experienced in making music to help me with that… So who is working on the animation? Whats your role going to be? How many people working on it?.. Any ideas?
6 weeks of having no life… w00t! 
One person job for me too, it looks like… Uh oh! 
Good Luck to All teams!
My role is lead animator. As lead animator, I plan on giving the majority of the work to the other members so that they have experience with all aspects of creating an animation. My role is basically helping each of my teammates establish a comfortable workflow and speed up their learning curve. Many of my teammates are new to animation, and I feel it is best if I be sort of a mentor, but still help model some stuff… However, I’ll probably be the rendering/lighting tech… hehe… i love watching renders 
It must be a challenge to work on the animation by yourself. Feel free to ask questions about anything… I know MConte is very knowledgable with Reactor. 
That roller coaster sim was awesome!!!
And Again
Happy Animating!
We’re still trying to decide on our theme and methods of accomplishing this theme. I know that even attempting human models are very complex and complicated… which is why I want to stay away from them, but I’m not really seeing any other way around it.
Got any tips on creating realistic humans with realistic features and motion? :]
I’m excited though 
When craeting a human, don’t make what you don’t see, a man with a T-Shirt is harder to make than a man with a long-sleeved turtleneck, since you don’t need to fully model the arms and neck for instance, invest heavily in the details that will be seen most, and nobody will tell the difference between the two otherwise.
As for animation, set up the rig so that it does some of the work on its own, but not much- since it’s a short animation, it’s not worth the time to make a complicated rig that walks on its own if you kust tell it where to go, it’s more time efficient to do all the small movements and reactions yourself, but basic rigging will save you hours of work and frustration.
Also, depending on your intended movie, mix the modeling advice with the animation one, if a man walks past a table, the time you don’t see his legs is time you don’t need them to move realisticly, strategicly placing objects can make animation easy work.
edit:
Another thing- I saw all the animations from 2004, the thing that really got to me was that some animations looked really nice, other than one thing that was made poorly or was out of place somehow, and it would ruin the whole animation- PAY ATTENTION TO THAT, EVERYONE!
Certainly. Here’s a really good tutorial on facial modeling:
http://www.3dzealot.com/php/index.php
Also, if you go to www.scriptspot.com, search for FaceMaker and Handmaker. These are very useful tools. My team is considering character animation this year; however, I know there’s alot of work that goes into rigging a model and I’m not even sure if we can do it properly. But we’ll try. 
But yea, I totally agree; creating humans and animating human models is a challenge.
[one more day until kickoff]
Here are some links to some tutorials that I think will help people out esspically for animation and stuff…
Animation - http://www.keithlango.com/popThru/popThru.html
Animation (walking) - http://www.biomotionlab.ca/Demos/BMLwalker.html
A whole documented sequence of making an animation from conception to completion - http://www.awayproject.fr.st/
Character Studio - http://www.maxhelp.com/csc/csc_tutorials/csc_index_tutorials.htm
Hundreds of links to tutorials - http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=21263
3dTotal 3dsmax tutorials - http://67.15.36.49/ffa/tutorials/tutorialsmax.asp
Mental Ray materials and tutorials - http://www.jeffpatton.net/Mental-ray.htm
Interesting read on lighting and how to simulate moods in 3d - http://www.itchy-animation.co.uk/light.htm
Some good tutorials - http://www.3dm-mc.com/tutorials/
Good luck
our team (663) is finally going to do an animation this year. Myself and another person are working on the animation, and we may have some other people help out.
I have a question - we would really like to do some sort of lego design in our animation, I was wondering if and how we should get consent from lego
Lego doesn’t have allmighty superior copyrights, you don’t need their consent to make a lego piece in 3d…
btw, asking a major corporation for some sort of consent is futile, they don’t want to bother with kiddies 
Plus you won’t be profiting off of it, so its fine.
I myself am in charge of our team’s animation (again) for the 3rd year. But this year I have been working hard during the offseason to learn anything i can. In addition If have a few, “grunts” erm, I mean recruits that I’m trying to teach Max to so it’ll be fun…
Good Luck to all team members and I can’t wait to see what each team can produce
I’m sorry, but can someone please point me to the requirements page/the theme for this years animation. I must be missing it, I’ve been searching for a good 20 minutes and can’t find it.
Its the same thing that it has been for the past couple years, “what does FIRST mean to your team”… I wish they would have picked a new one…
EDIT The requirements are on Section 9 page 20. For the Autodesk Visualization award.
I second that. I’m going to have a problem even matching my animation last year. I was really hoping for a different prompt. Oh well 
Just recently got started on my team’s animation. Wasn’t able to do last year’s because I was swamped, but I’ve gotten a head start on it this year.
My goal this year is to make an animation that doesn’t ■■■■ off a bunch of people.
Our team should have 6-7 animators this year, only three of which have any experience, and none of which are particularly good.
Oh well, we’ll still be able to come up with something pretty cool.
We came up with an idea last night, going to work on the storyboards and whatnot tonight
Can’t wait to get this done to see the final product… I think you’ll all get a kick out of it :]
I’ve been a part of my team for the past 2 years, this will be third. For the past 2 years I’ve been trying to llead my team into composing and finalizing an animation. We still havent been able to finish our animation since 2 years ago! Only 2 kids on team know Max Me and the other one but he’s doing programming. I end up trying to do whole thing, never works out. Im going into building this year. Only thing im worried about is if im not the leader, then noone will be doing it and noone will learn. Over 2 years i have accomplished to teach about 10 students the basics. But the basics dont get u anywhere. im also limited in my own knowledge thus the limitations and obstacles. end up searching google for a tutorial on how to do every single model of some object or how to do a camera affect or a star effect or u know