Patrick Algermissen’s Animation Mentor Blog

I stayed up all night on the 10th watching the Orientation videos. They were mostly about each section of the site and what to do there. One of the videos had tips from students on how to get the most out of your Animation Mentor experience. All said, I was up until 2am watching everything and exploring what I could. The bad thing was, 5 hours later I was at work. That was not a good day. Luckily there is only a small overlap between the current crunch time at my day job and the start of classes.

It was all very exciting, but all-too-small of a taste of the site. I was hoping that we’d get to check out the forums and cruise the campus a bit. It was great seeing all that stuff in videos, but not the same as actually experiencing it. Even if we weren’t allowed to post, or if we had a special orientation message board that we could post in, that would have been fine. Actually, having our own board would help us answer questions and start building camaraderie we our new classmates. We got to see the existence of the AM Chat app, but couldn’t use it. We couldn’t start adding people to our buddy list. Really, all we could do was watch videos, fill out our profile, and see our calendar. The calendar was marked with the start date and title of each class session, so that was pretty cool.  I just wanted more.

Regarding editing one’s profile: I was not able to get my avatar to show up. I talked to Jimmy, my friend who just finished up his last AM class, and created a 60×60 pixel avatar according to what he told me, and it was well below the stated 100k size limit. When I upload it, it says “Uploaded on such and such date,” but the image doesn’t show up. Just a 4-pixel black square, which I assume is an HTML border around a non-existent image. Has anyone else had this problem? Did anyone in orientation get their avatar image to show up? If so, what settings did you use?

I mentioned before that we get all kinds of awesome discounts. I was able to purchase my student copy of Maya 2009, which showed up on Thursday. A producer friend of mine had a copy of Learning Maya 7: Foundation, and I’ve been using that and the tutorials included with Maya to learn the program. I already know Blender well, so it’s just been a matter of learning the specifics of Maya. Obviously the book is a few versions behind, but the interface is largely the same, and it is actually pretty educational when things aren’t the same because I have to explore the menus to find what I need. That hasn’t happened often, though.

Included with my purchase were student versions of Mudbox, MotionBuilder, Toxik, and Cleaner XL. I haven’t installed those yet, as I’ve got enough to learn with Maya alone, but I am interested in checking out each of those. I’m not really a modeler, so Mudbox holds less interest for me, but MotionBuilder sounds really cool, and I’m interested to see Toxik’s approach to compositing and see if it has anything to offer me over AfterEffects (which I have a commercial license for and I use in my freelance work). I’ve been wanting to get a standalone video compressor, and my copy of Cleaner does not say Student Version anywhere on it, so I’m hoping I need look no further. I’ll have to look for licensing information once I get it installed. All in all, getting well over $10,000 worth of software for less than $400 is a great deal, even if they are only academically licensed.

Now, the site has gone dark until the 29th. Jimmy said he was in the middle of a chat when the site went down for him. That’s when it hit him that his journey was over. He couldn’t wait to get out of college, but now that he’s finished Animation Mentor he feels sad. The end of an era. I look forward to my own start, and my own sad day on December 17th, 2010.