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CG Animation - And so we begin...
Me:  Oh my god, where to start!?!?  *thoughts*makes me wonder if anyone cares*end thoughts* Ok, take a deep breath.....lets do this!

The Beginning    

     Welcome one and all to.....ok, fine I'll get to the tutorial thingy.  In our experience in the last 4 months, we have found CG Animation to be time consuming, difficult, a real mind bender....fun, enjoying, an exercise of patience, and a lot of other things.  It is all good when you get something good to show up, then you click somewhere else on the screen and press the wrong button....hoo boy.  But, if you have the patience to deal with it, then it all seems fun again :)

     I probably lost, confused, or scared a way about 2/3's of the people who was reading this....come back, I won't hurt you!!!!!  Ok, so lets get to the good stuff (no we don't have a history page, as we want to mess with things that are in today's world, not 10 years ago).

What you need

    Obviously, you will need a few things to work with CG Animation:  the software for creating it, a computer, a keyboard, and a mouse (preferably one that has 3 buttons or 2 buttons with a scroll wheel).  It is also good if you computer is pretty up to date, hardware wise.  The better the hardware, the faster the software can compile your creations.  Lets talk about the software for a little bit (as you probably have a computer, mouse, ect. to use, since you are visiting this site). Software that helps create these CG sequences are known as renders.  The most familiar of the renders, I'd say, is Autodesk® 3ds max by Discreet (current version is 7).  But, I wouldn't recommend this one for the projects that you will be doing with your friends or by yourself, before you run off to their website to buy it.  This render is very high-powered render to use for CG Animation (as most major companies use it for example, Electronic Arts).  "The why shouldn't I buy it then?"  Well, the price tag is: $3,495 as of right now (June 16, 2005).  But, if you have the resources...then by all means, buy it (unfortunately, I barely have 5 bucks so, I didn't write this based on that render).  Discreet also makes a free render called gmax.  It seems similar to 3ds max, but I really didn't get much of a chance to mess with it....yet.  So, I turned my head to the Blender compiler.  This compiler is free, and is open source (meaning freeware that you can basically edit, but still copyright laws apply).  So, I'll be writing based on this compiler.

Before I conclude...

     I'm not trying to take away the popularity of any other compilers out there, but I'd suggest you to use the Blender compiler (At least for now).  You can download it at Blender's Website (Click Here).  So, next section I write....I think I'll say a few things about the blender compiler then, we can mess with it a little bit.

To be continued...

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