How will your team approach the Excellence In Design Award for 2010?

Technical CAD
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Taken from 5.3 of the 2010 Manual
“This year, Autodesk is proud to sponsor the Award for Excellence in Design – with two separate categories in this single Award. Category One will involve 3D Design; and Category Two will involve Animation.
All competitors for the Award will have the opportunity to choose from a range of 22+ Autodesk products to incorporate in their entry in 2010. Products are available for free*, along with learning materials and tech support, when you join www.autodesk.com/first However, if you enter in Category One your entry MUST include use of at least Autodesk Inventor Professional 2010. If you enter in Category Two, your entry MUST include use of at least either Autodesk 3ds Max or Autodesk Maya (GREAT news for those of you who enjoy working with the Macintosh platform: Maya runs on a Mac). Remember, you can use as many Autodesk products as you like…but use of at least one of the above products is required in the competition categories.”

What types of Autodesk programs will your team look to use in both categories? Do you think that this new formatting is beneficial to teams in FIRST?

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My team, 694, will be mainly competing in the animation portion for this award. We will use 3ds Max primarily for modeling, animation and rendering.
3ds Max 2010 has alot of new, useful modeling tools that were not available last year. We will probably use inventor for the design portion. Maya is very similar to Max, but it’s interface and workflow is different and confusing for our new members who have only been introduced to Max. Also, while it isn’t really in the spirit of the competition as we are encouraged to use only autodesk products, Google Sketchup is free and good for teaching modeling, and Photoshop CS4(Free Trial) or GIMP(Open Source) is really necessary if you want to make good textures.

In my opinion, changing the award really doesn’t change the competition much at all, however it might change the nature of the animation to be somewhat closer to the design aspect rather than “Visualization” or communication like it has been in previous years.