More details will be posted soon, but you should spend some time over the weekend on the following:

• character design (reference/research material and at least front and side image plane drawings)
• start of character model

If you have a model finished by next week, you can rig it as we discuss rigging. The final Project 3 will involve the character design, modeling, rigging, and basic animation. Project 2 will include some animation practice (details to be posted shortly).  

Here’s a very basic example of a walk-cycle, a fundamental animation exercise. Read chapter 5 in Character Animation Fundamentals as well as refer to The Animator’s Survival Kit or other texts for good references. Here are some excerpts.  Grab these quickly, and please do not share outside of the class. I’m going to take the link down soon.

• Our Shotgun page.
• Help and user guide.
• Production management with Shotgun, training videos from fxphd.
• “Shotgun in Three Minutes” video.

And the choices are… well, you’ll just have to wait until class tomorrow.  ;-)

Invites have been sent, so you should have received two shared folder invites.  One with your name that you’ll share just for submitting assignments by placing them in that folder.  Call them LASTNAME_320_H1, LASTNAME_320_P1, etc. The second invite is for the group production folder that we’ll use very shortly to organize assets if needed.  Some of this may be handled by Shotgun, though.  You’ll have your accounts set up for that in the next couple days. If you haven’t received the invites, check your inbox (and/or spam folder) carefully and let me know in class tomorrow (Wed).    

We’ll be using two resources to manage our production this session:

• Dropbox will be used both to submit assignments and coordinate production assets as needed. We’ll discuss setting up accounts for this tomorrow.
• Shotgun will be used for our production pipeline management.  Our site is digitalarts.shotgunstudio.com — I’ll need to get everyone setup in this, too, before we can start using it.  Hopefully tomorrow as well.