It seems so!
The last week was time for the Blender Essential Course at the Blender Institute, its a 1 week course in wich the goal is to know all the sides of Blender, and just like in the past edition, the courses were given by the members of the current Open Project in development, Apricot.
The course’s program stablish that Tuesday was my day to give the course about Animation & Physics, and Character Animation. I was so nervous!, my first course, and in english! (my native language is Spanish), but thanks to Chris Plush who already gave a course a few months ago in the past edition of the Blender Essential, I could -more or less- know what know what I was going to deal with. It started very early in the morning when was time for Chris to give his UV Mapping and Textures course, and since it was a big team (8 people!), it was necessary for me to be there (luckily! it was really helpful), just in case, is complicated to keep track of every student when only one teacher is in front of 8 people.
It was fun!, is a very strange feeling being there as the youngest person in the room, and teaching!, they listened to every single word and took note of every step I did, all the process that seems so normal when using Blender i had to explain it step by step, sometimes I even felt like i didn’t really know Blender as I thought (finding stuff in the menus is a pain!), ok I know how this tool work and what it does, but i do not know how to explain that to others, that made me feel like i don’t really know deeply that tool, but after a while that feeling disappears (luckily). So.. with a little effort (from both sides, they and I), we somehow managed to get the 4 hours course done, and went through topics like: Armatures and Bones, rigging, skinning, what it is and what they do, Vertex Groups (boring topic! but i had to go through..), Animation in objects and bones, character animation, and animating objects and cameras along a path or curves, we even made our first real time Flag!, with the help of the new tool Continue Physics (wich I explain in the blogpost before this one), and the Wind deflector.
It was a really great-new-grateful experience, the language made it harder but it ended up well, after the first 10 minutes you relax and you get to know the students well, in fact, during the rest of the week I also had the opportunity to talk with some students and learn them about some specific features they wanted to know.
A very nice moment that I hope it repeats sometime!, I even feel like some-day consider giving little courses about Blender specific topics, if there is people interested in.. what do you think?
