Reassurance

It’s been a fairly intensive week in the office but I managed to catching up on some podcasts - specifically This American Life. Back in February they did an episode called Plan B telling peoples stories about the things they thought they would be doing with their lives, and what actually happened. It turns out my situation is not unusual.

Maybe your 30’s are about learning the things you wanted to be when you were smaller? The tumultuous 20’s are out of the way, and you’re more emotionally (and hopefully financially) ready to explore these other options. Turning 30 reminded me I wanted to be a fireman, so I became a volunteer firefighter with the local brigade. I want to animate, so that’s getting under way too.

It turns out it’s usually not too late.

State of play

Study online I thought.

There are a couple of choices which mesh with the end goal to varying degrees of success:

First up AnimationMentor.com, 18 months doing exactly what I want to do for a mere $25,000 AUD. Thats almost half a years salary and as such not something I can budget for.

Next we have the Academy of Art University in SF. Counts towards a degree but details of costs are less than forthcoming. Until further information surfaces this is not an option (although they did post a voluminous course schedule when I asked for more information. It's basically an entire tree in low GSM paper form).

Then there are things like fxphd which offers great content at excellent prices, but for now - looking specifically at character animation, they don't have what I'm after. They'll be the next step once I'm looking to develop technical skills and gain relevant industry experience, plus internet friends are likely to be teaching stuff I like, which is neat. On the subject of low-cost training the Gnomon stuff was ok but not great. There's not much support around the workshop stuff which means it's of limited use when you run into a problem.

In all likelihood night classes at a local place are likely to be how i end up starting this journey proper. 20 weeks, $1,500, and while the training won't be industry leading, it will be enough to get me ready to take on more. 

I miss Alias.

So the support for Maya is at best hard to find, at worst non-existent. In Australia support appears to consist of asking your reseller, which given I'm running a trail version of the software is irrelevant. What Autodesk have instead is "The Area" where I suppose you can ask questions of the community.

Considering you will pay up to roughly $3K AUD for a license I'm slightly baffled at the customer service, but when you're the only show in town, you can do what you damn well please.

So if anyone out there is familiar with Maya on the Mac, drop me a line? Please?

Norman

Learning to animate with a properly rigged model makes things much sweeter, and to that end the Academy of Arts University has released Norman.

Download and play!

Update on Sunday, March 22, 2009 at 6:09PM by David Coombs

If I could work out where to put the damn scripts that is.

Update on Friday, April 24, 2009 at 6:11AM by David Coombs

So I feel like a bit of a silly, but it wasn’t obvious to begin with. Under \Library\Preferences\Autodesk\maya\2009\ are the prefs and scripts folders. Now the directions included in the .zip file make more sense (if there’s a maya\2009\prefs\scripts folder, ignore it. The .mel files should be placed in the \maya\2009\scripts folder).

Once Norman loads without throwing errors at you, click the Green square in front of his right foot (visibility controls) and set the values for All Extra, Face Ctrl, Trunk Ctrl etc. to 1 instead of 0. Now create a new project and save the damn thing.

Tada!

Lets get on with this

So it turns out you can run the Maya 2009 Trial on a Macbook. Zoom!

Not well of course, and the screen real estate is a bit of an issue, but still it’s enough to start playing with. The plan is to start on some evening classes focused on Maya later in the year, and in order to do that I need a rig.

As a Mac guy I looked into the iMac and a low end Mac Pro to get the ball rolling, what I found was Autodesk (who now basically own 3d) don’t really like the Mac so most of my time would be spent bootcamped into Windows XP 64. So the beast will have to be a Windows box, not happy about the operating system but I’m kind of excited to be able to build a machine from scratch again. It’s much less expensive too.

For those spec-geeks I’m looking at the set up below. I won’t need it until the end of August so is likely to be revised.

Intel i7 920
Noctua NH-C12P Performance CPU Cooler & Mounting kit
Nvidia GTX285
Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P
Kingston 6GB DDR3
WD 1TB 32MB
Thermaltake QFan 750W
2X 24” Samsung

Obviously I’m looking at a relatively modest outlay and remain unconvinced that a Quadro or nForce provide real performance increases at my price range. That said the kit is largely irrelevant, what’s most important is actually starting to do things.

To that end I’ve gone back to basics with a couple of the Gnomon character animation DVDs. They available for digital download (no shipping charges or waiting), let me regain familiarity with Maya, and most importantly teach really important skills without requiring a machine capable of heavy lifting.

The Macbook doesn’t know what hit it (“Wait, this isn’t iPhoto!”)