So the Art Director and Lead animator wants me to train some of the contractors to help out with some of the garments skinning. We have a variety of outfits and 8 body types to fit them on. With the help of Anim tools, we are able to speed up our skinning pipeline with simple steps and editing tools. Since I am more familiar with that work flow, leads feel I am the right person to instruct the contractors.
I spent sometime reviewing the work flow, because its been a while since I did any garment skinning. I also made a copy of some of the tools on paper, and wrote side comments on some of the often used buttons and hot keys, I think this will be a great way to visually show what these tools are all about. I also had a step by step process I made for myself in skinning garments. But I had to take some time to modify for easy reading and guideline work flow steps.
I roughed out my presentation and it goes something like this.
- Garment Skinning intro
- Getting Set up
- Skinning Methods
- Polish and Save
- Sum it up
Anyways I hope my training goes well, I am fully prepared. I have all the files set up and ready to go. Once the contractors know what to do, I will be tasking them with easy files for them to get their feet wet, and it will start to advance down the road. Their final tasks will be skinning up some of the heavy duty garments sets, that will take about a day and a half to do.
So the training went well, But I wasn't prepared for their zero experience with skinning in general. I had to take some time and teach them the fundamentals of skinning and how to use max. This was challenging because i wasn't ready for something like this. But I took it one step at a time and went with the flow. We went over max and all the buttons needed to skin, i showed them how to skin up an easy object like a cylinder. and then we went over our skinning garment workflow. I think it was to much for them because it was tough enough to soak in the basic skinning. Hope fully they will catch on just fine. But my first step is done. And I feel i did a good job in delivering the tutorial message. Next step is to get them up to speed. Right now what take me 3 hours to do might take them a week.
ReplyDelete