Teaching "Intro to Maya" at Nickelodeon starts

Last night I started teaching an "Introduction to Maya" class at Nickelodeon. I think it went really well based on the feedback from the class, which consisted of around 15 2D artists and production people. It's a tight little training room, so unfortunately there's a waiting list, but we might have two more people from "Tak" next week. We have 5 more Wednesdays with 2 hours per night. Most of the class had never used a 3D app before, so there was lots of new stuff for them to see and take in.

We went through the basics of Maya, including navigating around the program, the basics of translation, rotation, and scale, and got a little bit into animation - just enough to keep people interested. I did some really quick modeling of a ridiculous little character so they could see how what we were learning relates to real world applications. That was the main thing I was trying to stress - that the simple fundamentals are the tools you work with through even the most complicated projects. I know that when you're moving a bouncing ball you think - how does this relate to animating a character? So, I ended the class by showing a couple of complex rigs and explaining how it relates to what they had learned.

Next class we'll jump in to modeling, then animation. I've been putting together some docs since a while back when I knew I'd be teaching the class. I'll put those docs and some sample rigs on the SchoolBook portion of my site soon!