Ravings of an Undead Cheese Minion

What is a show programmer? Well, let's take a look at one of the job descriptions. These are a major pain to try and find, by the way. The moment Disney no longer needs the position filled, they remove all the job descriptions, making it very difficult for those of us who want to do it as a career. This one is technically focused on being a figure animator, so it's not quite what we want, but it's pretty dang close. Also, it's all I could find, though I've seen much better descriptions in the past (which I neglected to save). The vanilla show programmers (which is what I'm aiming for) require a lot more in terms of coding skills. So that's why CS will be our baseline.  Effectively tell the story in a meaningful way through acting, movement, staging, with simple or complex articulated rigs. Create quality animation using digital tools, which adheres to the engineering limitations and requirements of an Audio-Animatronics(r) figure. Collaborate with and take d

This really confused me at first, and took way too long to figure out. So, I'm dropping a quick how-to here. Just FYI, this is very basic and I may rewrite it later after gathering more information.  A shared network drive is a folder that can be used by any computer on the same network (i.e. WiFi connection). This folder has to be stored on a computer, and this computer must be turned on. If the computer is off, you can't access the network drive. This is because you can't exactly access anything  on a computer when it is turned off. :') This is why you generally want to use a server to go through these steps, because servers are supposed to be constantly turned on. However, when you're just doing homework and will not be using the drive for something practical, we don't need to worry about that.  Step 1: Creating the drive Technically, the IT lab says to use only the command line -- but the specific task is to mount  the network drive using the command line, n

I'm going to make a little adjustment: I will try for an hour a day of animation/VFX instead of 30 minutes, but 30 minutes will be my fallback (MVP). Plus, I will continue with my 30 minutes per day of traditional drawing (or painting, once I get there). This will also eliminate the need for all-day pushes. I'm gonna have to miss the one for today, because I have those 2 pentesting labs.  I'll also be putting my tutorials on hold until I have my current projects done. Then, I will try to finish the "Houdini Isn't Scary" tutorial in just a few days before I hop onto something else. I may look into pipeline stuff, too.  I don't know how I will do this when I have to take 3 classes instead of 2. But, I will worry about that when it comes. My review of mathematics this semester should basically be treated like a third class anyway.  Let's do this. 

I've been stuck in this irritating "beginner's phase" for a long time. And I need to get out of it before I finish grad school, or else I'm going to be "doing tutorials" after work for the rest of my life and it is going to drive me insane.  The worst of this is with art. Yeah, I got into CS Animation after being stuck in the premajor for 2 years, and that's awesome! So I'm obviously not a terrible artist, and maybe I should call myself intermediate instead of a beginner. But I still very much feel like a beginner when it comes to 3D work (especially with Houdini, despite having worked with it for quite a few semesters). Furthermore, I'm still not satisfied with my drawing skills, and I really want to start digital painting but I haven't because everyone always says to nail your drawing skills first.  I never get to work on my own art projects, because I'm either a) too busy doing animation stuff for school, or b) when I get through t