Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2008 11:47:07 -0600 (CST) From: Mark Jacobson To: 810-088-11-fall@uni.edu Subject: Friday Rigging lab; Adobe After Effects; Maya II; Final Four Hi Maya students, Here is the link to the Chapter 9 - Further Animation Practices web page. Review that page and the textbook before Friday lab. We will do some skeletons, joints and character setup and try out the Forward Kinematics and the Inverse Kinematics. http://www.cs.uni.edu/~jacobson/maya/rig/blockMan.html I will try to come up with a simpler model so we can go all the way to animating it and not have as many bones and joints and objects to deal with. Note that the example files are available from the this blockMan.html web page and they work in the older, free Maya version 8 PLE all but two of you have installed on your computers. http://www.cs.uni.edu/~jacobson/maya/rig/blockMan.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- --- *** Adobe After Effects, Flash Animation and Web publishing, Fireworks, Certificate in Microcomputer Applications, ... ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- --- Our class web page at: http://www.cs.uni.edu/~jacobson/maya/info.html has a link to the 810:023 Microcomputer Systems class description. That class is at 1 MWF in the spring semester of 2009. Maya is a sufficient prerequisite to take 810:023. http://www.cs.uni.edu/~jacobson/23/c023plan.html Of interest to many of you would be that class will have 15 of the 45 classes in StudioIT laptop labs and will do Fireworks, Dreamweaver and Flash Adobe products in those 15 classes. In the classroom, we will have 8 classes on Adobe After Effects. I will concentrate those during one part of the semester so you can use the 30 day trial version and do all your work at home or on your laptop and not have to purchase it or come to campus to do assignments. http://www.cs.uni.edu/~jacobson/23/c023plan.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- *** Advanced Maya class in 2010/2011 academic year???? ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- It looks good for teaching a followup class to Maya sometime in the 2010 or 2011 school years. It would be called Advanced Maya or something more specialized, but basically would have a prerequisite of having had the first course. Why does it look good? 1. Maya class was up to 17 students as of yesterday afternoon. 2. The Maya class mistakenly has instructor permission required not taken off the 810:088 Topics description in the schedule book, both online and printed versions. I am sure that has kept some students from registering for it or considering it. 3. I have not done any advertising or marketing of the class yet, like I did last spring semester for this fall's class. No email to every student majoring in Art Studio: Graphic Design or Industrial Tech: Graphic Communications or Communications: Electronic Media. The only thing I have done is tell my 810:022 Microcomputer Applications and Systems Integration students about the class. 4. I expect it might be the case that I could teach Maya again next fall and get 15 or more students, but I really need to teach either the Flash Animation or the Flash Game Development topic next fall as my 2nd class. Flash needs to be offered at least once a year. 5. The course will be much better the 2nd time it is offered, though hopefully it has been fun and interesting and valuable this very first time for you. So word of mouth will be stronger for the 3rd time the course is offered. Basically, if I offer Maya again in fall of 2009 or spring of 2010, then the following will be true: 1. 75 to 90 students will have taken Maya 3D graphics. 2. Perhaps 30 to 40 will have not graduated yet, and there will be a few who have graduated who are working locally. 3. Perhaps half of the students who are still here or working close enough to UNI area to come back one a week will be interested in taking the 2nd class on Maya where you really can get far enough to produce a full animation short and approach some Maya mastery. 4. The magic number is 15 students, otherwise UNI will cancel a class that is at the 0xx level (it is 10 students minimum for 1xx 100 level classes. Usually, they let classes run if they get 11 or 12 students, but who knows in the coming few years what Iowa budget pressures will be put on UNI and Iowa and ISU. In any case, my dream is to teach Maya II sometime in 2010 or 2011 if there is enough interest and enough students still around who have had the first course. Every spring semester, in the early spring, the annual UNI volleyball banquet ends with the showing of the season highlight video and the graduating senior's video. Every banquet, the players and the staff, including the volleyball stats crew, get a copy of that video to take home. You would not believe the excitement each year to see the magic and reexperience the memories of the previous season in a new way, that can be replayed over and over in future years. My ultimate goal would be sometime in the next decade to see some of the effects in that UNI volleyball annual video that is produced as a major senior project by a few Communications: Electronic Media majors every year be Maya special effects and/or modeling and rigging. Hopefully, if Maya can be offered enough that students can eventually take Maya I and Maya II before their senior year or before their spring semester of their senior year, it can happen! I also expect that if UNI gets the recruit that they have a good shot at getting for UNI volleyball to come to UNI in the fall of 2010, there will be some sweet sixteen seasons and possibly an elite eight season to celebrate the highlights of on that video. In any case, the 1999 and the 2001 and the 2002 teams made the sweet sixteen. The 2001 and 2002 made the sweet sixteen NCAA tournament playing on their home court, the West Gym. I can't wait to see it happen in the McLeod Center, and it will someday. Did you know that in 2002 UNI was the 4th seed in the entire 64 team NCAA volleyball tournament? If we had the McLeod Center that year, we would have got to play to make the elite eight on our home court! If we won that 3rd round match and had the McLeod Center that year, we would have got to play to make the final four on our home court! University of Iowa field hockey made the final four on Monday morning while we were in class. The previous afternoon game had to be postphoned because of the horrible blizzard conditions at Michigan State. I have been to 6 final fours in my life - 1992, 1993, 1994 and 1999 for Iowa field hockey Richmond, Virginia 1992; Rutgers, New Jersey 1993; and Boston, Massachusetts 1994 and 1999. Louiseville, Kentucky is where the field hockey final four is this weekend, so I will be hitting the road for there Friday afternoon. Some years at their April banquet, starting sometime in about 1994 or so, they had a season's highlight video produced by a parent from St Louis at first. He was a dentist with a video development hobby. Otherwise, the banquets always had a slide show or a power point of photographs of the previous season. I will have to ask Tracey and Lisa this weekend (coach and assistant coach) if they have a program at Iowa and are getting amazing season highlights videos produced each year now, cause I think my last banquet was in April of 2000! The Communications: Electronic Media program at UNI is one I have been so thankful for since January of 2001 when I saw my first video at the banquet and got to take it home. I had 2 students over the years get the CS department computer applications certification, and got to sit at the same table at the banquet two different years with Professor Joseph Marchesani and the highlights video group. Who knew. Anyway, I am thankful that UNI has all these programs and majors and that this semester each of you decided to step out of that major and decide that Maya should be part of your education here. Communications/Electronic Media 14 Art: Studio Emphasis 5 Computer Science 4 Graphic Communications 2 Computer Information Systems 2 Movement & Exercise Science 1 English 1 Since some of you might not check your email after we have class on Friday morning in StudioIT 1, I better state the following right now: Happy Thanksgiving and have a great break! It is only the 2nd year since UNI finally came around and made Thanksgiving break match spring break, instead of having fall semester have two more days of class than spring semester. :-) Mark