I recently had the opportunity to present my work to some students at Ragsdale High, and show them some basic stuff about Blender.

Well, despite the complete lack of web updates I've had another busy year, full of ups and downs. A lot of the work I've done hasn't been published by the client so I'm hesitant to include it on my portfolio page, but I've been working hard. A lot of the work has been in illustration, web, and database stuff, so it isn't a great fit. Perhaps I'll put in a page for non-animation work.

I recently had the opportunity to talk to a small group of people about 3D in Photoshop, and SketchUp. I don’t have a lot of experience speaking in front of groups of people, and there were some technical issues with the projector, but I got through it with, I hope, a modicum of aplomb. Looking back I could have organized my presentation better, but I believe everyone understood what I was trying to do.

It also required me to brush up on some skills I hadn’t used in a while, and rediscover some new capabilities that Photoshop has in 3D. Previously I had used it as a way to ‘paint’ models that I had made in Strata Studio Pro, to make texturing easier. The internal modeling abilities are fairly primitive but it is great for simple 3D tasks like putting a logo into 3D and putting it on an environment. I have no idea if the 3D elements can be animated in Photoshop or not, but it is an intriguing thought. I’ll have to explore that further, especially if it can hook up to After Effects of Premiere Pro.

But beyond that, I found that I rather liked talking to a group of people about something that I’m knowledgable about. There was some input from other people about things they had done and software they had used, and I left knowing more than I came in with. As an experience, it’s something I might try again, perhaps on an ongoing basis, perhaps with Blender (currently the most complex software I’m using). Maybe swap with someone who knows how to code in Python, or is really good with After Effects. Perhaps some sort of animation workshop.

Something to think about, anyway.