Wish me luck! This is the first time I’ve taught 3D animation at the local community college… Its gonna be a very basic course so the students can get a taste of 3D and be more confident going on to a different school. We will be using Blender and Wings3D. I will also (if time is available) be putting together examples using different programs such as LightWave Max and Maya to corespond to what we will be doing in Blender and Wings. I currently don’t have much online other than the course plan… but after this class finishes I will try and reorganize my content and get the homework, projects and thoughts online for the Blender/Wings communities.
Good luck! I think that your idea to take your class materials and make them available for the world afterward is great!
plunneberg,
I am teaching my second class at a Local College computer class. My class is a community interest class and runs 17 weeks on Monday nights for 1 hour. ! have 9 students ranging in age from 11 to 50. It is a lot of fun. I hope we can share information.
I too plan to make my materials available fro the web. I am also working on a series of 20 to 25 short 10 minute training videos. I would like to share these for download as they are completed but need to work out the costs and how to cover them.
When NaN went bankrupt and closed early last year it sorta took with it the possibility of this class, but now that it is open source and moving along again I was able to convince them to do the Intro to 3D Animation. Do you have a web site up for your class? I would also be interested in seeing how you’ve organized the learning path. If this first intro class goes well they will be more apt to start more multimedia classes… currently the art department is strictly print and fine art. Granted I’m just ‘staff’ and only a part time teacher there… but… one step at a time… and this class was the first big step. Its good to see others trying this same thing. Another spinoff class that might come up is the Music program wants to do something where the music students could compose to go with animations… something along the lines of mini Fantasia’s. Who knows… lots of fun stuff is possible!
You can access my basic outline via www.CreationAnimation.com I am requiring the Blender Book by Carsten Wartman for my students. It takes some of the burden off me to provide information. My outline follows the book fairly closely. I expanded the modeling out to 4 weeks and the Animation out to 4 weeks. I have found that for the first 2 sessions the students are baffled by the interface. We just had week 3 and they are beginning to catch on.
Class one:
Class one was a lot of info, we talked about Blender, how to aquire the software, what the hardware requirements were, screen color depth and resolution issues, how to get it to run basically. We discussed 3d space a bit and then I showed them how to open Blender and select objects, delete, toggle edit mode and add objects, rot, scale, grab - the extreme basics. We also clicked some buttons to look at the different menus.
We also had class members sign up on elysiun and I encouraged them to post questions on the QA forum.
Class two:
We reviewed class 1 topics and added discussion of Layer control, and the other 3d window menu buttons. We added some objects and gave them a material and moved them around and switched layers.
Class three:
Review quicly the previous steps up to an object with materials, then we introduced keyframe animation with simple objects. We discussed and used the following: Frame change - How to (Click button, shift -click button, arrow keys), I Key, K Key, Animation buttons window,Blender screen changing, IPO window, basic IPO editing in curve mode and Key mode. Each of my students has a computer to work on during the session and I use a wall projection to demonstrate. Each student animated a sphere moving, scaling and rotating through several key positions and learned that they could alter the animation with the IPO window.
Class Four: This Class was spent almost entirely on Navigating the files systems, saving files, saving images, saving animations, navigating the file structure of Windows. The class reinfored previous lessons by adding a sphere, applying a material, keyframe animation, render and save a still, render and save an animation.
Class Five: Building a Castle Tutorial from Blender Learning Path.
I will keep you posted and good luck.