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 get too far into this web development blog, I should probably talk a bit about how I got started.
17 years ago, I went to school for Fine Arts and in 1998, Animation. Neither courses had anything to do with writing JavaScripts. No, but if it weren’t for the increasingly digital nature of how animation is being produced today, I certainly wouldn’t have discovered my passion for scripting.
I have been working for a company called PIP Animation for almost eight years now. Although the company had always boasted being all-digital (meaning the exclusive use of computers and software to accomplish what used to be done on paper), they we not yet using programs like Flash. It wasn’t until about three years ago that I syncronisly discovered that the Flash supported a form of JavaScript for it’s User Interface that practically wrote itself (by way of the History Panel) and I met Chris Fourney (who was already writing extensions for Flash). Between my own little discoveries whilst using designing in Flash, and seeing what Chris was doing, I was bitten by the bug.
I would have jumped right on the Scripting bandwagon if it weren’t for a teaching position that I was offered, and that I graciously accepted, for the same Animation program I had graduated from five years earlier. It was to teach 3D using Maya 7.0. I loved it. I got totally engrossed in the world of 3D and forgot about Flash and Scripting. Ironically though, through Maya, I began to learn MEL Scripting. MEL is Maya’s own flavor of JavaScript designed for is API (Application Programming Interface). So, even though I was involved in teaching the basics of 3D to students for the next two years, I still had this growing interest for scripting that was about to break through the surface.
The 3D teaching gig ended last year and since then I have been working at designing 2D characters in Flash and in the last few months, I have temporarily moved into a compositing job where I decide how to output layers for scenes animated in Flash to be treated in After Effects. Even though my jobs didn’t demand it (or give me much time for it), I have always tried to find ways to script everything I do, and learn more and more about the scripting language as I go. Between when I first started designing last year to now compositing, I have written over 20 scripts of varying complexity for the Flash API. Most of them just help me do my day-to-day tasks through automation. Some have been to design extensions through the used of SWF Panels, where I get to use my design sense to create user interfaces that I think are attractive, intuitive and functional.
As I return to the root of it all, JavaScript, through my ongoing self-training, I will begin to throw up a few of these scripts here on this blog. Hopefully I will begin to get some visitors who wouldn’t mind sharing their ideas and opinions on them.
I look forward to it.