Starting in the spring, I’m going to be teaching a first year seminar on modeling in Blender in the computer science department of a Tokyo area women’s college, where I work as a lecturer. It should be a lot of fun. A big problem is resources, though. Two books exist in Japanese, but both of them are for Blender 2.2*, so they’re a long way out of date. I have managed to find a couple Japanese websites for Blender documentation, but these are also kind of lagging behind. Not that I would expect anybody on this forum to know about what other Blender resources are out there in Japanese… but I’m curious if there are any Japanese people in here.
I don’t think we’re going to get much beyond pretty basic 3D modeling in the first semester (first year college students don’t tend to be as driven as self-studiers of something like Blender) so probably the major upgrades since the books won’t be as big a problem… Probably no animation, probably no physics… Unless it’s something I create resources for myself, if they seem really into it.
Also, the lack of resources in Japanese could be kind of a good thing, as I want to try to encourage the students to study their English as well, and this should provide some motivation. They are first year students, as I said, so I also think it’s a cool way to impress upon them the potential of free, open source software.
In any case, I’m sure that the average user of Elysiun will welcome the idea of a potential influx of Japanese college girls in here… Comb your hair, boys!
I’m Japanese. And I have a web site including basic tutorials from explanation of user interface to how to animation.
The tutorial is compatible with latest blender. I was updating those while alpha version releasing, and uploaded to server a few hours later after releasing formal version. But as I said it is “BASIC”, my tutorial doesn’t cover all functions of blender.
I think it is great, that you are using Blender for the seminar. It is a challenge in your situation.
Maybe, as part of the seminar, you could fine somebody, who attends there, inspired enough to continue beyond the basics, and create Japanese tutorials. I think once this starts, it will have a 'snowball effect" and more Japanese tutorials will appear from other users.
Actually, the sites mentioned by Fligh % and Toudou are definitely on my list as ones I’ll be referring the students to. Toudou, thanks very much, by the way, for that site, they are excellent looking tutorials. (by the way, are you in the Blender community in Mixi by any chance?) Indeed, the online situation in Japanese isn’t as dire as I made it sound, thanks to those sites.
I haven’t signed up for the education newsgroup. I’ll check it out. As for what sort of stuff I’ll have them do, I’ve been kind of thinking about that. I’ll probably start by having them google a bunch of stuff about open source, GPL, Creative Commons, etc, and giving some small in class presentations on it, and then start in with Blender, having them follow tutorials and report on their progress for a few weeks, then maybe choose some intermediate level object or image to spend the rest of the semester trying to model, light, render, etc. I also was thinking of assigning a short term paper discussing what they thought of as the strengths and weaknesses of the Blender user interface, which is different enough from most other apps I know of to warrant a little discussion. The idea of the first year seminar is to get students’ feet wet in computer science, so they aren’t necessarily going to be artistically oriented…
By all means, if any of my students are sufficiently into it, I would love to have them help contributing to making tutorials or helping to translate documentation in Japanese. I think that would be great. I also hope I can drum up enough enthusiasm to put together a more intensive actual course in 3D animation later on… That’d be cool…
It’s good. You like my site.
Actually, I have just made my account in mixi a few days ago. But I don’t participate in any community in the mixi. I usually appear in the “Blender.jp” Fligh %-san mentioned. I think that this site is center of blender community site in Japan.
Your approach of the education is good, I think. As you know, discussing is necessary to know other people’s thinking you aren’t aware of. During discussion, if you or your student find some new idea to improve blender, please post it to this site or blender folumn in official site for international discussion!
to be honest from my own teaching experience a lack of books or written tutorials isnt a big problem for first year seminar.
as long as your demonstrations and explanations are clear and helpful you will not even need that.
basicly here at BGSU we do not have any printed tutorial about modeling texturing etc. getting the hands dirty is in my opnion the better way.
i teached 3d modeling and animation in Germany during my undergradute time and fromy experience the students do not know enough to realy understand the program completly and thus assignments about logical reconstruction of objects which will focus on modeling and texturing and light setup are more important.
that for example you can show in a demo and also create a short script on you own. the students will figure out the rest on their own than in case they are very interested in it to learn.
Thanks for the comments, everybody. I think you’re right, Claas, there should be plenty of resources available for what we’re going to cover. Also, it’s important to me in general to try to get the students to google stuff and learn from online tutorials whenever possible, even in my other programming classes and seminars. This class will be a learning experience for everybody, and I hope the students get into it…
This is great to hear! Have noticed such a great community there. I am getting back to learning Japanese for the hope of living there for some time in the future, I could try and read Japense Blender documentation =D
Here at the Orange Studio we have been giving each couple of weeks some blender workshops for University Students in various design and development areas. Went quite well without the need for any handouts or documentation, but ofcourse some of the classes had some who were savy in 3D applications. These were one day things and were more like just an introduction. Ton himself doing the introduction to Blender, its a wonderful site ;). He is really good at demonstrating Blender and helping others to learn it efficiently in a class scenerio. If you would like I can get in contact with him and see what we can sort out for Japanese documentation. As far as I know Ton is in contact with some other places teaching Blender in Japan and might help for resources and information.
If any of this intrests you would be great to see if we can help it out.
Absolutely. I’m very interested. The computer science department here is interested in increasing emphasis on media computing, and I think Blender would be a great thing to work more into the curriculum. It’s nice in a lot of ways. Since this isn’t a specialty school for media or graphics, there’s no pressure to teach the industry standard software like Maya et al, and the open source nature of Blender, as I mentioned, is good for CS students for a lot of reasons… (I’ve also been trying to sneak Python into the curriculum where I can, too. Hopefully within a year or two I’ll be able to lead a Python seminar. So the scripting side also has potential…)
