hi folks, does anyone have suggestions re: fairly easy to use (for 13yr. olds) shareware/opensource type program i could run with for teaching. we use pivot stickman and a bit of 2.4x Blender, but looking for something a little less “intimidating” that will excite this age group but not scare them away. Some students really enjoy Blender - many get frustrated before we are done - never to return the following term.
thxs for any info
Hmmm, I’d like to see a dumbed down version of blender for people with creativity but little experience with programming or fancy software programs. This BlenderLite would have less functionality but work more intuitively for beginners. I’m still having troubles getting a hang of materials and textures myself! Often i have to switch to OpenGL render to get it to work; seems like lots of little gotchas like that.
I think it depends on what you hope your students will learn. I would recommend checking out panda3d.org if your main intent is to give students a little exposure to a game engine. Their documentation is very elegant.
Panda is not as complete a tool as blender, but it might give a big picture overview of a scenegraph based engine. I think blender really needs to focus on having a stable, easy learning curve with great documentation for a little while.
Another option would be to give a detailed description of exactly what you want your students to learn and then team up with some blender artists to create a set of bullet proof tutorials. (often tutorials on-line miss a little thing like stating “you must be in game engine mode for this to work” or something and of course many great tutorials expire very quickly with new version releases.
kesten
well, no 3D program like Blender AFAIK is for easy teaching the basics of animation, I´d go using something like Monkey Jam(freeware) or any other frame grabber and take pictures with a web cam of the stick man, it should be fairly easy to make the kids understand the very basics without overwhelming them.
Well, you could stop using Blender 2.4x- 2.5 is a lot, lot less intimidating IMO.
Pivot is a great program. I’ve got a lot of good memories of it from when I was around that age.
2D
http://www.pencil-animation.org/
3D with premade character(s) bundled and basic animation capabilities.
http://www.daz3d.com/i/software/daz_studio/getting_started?dzid=PPC&gclid=CNGMrY6HrqsCFQhN4AodTBSLKg
Daz studio is about as simple as I can think of for 3D, although you can’t model in it and the free version doesn’t offer rigging, but you said specifically simple and animation so that indicated to me you just wanted movable figures and a timeline.
I came to recommend Alice, but I see someone already has. My ex took a beginning computer animation class a while back where they used it and seemed to grasp it really well, despite knowing next to nothing about computers beforehand.
hey…thxs everyone - some great suggestions for sure. we don’t “move” anything in grd.8…so i should have been more specific…but do some decent modeling. 2.5 is probably the next logical move - but i have alot going on in various classes and am trying to find time to get a jump on that before i let the students loose on it. we’ll get there.
Anth… I´d go using something like Monkey Jam(freeware) or any other frame grabber and take pictures with a web cam of the stick man - “the stick man” i take it is part of the tool options i guess??
drobbins…thks i wiil look into Alice
kesten - Panda is not as complete a tool as blender, but it might give a big picture overview of a scenegraph based engine.
thxs for the great overview…and Panda
Archrystie…also i’ll check out your suggestions- i believe i’ve seen pencil somewhere - but will track it down and also check Daz
all great help and thxs again
deltawing
what about sketchup? that one is quite simple and it also has a basic animation module.
This may be more effort than it’s worth, but you could always take Blender 2.5 and tweak the interface a little by altering the python scripts for the UI.
If you wanted to teach the kids a specific thing per class, or for a few classes. Such as modelling then you could alter the python script to show only a few modelling tools in the tool bar, such as extrude and a few other things and gradually include new tools each class in order to slowly bring them in and to allow them to adjust to the interface instead of them just being bombarded with hundreds of buttons.
you could even run the 3D view port in full screen so the kids would only see the few chosen buttons you’ve enabled on the tool bar.
No I meant the stick man you were using, monkey jam is a program to take pictures in sequence, with X-sheets to do timing, is an animator tool