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Originally posted by ryuhayabusa13
I am just a student of animation and not an advanced computer user like yourself, ...

Hello,

But It was a very nice speech and it didn't offend anyone. I am a Noob, Have been using maya for 1 year and a half now ,27 years old , probably in 10 more years i'll be at your level, heh heh.

Originally Posted by

Hi there,

That was quite a statement. I'm older and grayer and I've seen a lot, but I have to say that truthfully there are 13 year olds that could program circles around me in their sleep. When I was thirteen we still had B/W TV in my family (didn't get one till I was 15 or so). Kids today are writing killer game apps. I was playing Cops and Robbers, or Cowboys and Indians.

You have no idea how much of a head start that you have. In the 70's most of the computers had access with tiny small green monitors or a system console that was a continuous print out (that is unless you were at X-PARC) so computers were in a sense boring and primarily work related. Zork, fairly sophisticated text game for its day came along in the late 70's and was refined in the early 80's

Back then when you wrote a program you had to wait 24 hours on some occasions for a response because there were other jobs ahead of you. And computer time was expensive, so you had to be diligent in trying to get your code correct. Today, when I program I let the computer find the syntax errors (far quicker than desk checking) and I'm done within minutes. RAD, or Rapid Application Development was a concept that was just not feasible.

You grew up with color, graphics, moving animations (sprites or others) and that was the norm. When I look at the astounding work that some people have done I can only wonder and marvel at the level of the complexity of the animiations that I see. Toy story, Mr. Incredible, and a movie trailer https://movies.yahoo.com/shop?d=hv&cf...&id=1808625216 for "The Da Vinci Code" very cool stuff.

I struggle with a few polygons or nurbs and there are people creating worlds and cities (Star Wars) with thousands of elements. I can't even concieve how long that must take to put together.

So, when you say I am advanced, it's true, I have lots of experience in many fields of study in this giant world of Computer Science, but in the new 3D world of Graphics and Animations I am but an underling a non entity. To put it into perspective...

In the physical world I can probably cut a few trees, tie them together and make a fairly decent wooden raft. Perhaps with time it would have small seat, maybae a canopy and even a rudder.

There are people that design floating cities called Aircraft Carriers that hold 5,000 or more people plus an enormous amount of extras like planes, weapons, electronics, food prep, sanitation, fire prevention, and on and on.

I sometimes wish I had been born about 20 years from now. Then while I was young and had that sponge brain that sucks everything in instead of cells dying off at a rate that is scary, I would have had, I think much more fun.

With respect to Maya, I have about 34 hours total experience with it.

Maya is a programming marvel and the level of complexity is far beyond what I "grew" up with. I used to think that MS - Paint was kinda cool.

I, like yourself went through the many iterations of Microsoft's attempt at an operating system. PC DOS v1.1 that was on the original IBM PC and then with MS-DOS and on to Windows 3.1 ... Whew! I am glad those days are gone. I wrote a 76,000 line C program in 6 months on that terrible platform. (coming from a UNIX dev environment ..) I had never heard of Near and Far variables and procedures. I spent 80% of my time wrangling memory managemnt instead of writing code. I had data structures that were well beyond the 380K limitations... what a mess.

One day I hope to learn how to put a wood texture on a Nurbs Sphere. I Truespace all you had to do was select a material and then select the funnel or global paint button and it was painted.
Between the brush settings, brush selection, and 10 windows I never even heard of before I haven't a clue how to do it nor could I take an image and apply it to anything either. Yeeeeeesh.

Well there you have it.

Keep up the good work, and happy hunting for answers everyone

wizzie