I started Animationmentor.com in January of 2009. So I decided to start a blog on blogger. Where is seams like every other AM.com Student has a blog. Hello fellow students, hello!
last assignment for class 3! It's ok... Still a little stiff in the spine and stiffness in general was a major problem for me in this class. So I really need to loosen up the my clips from here on out. My mentor recommended me to go on but he was a little hesitant because of the stiffness... So it's kind of a big deal, and an area I definitely need to work on.
So here it is. It is done. well almost. I still have some more polishing to do and my mentor gave me some great notes on how and what that is. But this is the "final" version I turned in. Like before this is first the blocking phase and then the final shot.
This was on Blender Nation today and I'm pretty excited about the news! A possible 2.5 release in October! I can't wait to try it out. I've been hearing a lot about the new fully customizable interface along with a revamped animation system. I think this is going to be a big release for the blender foundation.
Really! If it's as good as they say and if I can get the interface to not necessarily copy Maya but to easily facilitate the migration then I would happily switch to blender as my main animation platform. After AM of course, since AM doesn't have blender rigs.
I've been wanting to use blender for a while now but during school I was learning max and maya, then after school I was trying to get into the blender interface. Then I signed up for AM which uses Maya for their rigs so i left blender behind, again. So once 2.5 is out I'm definitely giving it another full on go!
So a long time ago, sometime last year, I came across a site called aniboom.com. At first I was really excited about it. It was a youtube like site dedicated to animation! It had contests and you could find like minded people and it seemed like an all around cool site.
But I was kind of turned off of it after I searched the site for a few days. The main thing was that there was a place for animation studios to have a site and display animations that they've done or clips they were working on. But when you looked it was just a bunch of people making up stupid "studios" posting the same stuff that was on the profiles. They had no system to actually verify that you were a "studio" or not. Some people may think that was cool, but I was just annoyed. There were other things about the site that I didn't like but frankly it was a long time ago that I forgot most of them.
But I was online today and for some reason aniBoom popped back into my head so I decided to check it out again.
It has changed quite a bit! And in my opinion for the good. Apparently they redid their site. Calling it a "re-branding" in my opinion it looks great. From what I remember of the old site it seems like a huge improvement. Granted it does seem a little slow and some things are weird but I'm just chalking that up to new site jitters and am overlooking them for now. Of course I don't really know when the "new" site went live though...
Anyway I was surprised to see my old account was still active, so I logged in and updated a few things and uploaded my latest AM vid. Took a look around and was pleasantly surprised. For one thing they removed the whole "studio" thing I was talking about earlier. Thank god for that. And your Area is now called a "portfolio" and you can enter your areas of expertise like 3d animation or 2d animation, storytelling stuf like that. You can give education history and employment history so people know who you are. It really looks good now!
Granted I only spent about an hour today looking around, but I'm interested. Like I said before I LOVE the idea of a "youtube for animation" I think its really cool. There are some "Bugs" that bug me though. when I updated my profile there is a button that says "click to see " my software choice, maya 2009, shows up under employment. Don't know why. But I did send an email to let them know. Also the upload limit is pretty small too but I'm not sure if thats a big deal or not yet. Also searching for people or profiles doesn't work well. I saw an "Animation Mentor" profile when i first went to the site but thought I would check it out later, but when I went back to try and search for "animation mentor" the site returned a bunch of animations with "animation" as a tag. And not one Animation mentor profile.
So overall I'm impressed with the new aniboom.com
If your interested my aniboom username is "Wasbubs" and here is the video I uploaded to their site.
Found another "error" when I tried to post the video the html I copied from the site was to big for the blogger post. So I need to find a new template if I want to embed aniboom videos.
So I finally decided that it was unacceptable that I, as an animator in training, don't draw well at all. So I bought a "how to" book and am going to work through it in my free time.
So I'm now keeping a sketchbook with the drawing exercises in it. I just started this little adventure so I'm not going to post anything I draw just yet. But if I feel I'm getting better I may grab a few sketches and post them up here.
but the main reason I want to learn to draw isn't that I want to be a great artist its that I just want to be able to put my ideas down on paper. Right now when I draw something out I know what it is but most of my friends and family have know idea what I'm talking about and the drawing probably confuses them more. :)
and if your curious the book I bought is titled "the EVERYTHING drawing book" by Helen South. apparently there are a whole series of "EVERYTHING" tutorial books.
