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Man-oh-man… what an excellent week. As you may have read on the Hand Turkey Studios news page, I spent last week at North Caroline State University teaching Blender to a brilliant pack of rising 8th and 9th graders in a program called Red Hat High. Working with two other members of the Blender community, Jeffery McGregor (Enzoblue) and Jonathan Williamson (mr_bomb), we walked our class of 14 students through a couple tutorials on the first two days and them set them loose on their own projects in Blender (providing individual assistance and encouragement where necessary). In the next three days, these students, many of which having never touched a 3D suite of any sort before, generated some incredible work. They could only work about 3 hours each day, so essentially they did all of this great work in a mere 15 hours, including the time it took to learn the program!

I’d like to think that we teachers could take full credit for this, but these are also some impressively bright kids who should be proud of what they’ve accomplished in such a short span of time. I mean, not only did all of them complete a model for a still image, over half of them actually found time to animate those models… and I’m not talking about just straight object animation, many of them created full rigs for their models and a couple of them played with Blender’s particle effects. I’ll put their animations up in a future post (I need to encode them for the web), but check out these stills:

Pretty awesome, huh? We certainly thought so. Also, since we were there and it’s a rare occasion to actually physically meet other blenderheads, Jeff, Jon, and I decided to start a little project. See, Jeff is a strong hard body modeler and Jon is a very skilled organic modeler. I, of course, have a passion for making things move. With this kind of well-rounded team, we figured it would be helpful to show the kids what kind of work a team of artists with different specialties could produce. But, this post is really to show off the work that these students produced. I’ll post more on our little animation project later. Not to be too much of a tease, though, here’s still from it:

That’s it for now.  More to come!

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 16th, 2006 at 12:20 pm and is filed under Art, Blender, Mustache, Projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.