By Mike Pauza (Mikepauza) (209.109.238.36) on Friday, January 24, 2003 - 10:20 pm:

I know most people wind up modeling, texturing, lighting, and rendering... but are not most people attracted to 3D in the first place because they want to create animation? Am I way off on this?

The reason I ask is that I'm about to teach an into 3D class to a bunch of folks with little or no 3D/art experience, and the goal of the class to try to get them to have fun creating simple art, not learn the software. I'm thinking ofspending only a fraction of the class on "traditional stuff", and spending the bulk of the time guiding them to experiment with various animation techniques with simple but really cool lesson specific scenes that I create for them. Not only do I want my students to get a lot out of the class, there's a somewhat snobbish Maya program in town that is teaching "what the buttons do", and I want to help my "inferior LW students" work to kick thier royal Mayan bums.

Thanks for any and all comments. -Mike

By Dan Heim (Heimhenge) (63.184.9.190) on Saturday, January 25, 2003 - 12:00 am:

Without animation what is 3D other than a nicely rendered still with appropriate shadows and surface effects? Hell, you can do that in Corel PhotoPaint (not a dig ... I like Corel).

Yeah ... I think it's the animation that hooks them.

By Steve White (Hrgiger) (24.95.88.69) on Saturday, January 25, 2003 - 01:26 am:

Mike,

I think that's the right choice. Animation is the reason I got into 3D.

By Larry Shultz "SplineGod" (Larrys) (216.244.32.122) on Saturday, January 25, 2003 - 02:41 am:

Mike, what I would do is to get them started doing stop motion animation which can be done cheaply with webcams and a few other odds and ends. Have them do some claymation, animate everyday objects frame by frame or construction paper cutouts. The nice thing is that it can be done quickly and you can see the results quickly.
The important thing is to give them a positive experience and try and transfer the principles over to Lightwave.

By Lernie D Ang (Faulknermano) (210.14.22.119) on Saturday, January 25, 2003 - 08:00 am:

i got into 3d because i wanted to make a short story.. my very own short movie. look where i am now. :| (in front of the CRT)

By Ken Mac (Kenmac) (67.83.211.28) on Saturday, January 25, 2003 - 08:20 am:

Hey Mike,
I used to teach Strata here in the city a few years ago. I started with the basics and then worked up to the old bouncing ball. Once they got a hold of that there wasn't any looking back.
You will know within a class or 2 how quickly they (students) can catch on. You will love the experience...I had a complete blast.
Good luck,
Ken Mac

By Mike Pauza (Mikepauza) (65.84.248.153) on Saturday, January 25, 2003 - 11:05 am:

You guys rock!

Special thanks to Larry and Ken...I plan on using very very very simple characters for them to practise technique with, then I'll give them a cool rigged character and see what they can do.

By Gregory Douglas LeMieux (Lone) (161.231.1.21) on Saturday, January 25, 2003 - 11:46 am:

my long-term goal is to animate. that being said, even if it weren't, i still would have gone the 3D route. sure you can do stills in other programs, but what if you don't like the angle of the 'shot' (i haven't done any 2D CGI, it may not be a big deal)? i like being able to change the camera, lights, etc., on the fly. and just modelling is a blast, too.

i do think most everyone else is here for the animation.

By Richard Green (Quivver) (213.249.173.235) on Saturday, January 25, 2003 - 03:08 pm:

From a personal perspective my interest in all things 3D was sparked when a magazine (ST Format for the Atari ST) did an article/tutorial on POV-Ray. However, I would agree that animation is one of the main reasons people get into 3D. Almost all of the "Introduction to 3D" articles I have read more or less suggested the same thing.

By Scott Lange (Castius) (208.58.117.41) on Saturday, January 25, 2003 - 04:00 pm:

I found this guys animation tips to be everything I learning in two years of bad 3d school (AIPH) in a few pages. Hope it helps in any way.

http://www.anticz.com/

By Nigel Gilbert (Nige) (62.253.32.4) on Saturday, January 25, 2003 - 04:56 pm:

Hi,

Just to be different, my interest in 3d does not include animation at all. Stills are cool too!!! I'm interested in archaeological reconstruction and brough LW for this reason.

ta


nige.

By W Wade Woehrmann (Thewww) (208.143.74.82) on Saturday, January 25, 2003 - 05:04 pm:

Well a few still shots is all that was needed to help my company sell some 500 million +or- worth of building projects. I am looking forward to using the animation part of Lightwave soon, but for work its been the still images that has put the bread on the table.


Wade

By Burton R. Ogden (Burton) (172.133.16.101) on Saturday, January 25, 2003 - 08:24 pm:

My original reason for buying Inspire 3D was to help me create sketches for paintings. I wanted to have all of the composition problems pre-solved in the sketches.

Good composition can involve quite a few things. We all know that when we take a snapshot that it is a good idea not to have a tree growing out of the top of someone's head. Moving the camera a few inches one way or the other can make the difference between a good composition and a bad one. But getting a good composition involves lots more than avoiding such obvious goofs. A lot of principles come into play.

At that time I was doing a series of butterfly paintings. Getting the sketches "just so" was in the spirit of the carpenter's creed to "measure twice, cut once." And I was getting tired of overpainting to correct my mistakes in composition.

Some artists use those little wooden poseable mannikins of people as the basis for their sketches. In that tradition, I made some paper models of butterflies to pose them.

I spent a lot of time futzing with them trying to get the composition and perspective just right in the sketch stage. It became apparent that my paper models were too simplistic. My sketches looked like paper butterflies.

So I tried building a more elaborate oversized model using wire for the skeleton of the butterfly wings. That turned into more work than I anticipated, and the wireframe butterfly was subject to getting "bent out of shape." But the wireframe butterfly suddenly "clicked" in my mind with the wireframes of 3D graphics and I thought, "Why not?"

At first I experimented with RayDream and eXtreme 3D, but settled on Inspire 3D because polygonal modeling seemed appropriate for simple quick-to-build models that were better than my paper models. Then I discovered how much better it was to let the computer do complex lighting and shadows, and the 3D connection with 2D art became more attractive.

Most artists know that it is better to draw and paint from life. While live butterflies are quite willing to pose nude, they are not very compliant models. They tend to be, how would you say it, "flighty." It became obvious to me that computer butterflies were inherently much more "trainable" and could serve when painting from life was not feasible. That is the approach I plan to follow.

I have also taken an interest in animation, but haven't learned to do it yet. I have upgraded to LightWave. The obvious next step would be mocap with butterflies. Maybe next year on that.

-- Burton --

By Colin Kai Heaps (Colkai) (81.86.199.212) on Sunday, January 26, 2003 - 09:07 am:

For me, animation is something "I'll get to", but I just like creating compositions.
Unlike my wife, (damn her ;-) ), I am not very artistically skilled in 2D. LW allows me to translate some images from my mind onto a canvas of sorts.
I just love coming up with ideas and seeing how they end up. Of the one or two animations I've done, they are either fly-throughs, or logo animations. I do have many ideas, but with a full-time day job, nowhere near enough time to get them done. Which I'd guess is about the same for most folks ;-)

By Jeff Thomann (Mastermesh) (128.206.230.89) on Sunday, January 26, 2003 - 01:35 pm:

Hey Mike, you might want to let the class know about the forums here... I know of at least one teacher on the forums at Caligari.com that keeps a website of trueSpace classwork and posts links to it on the forums. I think that if you direct the students to the forums, especially the techniques one, it may help them quite a lot.

By riki (Suture) (203.109.249.131) on Sunday, January 26, 2003 - 02:59 pm:

One general principle to learning that you need to remember, if the information isn't relavant, they're going to forget it. When I was learning LW at Uni our lecturer raved on about stuff that would be useful to me now, but at the time just put me to sleep. I think students only retain about 20% of everything you tell them, so you need to ease them in, show them lots of demo reels etc to get the jucies flowing.


It annoys me that the LW manual (if you read it from beginning to end) teaches you how to use the Graph Editor, before they've taught you the basics of modeling. I think most students will have a very basic approach to 3D. If you have a 14 week course you'll probably find that they spend the first 13 weeks working on a model and then go crazy at the end trying to animate it. Well that's what happened to most students in our class.

Maybe get them all to animate a walk cycle and try to shift the focus away from modeling. So that each week focuses on a specific aspect of the animation process.

By Will Silver (Lw_Will) (66.27.96.238) on Sunday, January 26, 2003 - 04:05 pm:

I think the main problem with teaching modeling and animating is that, given the set of tools, there is one way to model…

Okay, that isn’t technically true. There are several ways to model, but the basic techniques of moving points and creating from primitives are universally accepted.

Animation, i.e. rigged humanoid animation, there are as many approaches as there are animators. Even rigging… I’ve rigged several characters, each of which had major problems, things I should’ve realized I couldn’t do… there was no one like Larry looking over my shoulder to help.

Now, I’ve seen William Vaughn demoing ACS4. This changes EVERYTHING.

If you use a standard rig for your animating… you use a STANDARD RIG! EVERYTIME. This allows you to get better at handling the rig every time you use it. You get to reuse motion mixer data between rigs and characters. There is, finally, a SINGLE way to get characters animated. Fast, accurately, on time every time…

I have been blown away each time I’ve used the demo version of ACS4, and I will be purchasing the full version later this week!

I want to animate like Chuck Jones or Hayao Miyazaki… ;-)

By Larry Shultz "SplineGod" (Larrys) (216.244.21.72) on Sunday, January 26, 2003 - 05:04 pm:

ACS4 seems to be good for reapplying a rig that youve had to figure out beforehand. In many cases it will probably be able to produce a rig that works most of the time. There will be cases where you will have to get a rig that works on a special case and then load that into your ACS "database" Ive had to rig things on many occassions that couldnt be done directly in something like ACS4. Maybe a basic template could have been used to start with but many times the rigging has to be done in layout as youre going along. This is especially true where you have a character covered in armour or other strange things. Ive had to go back and forth between layout and modeler to get the pieces of armour to behave properly. Its also a case of figureing out if bones are the way to go on animating some pieces of the armour or linking them to bones in one of several ways. Ive had characters that were a mixture of soft (bone animated) parts and rigid (parented to bones) parts.
ACS4 looks like a good way to get basic, reuseable templates where you can then refine them further in layout. Many times those custom setups cannot be reused because the armour and other pieces are distinct to certain characters.
The bottom line is that people who dont know how to rig can get to a starting point faster. Those that do know how to rig will be able to remove much of the tedium from rigging.
I still think is important to understand the underlying principles of rigging to be able to produce better then average rigs.

By Gregory Douglas LeMieux (Lone) (161.231.1.22) on Sunday, January 26, 2003 - 05:12 pm:

speaking of the manual, i thought it was odd that the entire animation section came before the modelling - seems one should learn to crawl before one learns to walk, or, it's hard to animate without models!

By riki (Suture) (203.109.249.131) on Sunday, January 26, 2003 - 05:36 pm:

yeah I agree, for a newbie taking on the manual, they'll be lucky if they survive the section on the Graph Editor and the Spreedsheet Manager, especially if it has no relevance becuase they still have figured out the basics to modeling.

By Matt Clary (Mattclary) (208.255.196.58) on Monday, January 27, 2003 - 07:06 am:

I personally got into 3D to create stills, but have become more interested in animation as time goes on. I consider myself more of a draftsman than an artist, hard for me to come up with original ideas and give them detail.

Mike, each of your students will probably have a different reason for being there, so one answer may not fit all. I will have to disagree with Larry on this one, these guys are taking "Intro to 3D", not "Intro to Animation". If I took this class and you handed me a ball of clay, I'd be a little disappointed. You need to cover both modeling and animation, but not expect them to be experts in either when they leave. I would plan some simple modeling exercices for them, maybe a Gumby-like character that could be done quickly, maybe model Gumby's living room (keep it simple), then animate this. You are just giving them enough to wet their appetite, not getting them a job at Pixar.

By Derek Mebius (Mebek) (205.188.208.43) on Monday, January 27, 2003 - 10:49 am:

Actually, I've also started teaching a class at college, and I've found that the students (especially ones who have a) never used a 3D program before, or b) have used a different 3D program) find Lightwave easier to use if you show them Layout first!
It's simpler interface allows the students to soak in the info rather than drown in it. All I have them do is load in the pre-built models that come with LW and create a simple scene. This is a beginner class, after all, and starting with keyframing exercises is usually the easiest. Their first assignment was to parent an object to a null and have the object rotate around it. This shows them the relationships between a parent and child object. This week, I'll introduce them to Graph Editor, since it's the next logical step. Then camera / render properties, then lighting, and then surfacing. Only after all that, we'll get into modeler and have them create their own objects and figure out what all those menus and menus of buttons are for.

If a student has never used LW before, then modeler will just be overwhelming for them. This way, they already know the basic interface format. They'll have moved past the hangup on the interface and be ready to create something, AND animate it at the same time. The best way to model, after all, is to have the final animation in mind when you create your objects.

--Mebek

By riki (Suture) (203.109.249.131) on Monday, January 27, 2003 - 05:47 pm:

I guess it also depends on what type of class it is your teaching. If it's a class where people are paying to specifically get an intro to lightwave or if it's part of a degree course where students are assessed on the artwork produced.

By Mike Pauza (Mikepauza) (209.109.224.136) on Monday, January 27, 2003 - 11:39 pm:

HMM.

The class was advertized as a fun intro course for aspiring 3D artists, so I think what I will probably do is have them work through some neat tutorials and talk about the artistic side of it, while trying to minimize the tech. A few of you will probably dissagree a bit, but I think I want them animating for 2/3 of the class. The first class is kind of abitious...after the first hour of motivational eyecandy I'll see if I can get them "a little" comfortable with keyframing a bouncing ball with some squash and stretch going on. I "modeled a background object" they will use as a template to set up thier keys (see below). Hopefully that makes it easier for them. I want to devote a few classes wiht typical cool LW stuff besides animation, but if they can handle class1, with some help they can also copy poses, a head turn, a walk cycle, a facial expression, etc. A handfull of classes doing that stuff might allow them to do something something interesting looking with a simple and solid prerigged character, and that would make me happy...and hopefully them too!





What do you guys think of having them copy keys like this first class? Am I savy or insane?

By riki (Suture) (203.109.249.131) on Monday, January 27, 2003 - 11:59 pm:

Mmm good idea. I guess the real aim of these classes (and art college for that matter) is not so much to teach the program, but to wet their appetites and introduce new things, ie 3D animation. The ones who pick it up will continue on with their own reserch. I think that's the best think you can do is introduce new thinks to them.

By Mike Pauza (Mikepauza) (209.109.225.67) on Tuesday, January 28, 2003 - 10:38 am:

Thanks Riki, I think you're right. Just hope I can pull it off.

By kevin phillips (Kevman) (210.86.114.109) on Wednesday, January 29, 2003 - 06:09 pm:

Regarding your original question, here's a few suggestions...

(1) Start your course by asking the students 'What are you hoping to get out of this course?'

That would be the best thing you could do - Just go through the students and ask them to just say a few words. Take note what they say then proceed to (2)...

(2) Be flexible with your course material - Based on the student expectations, be ready to slightly alter or add material to benefit the majority

Hope those help - Thats probably the best way to find out what Newbies would be expecting...

By Burton R. Ogden (Burton) (172.128.184.203) on Thursday, January 30, 2003 - 03:39 am:

Mike,

"... the goal of the class to try to get them to have fun creating simple art, not learn the software. I'm thinking of spending only a fraction of the class on "traditional stuff", and spending the bulk of the time guiding them to experiment with various animation techniques with simple but really cool lesson specific scenes that I create for them."

I think that's a good plan. Beginners need some "instant gratification" and by prebuilding the models and the scene you can bypass the slow, tedious stuff.

Kevin's idea of asking the students what they hope to get out of the course could be a good thing. It also could backfire if it turns out your students want something wildly different from what you are prepared to present. I probably would rather animate a dancing girl than a bouncing ball.

I have to say, I never had a professor ask us what he should teach us. We expected the prof to already know that. In fact we expected to be told what we should get out of the course. At least, most of us did. If the prof had asked us what to teach, he would have shattered his "authority figure" image. Unless, he followed up by telling us our suggestions were wrong, and then proceeded to tell us what we really needed to learn.

But that was then. I know things are more informal and permissive nowadays. But still you don't want "the inmates to be in control of the asylum." OK, maybe that is not politically correct -- the students are not insane asylum inmates. At least most of them aren't. (grin)

By Larry Shultz "SplineGod" (Larrys) (216.244.19.18) on Thursday, January 30, 2003 - 05:00 am:

Mike, I would split things up into two parts:
1. Teach animation in the simplist, hands on way possible. Stop motion using cheap web cams is easy. Very little software to learn and you move your clay or paper cut out figures around. Its fun and you can teach a bit of lighting with real lights, you can teach animation timing and so forth. The students only have to compile their images and play back the animation. Its very hands on and fun. I got to do this in high school and really taught me a lot. Once you have given them the basic idea THEN move them over to the software. The animation basics are already taken care of and they can work on learning the software to apply the principles you taught them before. They really have to have a good, happy introduction to animation and not have to be worrying about learning software at the same time.
Another easy thing to start off with is to make some blank flip books. Have them draw simple images on each page and give it a try. Give them assignments like a ball bounce etc etc. Again, this can be a lot of fun and easily teaches the concepts.

By riki (Suture) (203.109.249.132) on Thursday, January 30, 2003 - 05:06 am:

But Larry it's an 'intro 3D class' not an 'intro animation class'.

By Larry Shultz "SplineGod" (Larrys) (216.244.19.18) on Thursday, January 30, 2003 - 08:02 pm:

You cant get any more 3D then doing claymation.
Besides 3D is really about modeling IMO. Animating is animating. I think if youre going to introduce 3D modeling I would cover some BASIC principles by using clay then moving over to 3D modeling. If I was going to teach 3D animation (and animation is really about timing) I would cover the basic principles by the methods I described. I would only spend enough time to give them a fun intro and to cover the basics before moving into the software aspect.

By Mike Pauza (Mikepauza) (65.84.248.153) on Friday, January 31, 2003 - 09:28 am:

I think Larry is probably right about the art being more important than the method, but this class is quite short, plus I'm receiving requests to put together a more rounded course. I'll see what I can do.

Thanks guys.

By Andrew Morgan (Aegisprime) (194.117.133.118) on Friday, January 31, 2003 - 10:25 am:

Larry: Boy, I wish 3D was about modelling - I'd have no shortage of work! Sadly most of the vacancies here in the U.K. seem to be for character animators (on Maya/Soft/Max) so I'm having to tussle with rigs and timing 'til I'm ready for a breakdown just to secure some work...

By kevin phillips (Kevman) (210.48.24.54) on Friday, January 31, 2003 - 06:04 pm:

Mike,

Here's what I did for a 12 hour course I ran last November (it was an 'Intro to LightWave' class)

Hopefully perhaps some things I did might be useful for you?

Luckily, most people came along to find out about 3D and LightWave, and what all this 'stuff' was about, nobody had any real expectations so I just did what I'd planned to do, and that was a very simple introduction...

Note that I had already spent a good few months writing a 'Course handbook' (A lot of work - More then I expected, but 80 pages later I was happy!).

Here's a breakdown of what I covered if it will be helpful, and surprise, surprise, it exactly filled the 12 hours!

Introduction
What is LightWave, history (I think I posted somewhere in the LW community forum a year back), TV/Movies/etc, very high-level review of Layout/Hub/Modeler and analogise with real-life film studio/workshop. We looked at the program, and I explained the common things like buttons, tabs, viewports and how they operated. I then covered basics of 3D - XYZ, HPB and again analogise this back to real-life if you can...

One thing you gotta watch out for are newbies that know nothing - The worst thing is to confuse people with abbreviations... I stood in front of the class and used my arms to show XYZ/HPB.

Project - 'Mountain Mad'
I created a ficticious situation, a client wanting a funky logo to spice up their 'mountaineering club annual video'. I used that situation to give a reason for doing things in LightWave.

One thing that will make learning more fun is a reason, or goal - Nothing is worse for some people then doing pointless exercises to 'show technique' - For instance, if you plan on bouncing a ball, try and make that ball part of a project theme, or put some crazy storyboard behind it. It'll keep people more attentive!

Also, remembering this was a course to 'introduce' people to what LightWave and 3D was, I deliberatly added a lot of extra steps into the process. It was a great way to cover a lot of areas that they might not see in most 'intro' courses where the tutor might keep things fast and clean, like compositing for instance.

Thinking
Anyway, I covered basic planning first before starting any project, all about proper set up with a content directory (with an analogy to a filing cabinet system) and gave them the 'clients logo' on CD rom

Stage 1:
After that we started out with:

* Modelling - The basic principles of creating the logo in modeler - Loading the logo, using text tool, pen tool, drill, sketch, naming polys, basic colour texturing, etc...

* Layout - Loading objects, setting up the camera, then how to create a key frame, move, rotate, play back and tweak basic curves in the graph editor. As I went, I made sure to explain in simple terms what each tool was for - Again, analogise with real life is handy if you can

* Rendering - We rendered out the animation as both RGB and Alpha. I also showed them how to render out to an AVI...

Stage 2:
Stage 2 was about creating some interesting background for the animation and a chance to play with SubD's...

* Modelling - Creating a simple flat plane, the TAB key, saving...

* Layout - The object properties box, what 'subpatching' was, and how to apply a displacement map, this also gave us a good introduction to the Texture editor. After creating a cool mountain, we textured it, which introduced Viper, as well as Gradients (for snow, etc) and finally followed up with Skytracer for a backdrop.

* Rendering - I showed the image viewer, and how to save a single frame to disk. It was a good chance to do some basic explanation of image formats as well...

Stage 3:
This was one of those 'extra' steps - In this section we used only the image editor (and learn't about image sequences), compositing and rendering to merge the background mountain image, and the RGB/Alpha image sequences to create the final AVI file.

At this stage, we'd spent roughly 8 hours in class - We we're doing well, and from my observations, everyone had managed to create the same thing.

That was the end of the day class - The rest of the course was continued in 2 x 2 hour

Stage 4:
The remaining classes, I had decided to look at the things we could do to spruce up the logo...

* Modelling - I started out with the bevel tool, making the logo much funkier, and renaming polys for some better texturing later on...

* Layout - Again, VIPER and this time we loaded a reflection map and created a metallic surface across our logo, I also amended the simple animation for a more 'dynamic' fly in effect.

* Rendering - This time, bypassing the logo image compositing step, we rendered directly over the background image. Note that this was also a good chance to add in some rendering pizzazz with Motion blur...

After that, and a lot of Q&A I finished up showing some video material from TV of work done using LW, showed (but not taught) more advanced material like a rigged character, endomorphs, etc to give them a taste of just how much more LW had, and then we finished up making a christmas decoration (since it was almost christmas) for some fun!

Needless to say, everyone seemed happy! I've even heard one student had gone out and bought 'Inside LW' and had been working on some better stuff to make his first animated 'short film' (Some people can be real enthusiastic!)

One other student was off to a fulltime 3D course, and felt that now she had a head-start on the other students when she got there...

That's the kind of stuff I like to hear!

By kevin phillips (Kevman) (210.48.24.28) on Sunday, February 02, 2003 - 03:53 am:

Oh, and definitely try and get some 'feedback' forms prepared and get students to tell you what they liked, disliked, etc after the course is over...

It'll help you improve the course over time!

By Mike Pauza (Mikepauza) (65.84.248.153) on Wednesday, February 05, 2003 - 01:48 pm:

First class is over:

For those interested...the intro to LW via a keyframe tutorial had mixed results. 1/3 of the class was rivited and thought I was going slow, and 1/3 were upset I wasn't explaining EVERYTHING, and I do mean EVERYTHING...like the maximize button for example...don't get me started. Anyway in future classes I hope to simplify and "crashtest" the night exercies, then feed the more advanced students some extra stuff. I did get one student who was ecstatic with the class...I guess that's what teaching is all about.

BTW, thanks Kevin for all the suggestions.

By kevin phillips (Kevman) (210.48.24.45) on Wednesday, February 05, 2003 - 07:14 pm:

Sounds like it was cool! Congrats!

You will *always* get people who want you to explain everything, especially if your course is advertised as an introductory course.

And its amazing how many computer illiterate people want to do 3D (and then spend a lot of time wanting you to explain how to operate common windows stuff). Suggest you add the line 'Students must have a basic understanding of using the Windows or Macintosh operating systems' to the description of your course requirements. It helps, though you'll always get the odd one slip through!

By Timothy J Alt (Groodwanderer) (134.121.19.17) on Wednesday, February 05, 2003 - 09:25 pm:

what maximize button? hahaha. Isn't it amazing that in this day and age ppl have no idea how to use a computer. I often forget and expect everyone to understand at least as much as i do if not more.