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 02

Basic Animation using Inverse 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 02 focuses on inverse kinematics, controlling position of a system with the position of the child of the hierarchy.

For this imagine a puppet moves forward as you move his feet in steps. The whole body will follow the feet, even though the whole body is really controlled by the hips.

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 two legs, two feet, and connect them to a pelvis.
Link them together and, using inverse kinematics, create a walk cycle that consists of at least three full steps.

Level Two:

Add a spine, shoulders, arms and head to the legs you created above. Create appropriate physiological movement for the entire body over the course of those three steps.

Level Three:

Show a distinct character only through your walk. You will most likely want to make your character somewhat extreme in its' actions in order to clearly communicate who it is.

Level Four:

Your character encounters something that makes it stop, react, analyze and act on the situation.

Hilarity ensues.

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