Get Schooled

The past few years, while learning and doing and working on various projects, November and December have traditionally been my slow-down days where I don't work on any projects and just sit back and let motivation take hold. Thanksgiving and the Christmas seasons are pretty much family time.

I have a lot of motivation right now for continued learning, and after my OS rebuild which I hope to do this weekend, there are several things I want to delve into:

1. Houdini 10
2. Fusion 6
3. Advanced After Effects techniques
4. Softimage 2010

The past year I've been pretty much working with sequences from start to finish. But, as much as I want to be familiar with every aspect of post-production, I've learned that I have a love of particles and fluids. That's what I really REALLY want to learn, so I've got my eye on learning node-based programs like Houdini and Fusion, which is where the industry is leaning towards. Plus, if the gods were to do particle effects, they would use Houdini. So that's what I want to learn.

As of now, I just don't get node-based workflows. I'm so used to the time-line and hierarchy style of After Effects compositions (and even older programs like AVS), that dealing with nodes is quite outside of my comfort zone.

But, I really want to discover the industry in every way possible, and that means learning the different ways that other programs do (mostly) the same thing.