You should have received:

• Dropbox Production Folder invite to your requested email.
• Dropbox 320 Homework/Project Submissions Folder invite to your requested email.
• Shotgun account invite to your UNCW email.

Please confirm the Dropbox invites and also login to da.shotgunstudio.com and change your password.  Also, please upload a photo of yourself so that others in the class can recognize you.

As mentioned in class Friday, do your best to do homework #1 and bring some work to discuss today, but do not worry if you have some issues. We’ll take time this first week to address and fix them, and you’ll have a few days before you’ll need to submit your homework. We’ll wait to make sure that card access for the DA lab and also our Dropbox setup is ready to go.

• Free tools for exporting movie files from image sequences (mileage may vary): Sequimago (Mac), Framed X (Mac), VirtualDub (PC).  You can also use Quicktime Pro 7, Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro, After Effects, etc. (set still image duration to 1 frame) or even the powerhouse Windows Movie Maker (set rate to 1/24 sec per frame) — some of these may still be installed in the lab (but this summer things may be a bit iffy on the extra installs down there).
• Here is a link to a video tutorial on Toon Boom Animate, if you choose that for your hand-drawn homework. We’ll probably only be doing 2 or 3 of these at most, though, for the sake of time.
• Character animation book online extras.
• HTCM book resources including goon and groggy rigs.
• Other sources of free rigs to consider: 1-Second Club, Creative Crash, and Lester Bank’s blog post.

• Read over this for descriptions relative to the first project.
• Here is a rough guide to what we’ll probably cover in the first segment of this course.

 

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.