Happy 2012

Wishing you a healthy 2012. 2011 was a good year. Saying goodbye to 2011 and I hope 2012 will be healthy and fortuitous.

The Fall 2011 semester at Harvard is over for me now. The students worked hard for the intro to maya course. Teaching was challenging and fun. I received good feedback and I am going to implement the student's comments into my next class. I will be submitting a course proposal for another intro to Maya Course at Harvard Extension school for Fall 2012. The next intro class will be a refined version based on feedback and experiences from 2011.

http://www.extension.harvard.edu/courses

Intro to Maya 2011 Syllabus

http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic950985.files/CSCIE21_SylabusFall_2011.pdf

Our class stayed on track with the focus areas of work. I deviated from the original plan when it felt needed. I needed to add lecture time for constraints,joint orientation,skinning,connection editor,and graph editor. A difficult issue with Autodesk's Maya software is learning the interface. We ended with a 4 week final project where the students were asked to design a robot and animate the robot's function. I focused a lot of my feedback on animation related issues, since that is my specialty.

Some of the students posted their work online. So with their permission I have included links to there work in this blog post

Larry Kyrala
Larry's YouTube Channel
http://www.youtube.com/user/coldnebo?feature=watch
Larry's Final on vimeo
http://vimeo.com/33486895
Here is a link to Larry's Blog
http://coldnebo.tumblr.com/

Ben Guild
Ben's Final
http://vimeo.com/33557825

Onem
Onem's Final project
http://onemboreal.com/archives/3236

Every student ended up editing their storylines to be shorter. Which I feel is part of the process of creating your first story for animation.

It was my honor to be the instructor in this course. Thank you students and thank you Harvard.