Week Five begins the first taste of why we are all here. Basic animation! The assignment this week was to just make a sphere move. Not to focus on the quality or motion but on how to use the actual controls for animating. I ended up Animating a snowman which is essentially 3 spheres stacked.  I thought I would keep it simple and have him sliding on ice.

I had a lot of fun finally being able to animate in Maya. It is a very complicated beast. Even working with the limited experience I can tell the amount of hours (maybe years) of thought that went into this programs user interface.

The 2008 San Diego Comic Con Comes to an end. A total sensory overload! I was there all day Saturday. This year was casual as I stayed away from the big attractions that were drawing crowds.  The lines to get into panels were incredibly long. You could waste a third of your day just waiting. If you are a single day patron that's a lot of time. 

I was able to hit up the Stuart Ng Booth that held the  Eric Goldberg book signing. He has a bran new book out called "Character Animation Crash Course!". So far I have only thumbed through it but what I have seen looks great. I am very interested in the Disc that comes with it. From my understanding it contains movies of animation examples that you can play, pause and rewind for study purposes.  The line for the signing was relatively short yet stayed consistent in length. It moved pretty fast as well. When I finally got up to see Eric and I did the usual greetings. He was very nice and out going.  It would have been awesome to site and talk to him longer... but I did not want to be "That Guy" who held up the line. He was very nice to pose for a picture. We had a small discussion about me attending Animation Mentor. He had a lot of good things to say about the school!  I can't wait to start implementing the book to use.

I spent a bit more time hanging around artist alley.  I was picking up a bunch of artists printed sketchbooks.  Unfortunately there were more books than bucks in my pocket. I am thinking about making one for next year so it was neat to see what everybody is doing. So much inspirational stuff. To name just a few... Stephen Silver, David Coleman, Erwin Haya, Javier Guzman, Patrick Morgan. Also I picked up a neat book called Depth Charge by Donnachada Daly. It is a stereoscopic 3d book that does not need glasses. You stare past the images until you see three images blurred. You then focus on the middle one and let your eyes relax. The image in the middle then starts to have some depth.

 To describe the rest of the day... Big crowds, Random celebrities and cool displays. With a pedometer we were able to track  the distance of 8 miles. Some of that was coming from and to the car a couple times but it does show you how much distance can easily be covered going up and down the isles. I have to add that we still had plenty of undiscovered territory. Till next year. 

Me and Stephen Silver

I will be headed out the the Comic Con this Saturday. I have a pretty busy schedule laid out with a bunch of meet and greets planned. While I am going for the name sake of pleasure, the con is an amazing place for networking.  I have been going enough times where I am starting to create friends and  acquaintances. I now have a tradition of booths to stop at each year. Some artists are just so popular it does not matter how many times you stop by. There are just too many fans  that pass through to remember.   I am usually slow to upload photos and what not but hopefully within a few days after I will have some updates. 

below is a couple of photos from recent years...

Chris Sanders and Me

 

I am now in the third week of Maya Springboard class for Animation Mentor. The first 5 weeks can be considered orientation and grace period to buy and get all supplies needed. Each week we have new access to some part of the site. First part was adding your profile informtion. Second week was to buy a webcam and test it out on the site. I ended up getting the Logitech 9000. A pretty sweet camera. Has all the bells and whistles. As well as the camera I finally purchased the tool of tools that will be used. I have my Maya 8 Complete in the mail and on it's way. On top of that I ordered a book that is highly recommended by the AM crew called Learning Autodesk Maya 2008, Foundation . Since I really have never used Maya I will need all the help I can get.

This week we finally got assigned to a class and a Peer Buddy as they call them. They will be the ones teaching us Maya. I also got to meet fellow students yesterday while attending my first group Q&A. I got to hear fellow studets ask questions about what is expected for the course. Seeing the school in action is very exciting for what is to come. Week 6 though 12 is the portion of the class for Maya training. Once that begins we will have two tasks to complete each week.