Welcome! Here’s to a productive and fun semester! A few things to get started:

• We’ll go by the syllabus and general schedule posted on this site.
• If you haven’t yet, you can pick-up your academic license of Maya 2014 here at Autodesk Education (and you may also be interested in Mudbox as well). We’ll tentatively plan to stick with Maya 2014 for everything to keep a standard, and even though you can work from home, I very strongly recommend working from the Digital Arts lab as much as you can.
• You’ll have 24-hour card access setup within the first week or two for the Digital Arts lab where software is already installed.
• We’ll be using Dropbox for homework submission, Blackboard occasionally for quizzes, and Shotgun for production (and possibly asset) management.
• Homework will be graded on a check system; other assignments and the overall course on the standard UNCW 10-pt/+/- letter-grade system.

To start the class we’ll discuss the production pipeline and narrative structure as well as lead into some history and principles of animation.  Then we’ll follow with character design and animation, the basics of rigging, and more production material and practice.  We’ll have some brief coverage of scripting within Maya and other topics.