Sunday 27 March 2011

Its AM - Eve!!!...

Thats right, AnimationMentor starts tomorrow! I recieved an email the other day that welcomed me as an official student of AM so its goodbye to the silver fan badge and hello to the gold student Badge!.

The student website shut down on Friday so they can prepare for the start of a new term and will re-open with full access on Monday at 12noon PST which wil be 8pm UK time, it couldn't have worked out much better for me :).

As i had no experience in Maya prior to my application for AM ive been spending the last couple of months learning the basics, this was for 2 reasons:- firstly i didn't want to spend even more money on AM by taking their springboard class and secondly i wanted to get started on their 18 month character animation course as soon as possible and had i taken the springboard i would have had to wait until summer term.

For learning the basics of animating in Maya i highly recommend the book "How to Cheat in Maya 2010" by Eric Luhta (www.howtocheatinmaya.com). Eric is an alumni of AnimationMentor and also an instructor for their Maya training program. Other training sources i have used and highly recommend are www.digitaltutors.com and www.lynda.com.

During one of our recent weekly coffee talks a class 2 student was invited to share his experiences and give advice to any would be students watching. He highly recommended us to practice some basic ball animations in the run up to AM so over the past few days i've been working on some of my own as part of my pre-AM warm up, here are the results...


Bouncing Ball Test from Adam Bryant on Vimeo.



Bowling Ball Test from Adam Bryant on Vimeo.

-Adam

3 comments:

  1. These are really impressive, Adam. How long did each one take?

    PS I couldn't sit by and not try it out myself. You can see mine over on my blog. Watch it then read the disclaimer in fine print :)

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  2. Thanks West,

    I spent a few hours on the bouncing ball test and quite a few more on the second test :), I had learnt alot during the second test and then went back into the bouncing ball and worked some more.

    I really dont have an idea of how long they took maybe i should start roughly timing myself.

    Haha ive just watched yours now, they look great although im not sure how far ncloth would get you in AM :) - Adam

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