New Mentor! Joe Mandia

My new mentor is Joe Mandia, check out his IMDb here: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0541798/

He currently works for Sony Online Entertainment, for DC Universe Online which is a games company.

It's cool to hear the difference between game animation and film. In games you really have to think about animating in the round, so everything has to look good from any angle. In film you can cheat and get away with animating to just one camera. I know for Horton Hears a Who! they did a lot of cheats by animating UVs to get better shapes for one camera, if you moved it the model would look extremely broken.

Apparently game animators are uber fast too, yikes! I'm kind of surprised they use Maya there since almost all the game companies around where I live use 3D Studio Max as their primary 3D software.

So Week 1 went well, it was planning. I may upload my vid ref a little later, but I just threw my first blocking up for Public Review and have gotten some feedback which I will begin to incorporate.