Me and my graphic design teacher at Dyersburg State Community College have been discussing which 3d modeling program to pitch to the admins to let her teach this fall. I recommended blender over maya because of the price and availability.
Has anyone taught or been taught blender in a college? Does anyone have any suggestions that may improve our chances of convincing the school to approve the class?
thanks!
-boon
Show them Elephants Dream, and tell them it was all done with open source software.
Tell them that you are going to teach the principles, not the application, which can be applied to any program.
Tell them they will be contibuting the development of a community, and not the profits of a corporation.
I currently teach Cinema 4D and Maya at a big art college. I requested Blender be put on the machines in the lab I teach C4D in because Blender has built-in and efficient UV mapping, something that Cinema did not have (until this latest release) without an additional large expense for BodyPaint, which was really overkill for a single class. I’ve been balked from switching wholesale to Blender because of the students’ desie to be trained on the software that they perceive to be “industry stndard”, ie, they want to be able to say that they’ve trained on thus-and-such name for resume purposes. This can be a legitimate concern for people trying to go pro in a vocational way. In that case, however, I’d recommend that they try a dedicated 3D program, like Full Sail or The Guildhall.
My feeling is that Blender has become an ideal tool for sole- to small-proprietorship businesses, creatives who want to use 3D as part of a workflow in other media, such as illustration or concept art, and as a way to learn solid 3D and animation skills without incurring a lot of overhead. It’s a worldclass teaching tool for free, andthe only hing that might make it second choice would be that “want **** for the resume” problem. You could easily cast it as “Blender’s a better tool for teaching since it doesn’t lock you in to one manufacturer’s way of doing stuff or automatically steer you toward certain employers, like Max or Maya. The tools are industry standard or above, the principles of 3D are clearly displayed, and the possibilities of doing pro-quality work are the same as with any other program. If you need to learn another program for an eployer, you an download the PLE and all your Blender knowledge will let you learn it in a week or two at most.”
i learnt Maya at school, all of it was principal based teaching so was software indipendant (to a large degree)
the lecturer focuses on teaching the principals, i.e. good animation principals, secondary animation … modelling head with good loops… as you can always learn software yourself you can’t learn the principals.
blender can do Everything, than Maya could for the first 2 semesters of work at least.
first semester
first project, head model.
second project, 4x animations (from premade rig), 1x 10 seconds, and 2x cycles.
second semester was
timing animation (can’t remeber the name)
full animation
BTW i topped the class against Maya users, the software was easily up to it, infact it had better modelling features than Maya did by default. i.e. face mirroring was easy in blender so i could model one half of the head.
if the teacher really wants to have fun they should get Deep-paint-3d for the texturing of the head/whatever model they do. its like photoshop in 3d, its fantastic.
Alltaken
I would say that the price alone makes it worth pursuing. Most of the advanced features in programs such as maya won’t be used by beginning learners anyways. And like alltaken said, most of the principles can easily be applied to other software. I just got maya for Christmas, so I’m learning it, but I actually found blender easier to start out on, simply because maya is so complex. Admitedly, maya and other expensive programs have many more features, but you don’t need most of them to understand the concepts of good modeling. Also, plenty of people have made amazing stuff with blender. I would recomend browsing the gallery section and maybe printing or showing some of your favorites to your teacher, to demostrate blender’s capabilities.
well, I’m almost in the same position as you are.
I just landed a gig teaching blender at one of our local colleges, but seeing as the new term hasn’t started yet, I’m still waiting on specific details.
As to how I convinced them to drop lightwave in favour of blender, the simple answer is I showed them what blender could do. The things that impressed them the most were the new sculpting tools, the raw speed that shortcut driven modeling provides, the modifier stack and what the new compositing tools can do.
I also pointed out that half the lightwave developers stopped working on lightwave in favour of Modo, that updates are infrequent, and that blender is being developed at a blistering speed.
So sit down with the heads of department, fire up blender and create something cool. That’s always the best way to show the worth of a particular bit of software.
Good luck!
Opps, wrong thread.