Rules

Here's my philosophy of teaching as well as some rules I like to set forth, as well as some suggestions.

I'm not your Mom.
At this point in life, you should be making professional practices a habit. This means, by the start of class, have your work in the folder and ready to review. I'm not a strong disciplinarian - I won't be coming by and scolding you for being on Facebook. However, if you aren't engaged in class, participating, working, and just zoning out to whatever is entertaining on youtube, that will be factored into your class participation. But have your work ready to go...having the entire class pause while we wait for you to find and load your work just wastes everyone's time.

The Dog Didn't Eat Your Homework
If you can't get your work in on time, let me know 24 hours in advance for a penalty free extension. Just showing up with no work, claiming you forgot your flash drive, or you couldn't find a reader for your zip disk doesn't work in 2017. Just save your assignment to dropbox, or icloud, or google drive, or any cloud based system that dumps whatever is in your folder onto the internet.

You're the Boss
I may teach the class, but ultimately I work for you. If you aren't getting what you need out of the class, be it more specific lectures, more critique on your work, etc. you need to advocate for those things. Most teachers work from their own frame of reference - so be vocal about what you want me to focus on...I'm happy to fit in lectures and topics based on your needs.

Did Your Aunt Die Again?
I average about 7 family deaths a semester per class. I'm either very bad luck, or something is a little suspicous. If you aren't going to make class, just let me know ahead of time. Life gets in the way sometimes...I completely get that. But just give me a heads up and make up the work. These assignments build off of themselves, so keeping them going is vital to this class.

Housekeeping
Never name something "final". Animation is never final.  Here's how I'd like you to name your work (and not have something called BobFinalfinal2final).

LastName_FirstName_Module#_description_version
e.g. CoopermanJeff_M01_blocking.ma

It sounds annoying, but it makes organizing your work for grading much easier. You can also dump everything into one folder and have it all line up nicely.

As far as folder workflow goes, here's what I do. Say I'm working on my homework and I have 4 versions and are working on version 5. What I like to do is keep the main file as up to date as possible, work on versions, then save the most recent one without a number. For example, my folder structure looks like this

CoopermanJeff_M01_blocking.ma
CoopermanJeff_M01_blocking_a.ma
CoopermanJeff_M01_blocking_b.ma
CoopermanJeff_M01_blocking_c.ma
CoopermanJeff_M01_blocking_d.ma

When it's time to work on the next version, I open version 'd', save it as
CoopermanJeff_M01_blocking_e.ma
When I'm done, I save it, then save over
CoopermanJeff_M01_blocking.ma

I started using this workflow with game animation, where, say you have a run cycle that you're constantly tweaking. Rather then continuously renaming the cycle, I just keep working on incremental versions, then save over the main file that's in the game, so my most current version is always live.

My other dumb trick is when I file from one folder to another, I always have my source on the left and target on the right. Again, this sounds really dumb, but after an all nighter, you want your habits to be solid, and I've seen too many people write over their carefully polished animation with an older version.