Guiding Thoughts for Subdivision Surface Modeling

1. Volume, form, detail. Always in that order.
2. Before adding another point/edge/poly, ensure that those that are already there are correctly placed.
3. The vast majority of your time will be spent tweaking points.
4. Don't get stuck working on your model from one angle, use your 4-way view and rotate around.
5. Edge flows should follow the contours of your object.
6. Trace edge flows onto real objects to get a sense of how to approach them.
7. Use the bare minimum level of detail you can get away with to accomplish your task.
8. Add detail by cutting in loops; localized detail tends to get messy.
9. Quads, quads, quads.
10. All previous thoughts should be discarded if they do not serve your aim.

How HipHop Dancing Can Make You A Better Teacher

With most subjects I'm a pretty quick study, especially if I have an opportunity to ask clarifying questions. Which is why dance classes are always an eye-opening experience for me; they force me to occupy the role of frustrated student.

I am not a natural dancer, I am naturally enthusiastic, but that's about all I have working in my favor. It took me 5+ years of near weekly dance classes to discover "the beat" and its integral role in dance.

Last night I took a hip hop dance class at my gym. I was unquestionably the worst out of 30+ people. Yet somehow, I managed to smile my way through.

Some thoughts on what worked and didn't work in the class:

Worked:

• After learning new steps we would go back to top and review that. By the end of the class those first 4 moves had been reinforced to the point that I could probably still do them now.
• The instructor had a great enthusiasm for his work, and it was infectious. This, more than anything, is what kept a grin on my face.
• The skills being taught were of particularly high interest.
• I was allowed to quietly fail without comment or criticism.

Didn't Work (For Me):

• At one point the class was broken down into performance groups by gender. That totally killed the safety for me. Random assignment is way better.
• The pacing of the class was far too quick (for me, almost everyone else was keeping up fine)
• The rate of instruction increased as the instructor felt pressed for time.
• Repeatedly saying "Now I know this is a lot...".

Takeaways / Ideas for My Teaching Practice:

• Let people walk away with mastery of at least one skill: For each lesson, pick 1-3 skills that will be reinforced throughout the lesson. Explicitly state what they are, break them down, give a rationale, the whole shebang.
• If you set an ambitious goal, where failure is a risk, allow people the space to fail privately. Don't single people out for congratulations or criticism - this helps to generate intrinsic value for the learning.
• Some classes are not for all people, and that's okay. I nearly walked out many times due to frustration, it was entirely a battle with myself and had nothing to do with the instructor.
• Find a way to make your material exciting to *you* but don't let your excitement detract you from your primary goal: ensuring your students learn.
• Don't say "Now I know this is a lot...". Instead say: "We will be covering a lot of material. My goal is for you to learn X, everything else is gravy."

Thoughts that were helpful to me as a learner:

• This is your first attempt at this, of course you aren't amazing.
• Your peers have been at this (if not hip hop, perhaps jazz, etc) much longer than you.
• Even if you suck, you better keep a grin on your face, because the only sadder than a bad dancer is a bad dancer beating himself up.

I managed to take some of these lessons into my private training work, with good results. Here are my takeaways from that:

• Always, always, always make time for skills integration. People much prefer walking away with one thing they can use over 50 things that really impressed them but they have no idea how to approach on their own.
• Examples with wow-factor are great, but only if they demonstrate good habits. Otherwise they're a trick and manipulation used to make YOU the teacher feel better.
• You must constantly evaluate your teaching practice and adapt to the needs of your students.

I'm sure there are more, but those are the biggies.

U.S. CG Feature Film Animation Studios

Over the next few months I'll be posting the results of research towards my goal of making a living by telling touching stories through the medium of CG Animation. I now present, a list of the U.S. studios that have put out an CG animated feature film, and are likely to do so again in the future. This is no doubt a partial list, and I invite you to add your own contributions to this post's comments.

• Blue Sky Studios - "Ice Age", "Robots", "Horton Hears a Who"  [Positions]
• C.O.R.E. Feature Animation - "The Ant Bully", "The Wild"
• Dreamworks Animation  - "Shrek", "Kung Fu Panda", "Antz"  [Positions]
• ImageMovers Digital - "The Polar Express", "Monster House"
• Lucasfilm Animation - "Rango"  [Positions]
• Pixar - "Up", "Toy Story", "Finding Nemo", "Monsters Inc"  [Positions]
• Sony Pictures Animation - "Surf's Up"
• Vanguard Animation - "Space Chimps"
• Walt Disney Animation Studios - "Tangled", "Bolt"  [Positions]

Nerding Off is now on YouTube

I've started putting up some Cinema4D training videos on my YouTube channel. You can view them here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/nerdingoff

VS C4D 633 Day 02 Lecture Notes

Here are the notes from yesterday's class:

If you find some of the text is being cut-off, try downloading it as a PDF.

1. In the above slideshow click on the expand icon to the right of the "Slide 1/21" text.
2. Click on Actions->Download as PPT

VS C4D 633 Day 01 - Homework & Lecture Notes

Hi Guys,

Great class today! Your homework is:

• Create some text
• Throw it in a fracture object 
• Use Plain or Random Effector 
• Extra Credit J for using Falloff 
• Add in a Video Plane BEHIND your text 
• Animate your camera 
• Render this out, bring it into AE 
• Replace the video plane, with an image or video.
• NOTE: At a basic level, I'm looking for mastery of the technical skills involved in the above tasks. But more specifically, and this is why you should care about doing homework, I'm looking for a sense of design. You should be able to look at your finished animation and say: this belongs on TV. If that means simplifying your design: do it. Simple things to check for:
• Framing: is your text always in view? Stop at random frames throughout your animation and see if you can't make the images more dynamic by moving your camera.
• Color Scheme: Do your colors go together, or do they clash? If you have bad color-sense (like I do from time-to-time) check out Adobe's Kuler for inspiration.
• Make sure the colors you choose in C4D go well with the footage you'll be bringing into AE.
• Motivated Movement: Do the movements make sense? Do they have weight? Is there purpose behind the movements or are objects just moving to move?
• Exposure: Is your scene too bright or dark?
• Lighting: One light can be enough, but it usually isn't. Add lights to help direct the viewers attention. Avoid painfully harsh shadows, and visible spotlights (unless they serve the story).

You can view the lecture notes here:

Video Symphony C4D 633: Day 3

Topics Covered:

MoDynamics Chain:
http://greyscalegorilla.com/blog/2010/01/how-to-make-a-dynamic-chain-with-cinema-4d/

Lighting Interior Scenes:
http://cg.tutsplus.com/tutorials/maxon-cinema-4d/model-texture-and-render-an-interior-scene-with-cinema-4d-and-vray-%E2%80%93-day-2/

XRef Objects:
http://www.wonderhowto.com/how-to-create-and-use-xrefs-when-working-maxon-cinema-4d-382603/

C4D -> AE:
http://greyscalegorilla.com/blog/2009/10/how-to-export-your-scene-from-cinema-4d-to-after-effects/

Note: these tutorials may follow a different procedure than we did. There are usually at least 3 good
ways to handle any task.

Travel as Teacher

I'm writing this post from my studio apartment just after sun has set. This morning I walked to my car, drove to work, worked inside of my office, drove home. I've spent less than 15 minutes outside today and a total of zero minutes in a physical environment that is not familiar to me.

Just as the stickiness of immobility was collecting on my skin I clicked one... more... link... and arrived at these terrific short films:

Move

MOVE from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.

Learn

LEARN from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.

Eat

EAT from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.

A friend was telling me about a trip she had taken with a person who complained that every tourist-trap-outing was something done better from the comfort and relative inexpensiveness of her home city. On the face of it, this is likely true. Most cosmopolitan cities have museums, and performance, and food, and classes, and heck if you were determined: a chance to interact with exotic animals. However, and I don't think I'm alone on this, when I'm at home I stay at home. I don't often find myself taking advantage of the delights that a traveler to my city might revel in.

Every once in a while, and perhaps more often than that, we need to place ourselves in environments that challenge us to leave what is comfortable and take in all that is around us. Travel is a shortcut to those experiences, and the above films make that abundantly clear. Travel forces us to move, eat, and learn.

Gmail: Archive and Next

If you find yourself with a Gmail inbox a mile high, and want to power through it, you're probably doing the following:

1. Move cursor to top-most email.
2. Click.
3. Read the email.
4. Move cursor to the Archive button.
5. Click.
6. Repeat.

There is an easier way:

1. Click on the top-most email.
2. Read the email
3. Press the '[' key on your keyboard to use Gmail's "Archive and Previous" command (use ']' to move in the other direction)
4. Repeat steps 2 & 3 until you've cleared your inbox.

The time savings seems minimal, but let's add it up:

Point & click method, time per email: 2 sec (factoring in page load times)

Keyboard shortcut method, time per email: .5 sec

That's a savings of about 1.5 sec per email. Now, lets say we get 20 emails a day.

1.5 sec/email * 20 emails/day * 365 days/year = 10,950 sec/year

= 182.5 minutes/year

= ~3hr/year

Now let's assume that we've all got about 60 more years of emailing left in us, and that a radically faster alternative for archiving messages won't be developed in that time (unlikely, but I want to calculate these numbers so bear with my pointless hypothetical).

3hr/year * 60year/life = 180hr/life

180hr/life / 24hr/day = 7.5days/life

So while reading this blog post has probably taken 2 minutes, over the course of your life you now have an entire week to spend on things other than archiving your emails.

For a full listing of other time-saving Gmail keyboard commands, go here:

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6594

Note to Google Apps Users:
You may find that the above shortcuts do not work for you. You need to go into your mail settings and enable keyboard shortcuts, they are turned off by default.

VS C4D 633 Lecture Notes

Hello Students,

Here are the notes for Day 2 of our class.



-Donovan