[Bf-education] Re: Re: Standard course material for blender

[Glen Moyes]

Luis Belerique wrote:
> For example, a person can learn how to use an armature with a couple of
> bones and a cylinder, and in an advanced course, pushing it by making a
> rigged character...
>   
Students are fairly capable of rigging a full character so long as there 
are no fingers or toes or anything crazy like that. A simple rig with 2 
arm, 2 legs, a head, and body is fine, and the new rigging system is 
easy enough to use that newbies can do it. From envelopes to weight 
painting, it's pretty easy. The advanced part would be to use IPO 
drivers and other crazy stuff and theory to get the joints to deform 
right so that you get correct muscle movement and such, as well as 
constraints, really psycho IK setups (you've seen 'em).
> Just a question, Glen, how long is your workshop in Blender?
>   
8 weeks, 3 hours a week, so 24 hours a semester. However, I found that I 
had more students stay in the workshop when I dropped the time down to 2 
hours a week, so now it's 16 hours. It was an experiment, but it turned 
out to be very successful. It was easier for them to endure a 2 hour 
class. And as you can imagine, I have out-of-class reading and exercises 
to make up for the time lost. I am planning on extending it to 10 weeks 
though, but still keeping the 2 hour block. A 40+ hour course would be 
really nice though. With that much time, I'd say take it as slow as you 
need to. You might spend the first 15 hours of instruction on modeling, 
but that's okay. Just teach until they get it, and then move on. 
However, make sure you get as much time as you can to teach animation. 
Good modelers and good animators; that's all you need to tell a good story.

You should spend 3-4 hours on materials and texturing though, but for 
beginners I don't think it's that important, because I don't think you 
can teach them how to paint textures effectively until they've taken art 
classes and know how to paint using Photoshop/GIMP.

And teach them how to learn outside of the class. Email them with 
reading materials. Let those that are committed really sink into the 
material while they are out of the workshop.

The point I'm trying to make is that I don't think you can ever have a 
workshop that is long enough. I'm only teaching modeling and animation 
for this workshop, both of which I consider beginner courses because of 
time constraints, but you'd be surprised how much more they'll learn if 
they are studying outside of the workshop.

- Glen Moyes