The first 3D workshop has come and gone.  We had a full house of eight people.  We ran out of time when it came to the Animation half of the workshop.  After I descried a typical 3D pipeline, spent a solid hour just on Maya’s interface, most of the time was spent on modeling (where I continued on mentioning even more elements of the user interface).  Animation was squeezed into the last 40 minutes.

Here’s a brief breakdown of how things went:

User Interface (UI)

This took more time than I originally scheduled for. Unfortunately, it’s one of the more difficult aspects of Maya for new-comers.  If I explain it in too short a time, I’m afraid people will have a hard time accomplishing the modeling and animation goals of the workshop.

Modeling

We covered polygonal modeling using a box-modeling style of a head.  Of that, I only covered using the “Inputs” section of the Channel Box (Also known as the object’s “Construction History”) to change an object after it has already been created in the scene.  Then I moved on to talk about  extruding faces out from the original surface of a polygon object, splitting some of the polygons into smaller polygons, and added entire “Edge Loops” of detail around the entire shape.

Animation

Animation suffered from a huge lack of time.  I covered the keyframing of a bouncing ball.  At the same time we used the “Graph Editor” to edit the curves that detailed the inbetweening of the animation.

The Dinner Break

Because we were so strapped for time, some people stepped out for dinner and brought food back and ate as I continued the workshop.  There wasn’t any one-on-one attention unfortunately, but I tried to move at a speed that most everyone could follow along to, and, for the most part, I think everyone did well.

For Next Time

I hope to make some minor changes to the lesson plan to better fit the material into the time frame better so the next workshop runs much smoother.  For the next workshop on the 31st of this month, I plan to start promptly at 4:00pm and hand out a printed version of the 3D pipeline description. I will also add a brief outline of the workshop to the “3D Training” page of this blog.  People can download it and have it as a guide during and even after the workshop’s over. I also have a short-cut card people can download and print out for reference that I will also put up on that same page.
So that’s it for now, but I want to thank everyone who came. I look forward to doing it again at the end of the month. See you there!

I posted the signup sheet this morning in the PiP breakroom and response was extremely good.  I think there is over a dozen names on the list now.  I will leave it up for the rest of this week just in case people haven’t seen it yet.  I will take the email addresses that people have provided and send out a newsletter of sorts detailing my intentions for the workshop, along with a propossed  date and time.  I am meeting with Dulcie tomorrow morning to discuss using PiP’s animation floor as a location to give the workshop from.  There are plenty of computers and they should be more than powerful enough to run Maya for what we will need it to do.  I am very hopeful that we’ll get access to the studio and have a great experience.

Before I converted www.douthwright.com into this Blog, there was a book store page where I had listed recommended books on art, animation, and 3D (specifically for Maya). Well, the book store is coming back. I am in the process of reviewing and revising my books list and making sure visitors can simply click on a book and link directly to an online book seller (it will either be Barnes & Noble or Chapters/Indigo, I haven’t decided yet). Any revenue generated from book sales will go toward maintaning this blog and future plans to include video tutorials for 3D in Maya. So check back in the next few days and you should be able to start checking out what books I recommend.

I finally decided on a working title for the 3D project so I had something more unique to refer to it as, than just “The 3D Project”. So, from here on I will refer to the 3D Project simply as “The Pilot”

The end goal is produce a static shot and leave it at that. So what that means is producing a full model of a pilot character, his outfit (which includes the helmet), the aircraft/spaceship, and the hangar where the scene takes place. Originally, there were plans to include a second character, a deck worker who might be refueling the spaceship, but the schedule won’t support it.

Even surface materials and lighting are being left out of the this first project. My only goals are the modeling of the scene objects and even then, only from the angel of the static camera. The test rig of the helmet was just an exercise in one of my other passions, rigging. It will be hard, but I have to leave rigging to another time.

As for the design style, I will be scanning some drawings in the days to follow this post which will show just where I am going with the style. All I can say, is it is no longer “photorealistic”, as I had first envisioned. I am now developing a more cartoon-like style with exaggerated elements. Stay tuned for some drawings that will hopefully say it all!

After many years (and just as many different looks), this site has settled into what it is today, my personal blog. Older versions of this site used to contain tips on how to put together a portfolio for submission to animation schools. I promoted the school that I went to for animation. I linked to every animation web site I knew. I posted my own portfolio. All this and every bit was hand-coded in pure html. It was a nightmare to keep things updated and the look always fresh.

I even had tried out Joomla last year as a solution to manually updating all those pages. Even Joomla turned out to be too much to work through in my “spare” time. So I settled on a nice, neat little blog. Will any of the old content find its way here? Perhaps, but for now I am just going to slide into the world of blogging gracefully and without lofty goals. I hope you will appreciate it and come back from time to time to see what’s new.

‘Till next time, farewell.