One of the many things that the abundance of time in Pilani offers me is pursuing of a hobby. One of these hobbies is 3D design. I have used Blender 3D for a very long time now and dabbled in daydreams of starting an animation studio, an architectural rendering studio, special effects studio etc. - there is no limit to imagination is there? :-)
And all this with free and open source software.
With passing time, I realise that for a lazy and unmotivated person like me something like this is practically impossible. So instead of spending inordinately long hours in front of the computer fiddling with Blender 3D, I talked to the BITS administration about allowing me to offer a course from next semester on 3D Design.
Its an attempt to pass on what I have gathered through the years and see if you guys can make anything out of it. I also want to demystify Blender 3D which is considered by many to be notoriously difficult to learn - but teaching has always been my one of my strong points. :-)
Here is the tentative handout and summary of the course :
Of course, it is not official yet and and has to meet with BITS' screening and approval. I just wanted you to comment if you are interested so that I would get to know if this is feasible or not. But as I said, it is pending approval and is likely to meet with many changes in requirements and format.
Textbooks really won't be required because there are community tutorials splattered all over the internet.
Last but not least, this is not an engineering or physics course - the aim is to channel creativity to a particular medium and have fun while doing it.
On a related note, I was pleasantly surprised stepping out of my office yesterday and finding a signboard in the TBI area with "Anaya : Animation Unlimited" written on it. I dropped in for a couple of minutes and a nice dude answered all my questions very patiently.
I'm extremely happy because this is the first ever attempted start-up I have seen in BITS that has a very solid technical base. They are using CUDA as of now to accelerate physics calculations for a few animation companies - they plan to branch to OpenCL soon.
For those for whom that didn't make any sense, CUDA and OpenCL are standards which allow us to harness the tremendous power of GPU's (your graphics cards, plainly put) to do calculations much faster than the CPU can handle. There are free SDK's that can be downloaded to do the same - but I know nothing about them. Although I could tell you a thing or to about the graphics card architectures. :-)
Of course, these calculations need to be of a particular type only - otherwise the CPU is faster.
But I'm very happy to see some young guys doing cutting edge stuff sitting in this arid Indian hamlet. CUDA and OpenCL are just getting noticed all over the world and maturing as technologies and these guys are already on to it.
Congratulations Anaya, and best wishes.
