3December

I attended the Autodesk 3December event.  The event consisted of a showcase of student work, discussion panel with several alumni with a following Q&A session, and two presentations of Autodesk products.

There was plenty of interesting work by the students, including several games, as well as the "Conducting Robots" project.  The reel of student animations had some impressive work as well.

The most useful part of this event was the discussion panel/Q&A portion.  This was the most informative and had plenty of information pertinent to students transitioning from college into the animation industry.  The alumni offered plenty of routes to take when moving into the industry, elaborating on how you could go about doing something for a big network like NBC or simply doing freelance work on their own.  I found this particularly useful because it showed me what it could potentially be like for me if I choose to pursue a career in animation.  The other aspect of this portion of the event that was beneficial to me was the discussion on internships.  Before this I wasn't planning on pursuing an internship since it wasn't necessary for the major.  After hearing them talk about how helpful an internship is at getting you not only real experience, but potentially a job later on, I've decided to look for one for the coming summer.

The first presentation was about importing files from Maya into a program called Unity, which is geared more toward game development.  The presentation was fairly interesting, although extremely technical, even though I don't plan to go into the gaming industry.  The second presentation I was unable to stay for.