Ott Planetarium Announces Blender Workshops for 2012
The Ott Planetarium announces two new workshops, one of which is online.
The Ott Planetarium at Weber State University has provided Blender-based production workshops every year since 2008. This year, we’re shaking things up a little: Our Introductory Workshops will be offered online and our Advanced Topics Workshops will dive deep into different advanced topics each year.
Introduction to 3D Animation with Blender (ONLINE)
June 11-22, 2012We’ve reduced the fee and beefed-up the content, for a full 40 hours of instruction and hands-on projects. The intro workshop will be available June 11-22. The instructor will provide on-call support via e-mail and telephone 9:00am-5:00pm MDT during the workshop period.
Workshop Fee: USD 399 per student.
Registration Deadline: June 1, 2012Advanced Topics Workshop: Procedural Animation with Blender
June 26-29, 2012 (Optional Basic Skills Refresher June 25)This year’s Advanced Topics Workshop will explore Blender’s procedural animation tools. Learn how to set up complex, dynamic animation with minimal effort. Save production time and increase the visual impact of your work! This 3.5 day workshop will be held at Weber State University June 26-29, 2012. We will offer an optional basic skills refresher Noon-5:00pm on June 25.
Workshop Fee: USD 699 per student.
Registration Deadline: June 1, 2012E-Mail Ron Proctor for details and registration information ([email protected]). For more information, see the Ott Planetarium website.
$400 and $600, sorry but I can’t go
XD true
Wow… 3dbuzz.com just offered an amazing course for Blender that is only the cost of their member sponsorship fee:$35 a month.
I appreciate the sentiment, but it takes considerable time and effort to produce a quality education experience.
Our instructors expended 280 hours preparing for and teaching the workshops last year. We cost the university approximately 50 USD per hour (salary, benefits, and overhead). That’s an outlay of 14,000 USD. We have to pay for that somehow and we do it by collecting workshop fees. 3D Buzz is likely to have a comparable investment and they’re probably expecting users to stick around longer than a month (by the way: 35 USD x 12 months = 420 USD).
There are many excellent resources online and there are also many excellent books and training DVDs available (buy from the Blender E-Shop whenever possible). I learned with these materials and I know how important they are, but the difference that you get with a workshop is curated content, focused instruction, and live, human experience from instructors who have been using Blender professionally since 2006.
Our workshops are a accelerated learning experiences. In one week, my intro workshop students will reach a skill level that took me several months to reach on my own. We give specialized instruction in planetarium show production and we provide a lot of home-grown tools and shows under open source licenses to workshop students and the larger community (several examples: http://www.blendernation.com/?s=ott+planetarium&submit=Search ).
Over the next couple of months, I will be recording 50+ tutorial videos and writing two 30+ page workshop manuals. The hours I spend preparing for and teaching these workshops would certainly yield a greater return if I worked on show production instead. I do this because I love Blender. Ott Planetarium does this because Blender has freed us to create our own planetarium shows. We want to make high quality open-source production tools accessible to other small-budget planetaria, like us.
And yes, it costs money, but that is why they call it “professional work.”
Clear Skies and Happy Blending,
—
Ron Proctor
Production Coordinator
Ott Planetarium – Weber State University
ottplanetarium.org
My experience w/ blender: downloaded, installed.
Would I be able to keep up with the online lecture?
The video segments will be pre-recorded. I will also record and post answers to questions for all to see.
If you find yourself falling behind, you can pause the lesson in progress or watch it again. :)
I want to learn animation and I really appreciate that you offer it, but I don’t think I can attend this time.
Will it be available again in the future?
@Modin: We will continue to offer annual courses for the foreseeable future. Feel free to e-mail me directly if you have any questions. :)