Centre College in Danville, KY is using Blender in its Principles of Computer Animation class. The class is designed to learn the basics of computer animation. The students started the three week course, many of them with little to no computer animation experience, animating a ball bouncing.
The class did not require previous experience in computer science or animation, participants came from a wide variety of majors, including art, economics and foreign languages. This project we are highlighting involved the students animating the well known Ludwig character with lipsyncing and all. The character had to be expressive with gestures, facial emotion and tell the viewer facts about Centre College. The students used their own voices.
Mandy Smith, one of the students, said this of the course:
"It was a lot of fun to show our final work," she adds. "It's very rewarding to watch people laugh or gasp at the emotions you've created. I think the whole class enjoyed watching the short movies and marveling at how far we had all come as a class. We went from learning how to make a ball bounce to making a room full of people laugh along with actual characters interacting with their environments."
I think its great how educational institutions are using Blender and that new young minds are being introduced to our wonderful program. Watching the video you can tell that they are beginners, but what they learned in 3 weeks of using Blender is amazing. Keep an eye out, we might see some new Blenderheads popping up.
View the Centre College article on this or watch the animation the class produced.
10 Comments
yay to the use of blender!
Yet, almost no one in my area has heard of blender.
I hope things like this will change that.
They sure will nano.
I'm going for open-source applications (aka love :D ) from now on (Ubuntu OS here i come!).
Will also produce a next-gen mmorpg using such tools.
Hope others will discover "love" too, asap.
I did use Blender for a class at Catania Accademia delle Belle Arti (Sicily)
It was certainly a success and I have seen a handful of nice project to be completed from young artists in training .
To be open source was a plus and to be sleek and fast and fun like only Blender can be was a plusplus.
Webcam combined with simple stop-motion software has no learning curve so it's fast method for learning/teaching animation basics. Besides it's hands-on method, anything can be done from cutouts to clay and pixillation and you can go from basics to character animation in few days. Blender is great but as it's already a technique, not a principle, I would make it second part of the course.
Stopmotion is also fun when you're drunk at animation festival, recommended.
This one is commercial but pretty nice (and monkeyjam is free):
http://www.animaatiokone.net/
That was cute. Good luck to the Centre College in their Blender escapade!
(Seeing ludwig also reminded me that I still havn't decrypted the new mancandy rig. That guy is wacky-complicated now isn't it?)
@hevonen: I just noticed that you mentioned MonkeyJam! I looove that program. It's got a great name, and I like it's features -- especially the multi-frame composite to make a cleaner shot.
Bmud:
Monkeyjam has indeed the best name! It's XSheet implementation feels a bit strange to me compared to TOONZ or CTP. But great it is, anyhow.
There has been a massive surge of stopmotion software since Aardman became media star. One that is very nice for pro stop-motion is Animate which comes with Leitch hardware and Aardman has been involved in it's development. Though as far as I know it can't be used without those special i/o cards.
What was the first version of publicly available Blender, back in Neogeo/NaN days? I bought 1.5 manual back in the C-key(?) days and I think I started with one of the first versions (maybe 1.6), but I can't remember anymore.
Wow, those are some nice (and very funny) animations for people 3 weeks into blender.
Now I just want to go get ludwig myself and make him talk like me. It sounds Awesome!
A friend of mine online said she noticed that Blender was installed on all the computers at her school in Australia.
Cleanliness is something that we should always consider when it comes to our property.