In two and a half weeks I will be teaching an evening course in Blender consisting of six classes, three hours each. Last I heard about six people had enrolled and they were expecting more. Some other people who work at the training institution will be sitting in on the course. So it’ll be relatively big (the computer lab they have is only built for 12 people at the most!)
It’s very short and I can’t assume that any of these people have prior 3D skills! So it’s only an introduction. I want to give them a relatively solid look at the basics like modeling and texturing, a sense of how to animate things, and just let them know about a whole range of other features so they at least find out how much they don’t know yet
In order to make it fun, I want them to produce five segments of abstract animation (starting from the second class), which they will put to music. This gives them something to show their friends/family when they’re finished.
So far I’ve created a mind map in VYM (a linux mind-mapping program), and exported it to HTML. If you scroll down, you get the same information in straight text:
http://lisa3d.org/Blender/course_outline.html
Tell me what you think! Also, as I’ve written here, I want an easy but spectacular exercise to take them through in the first class - something where they can just follow all my clicks (I’ll be using a projector), and out will pop a satisfying render at the end. I’ll be looking through all the tutorials to find something like this, but does anyone have a suggestion?
(Note: I am only being paid on an hourly basis for the time I spend teaching. I don’t get paid extra for the time I spend preparing course material. So I won’t profit from any suggestions people make here for the course. You’ll just be helping to give Blender a good name!)