Welcome!  It’s going to be a whirlwind but productive and fun five weeks. Here are a few things to get started:

• We’ll go by the regular-semester syllabus (and to some degree schedule) posted on this site, but here’s a condensed schedule that should match pretty closely to what we’ll end up doing in this shorter summer session.
• If you haven’t yet, you can pick-up your academic license of Maya 2013 here at Autodesk Education. As mentioned in class, we’ll stick with Maya 2013 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.  It will help, especially with the condensed schedule, to have people around to help.

Today we talked about the production pipeline, and as a quick reminder, here was your informal homework from today:

• Watch After You and breakdown the 3-act structural elements. How do these work well as an animated short?
• Brainstorm a sheet with columns for characters, settings, and motivations.  The settings don’t necessarily need to be tied to a character (although it helps if it can further the story), but the motivations should be tied to the character.  We’ll use these tomorrow to help you finish a story concept.
• Try to do a ball-bounce animation in Maya.  Again, don’t worry if your Maya experience is limited at this point, we’ll discuss tomorrow.

I will plan to be around the Digital Arts Lab from about 2 to 5:30 p.m. today (Thursday) for last-minute questions and help.

• Your animated shots for the final production.
• Your departmental and other contributions to the final production.
• The final production being completed on time.
• Your shots and other work presented via your portfolio website for the final meeting.

More details pending.

Thursday we’ll begin covering some of the basic tools for rigging:

• hierarchy
• joints and skinning
• IK chains
• controllers
• constraints
• connections, expressions, set-driven keys
• attributes
• blend-shapes

Here’s a basic version of Job in progress that I’ll use for an example mesh.

Here’s the list so far.

Here are the files for the example.

Jump reference.