[Bf-education] official user certification

[Tom M]

I think we should do user certification.  Students need certifications
to help them get jobs, often times without a certification listed on a
resume the resume can go straight to the trashbin, etc.  If we can say
'over 1 million certified blender artists' that probably will give the
3d industry more confidence to hire blender artists as well (they want
to be sure enough basic skilled and well skilled artists exist that if
they get behind schedule they can fairly easily hire additional people
to do the work).

Most of the jobs for 3D artists are not the high end work, but the
simple industrial animation, product design, and illustration work

architectural visualization
industrial animation
product visualization

that have zero need to understand anything but very basic animation,
need some basic modeling skills (mostly it is buy stuff from 3d site
and modifiy it for this type of work).

Note that we can have separate higher end/master certification - but I
think it is crucial that we also have basic skills certification.

I think it is mandatory that we have a central 'certification' body
that issues all certifications - preferable the Blender
Foundation/Institute.

For basic certification - I propose the following

1) Each certified instructor submits 10 or so multiple choice/fill in
the blank or matching questions - questions that are easily scorable
by computers.  Then the instructors can agree on which ones are 'good'
or not.

I have a survey monkey account that i can transfer to the BI if
desired that works well for administering the tests.  However the
scoring of the tests would need to use a different piece of software
(for multiple choice and fill in the blank I'm sure a simple python
script could be whipped up for it).

2) There would also be a practical part of the exam where the student
needs to do a task for each major area.  This could be partially
automated if we save out the list of actions from the software (then
just parse the log and see if certain key python functions were
triggered - ie extrude, loopcut, mirror modifier, etc. for a modeling
task; creation of certain nodes and adjustment of certain curves or
other parameters for a compositing task, etc.)

model a; unwrap b; use modifiers to create c; sculpt d; retopo e;
paint f; rig g; weight h; pose i; light j; do materials for k; render
l; composite m; simulate n, o, and p; script q; video edit r.

All of these would be two to five minute tasks.  Ie (give this head
model some hair, slick it back and color it so it looks like the hair
in this photo; or 'this model has bad weighting on part of its skin -
fix the weight painting for the bad area without getting rid of the
existing weighting for the good areas).

LetterRip