Syllabus	Things to remember when Opening MAYA	U of MN Animation Home Page
Class Outline	CG Production Workflow from Isaac Victor Kerlow	Links
Recommended Texts	High End 3D	John Lasseter's Principles of Animation
Assignments	Getting Started in Maya with Tutorialized.com	A pdf of MAYA HOTKEYS
Assessment	A pdf of selected pages from the Help files	Video Copilot.net tutorials for After Effects
		After Effects tutorial at the Adobe web site

Animation Assignments and projects.

Bouncing Ball	Modeling a 3D Room	Kinematics and Animation
Large Project	Written Proposal	Storyboards and Pre-Viz	Animatic	Rough Cut	80%

Project three, Path 01

Basic Animation using Forward Kinematics

The purpose of this project is to introduce us to the basic technology of animating in Maya, and to begin to translate the fundamental principles of animation into 3D. 

Path 01 focuses on forward kinematics, the controlling of a hierarchy from the top, or parent, down to the child.

If you think of a robot arm that moves the position of it's hand by first rotating its' shoulder, then its' elbow, then its' wrist.... that's forward kinematics.

There are four levels for success in this.  Everyone must accomplish at least the first level.  After that, you can go as high as you want with this, even beyond level four.

These should all be rendered out as a Quicklime movie, 800X600, using the DV/DVC-Pro NTSC compressor. 
I would strongly recommend to render them as a sequence of tiff or tga files, and then import them into After Effects to composite them into a movie. 

Level One:

Create an arm with three joints, (shoulder, elbow, wrist), and a hand with three fingers and a thumb.
Link the arm together and, using forward kinematics, catch, bounce and throw a ball.

Level Two:

The arm catches, or picks up, three different balls of three different weights and consistencies, (bowling, ping-pong and water balloon), and, clearly displaying the weight of each, throws them down a flight of stairs.

Level Three:

The arm displays not only correct physics for each ball, but also displays an emotional reaction different to each.  (hate, love, fear, etc.).

Level Four:

All of the above, but the arm is attempting to balance on an exercise ball. 

Hilarity ensues.

This will be due the Monday after Spring Break, (March 22nd).