 Hello and Namaste. Welcome all to this short session about the animation course which is on IIT Bombay X right now. We had received some queries from various people therefore we thought we will just make one small introductory video about this. Well, this is a 3D animation course and as you know right now all IIT Bombay X courses are free. So, this is a free 3D animation course offered on IIT Bombay X. I am Sameer and I would be taking you through the features of this course since I am one of the instructors of the course. Let us just begin. So, there has been lot of queries and lot of emails about why this course name is SKANI 101X. So, let me just clarify in the beginning itself. We wanted to create a range of skill based animation courses. So, various skills were thought of and the first one what we decided was animation skill. So, therefore this particular course is titled as skill course in animation and that is why this SK and ANI have been picked up for the acronym and like every other course which is a primary course will have the code 101 even this is 101 and IIT Bombay X course always has the X tag at the end. Therefore, the title is SKANI 101X. I hope now we are clear about why this is called. In fact, the courses which are coming soon on IIT Bombay X and which have the skill development tag will be titled as SKARC where it will be a skill based course on architectural drawings or SKGAM where it will be skill based course on gaming. So, we are bringing up a gaming course very soon. So, let us just come back to SKANI 101X and I will be introducing the instructors and there is a huge team behind this. It is not a very single person job. The people who are right now with me recording these videos, people who are doing the post production of editing, there is a huge content team which will scrutinize the text and also the text what appears on screen when I speak. There are programmers who will program all the software and the platform. There are system administrators who maintain the servers so that you can get the videos in time. There is a huge team that is there are reviewers by the way who will test the content first before it goes up on the website. So, that is how the team works. In fact, there is a special page dedicated on the course where you can go and have a look what this team all about. Having said that, let us just go into slight details about animation. I picked up this because I come from a fine arts background and my specialization was animation where I studied cell animation that was the traditional animation. So, after that I worked in the entertainment domain for long time, but towards like last 12 to 13 years I have been working in the area of how to create educational content using animation. That was actually my research topic also when I finished my PhD and since then I have been working on various ways in which we can utilize animation for educational purpose. We found out blender in this whole journey and then we started working around this software blender because this is free and open source. So, obviously education institutions do not have to purchase any license for this not even to practice or even to learn. So, that is the biggest advantage this software give you. We started off by creating some blender models. For example, I can show you couple of them here. We have a website called oscar.iitb.ac.in which you can see here and under this you will see lot of blender activities. So, there is a repository of such models. There are over 100 models of various nature created in blender. By the way, this is also one of the blender models. Then you can see that there are multiple videos of how we have created various things. So, this is one of the animation video and let me see if I can show you that. If I click on animations it will take us to a video. So, this video is talking about distillation column. This is the distillation column which is typically not seen in a way that we can see things inside. So, there is no cross section available, but for animation sake we have made it like that. Anyway, you can see that how the liquid gets filled up here and then the heating happens, the vapors will come out and how the, you can see here the vapors. By the way, all this thing is created in blender and as you can see it has been used by lot of people earlier and we have been using this for educational purposes. We also were trying to see how blender can be used by BTECH students in creating their final year projects. So, we have a link from here. So, here we show how different things were done as BTECH projects using blender and people have created games using blender. For example, creating 3D interactive interface for building e-learning systems using blender or we had a gesture based for example, gesture recognition for educational purpose was one more thing where we thought of teaching mathematics using blender. So, here is an interesting game what we created using blender which was called math amazing. Now, you just what you have to do is go and so this is the game which starts by the way this requires something additional. For example, it requires a Kinect box in addition to the computer and the students will have to solve this problem So, what is 5 plus 7 minus 3 plus 3? So, if you have to figure out the answer and when you stand in front of the computer with this pose you can actually get the tracking of your body here in Kinect and as you move your body the character on screen will also move. For example, you bend forward then you can see that the character on screen will also go forward like this and you take your right hand outside to make it move towards the right hand side then you can see that the character on screen will also go towards right hand side. Now, remember all these things are done using blender and there are many more things which can be done using blender and our whole point was that we wanted to use this wonderful tool for educational purposes and that is the reason we decided to create courses and this is where we started off with the course called SK ANI 101X and it was released on IIT Bombay X. So, just show you a small little promo at this point. 3D animation, are you aware of any 3D animations of the which is free? Here is a short-term skill development course on basic 3D animation using blender. This free online course has the following, slow-paced video lectures, animation principles, explained with examples, online discussion forums to help you, quizzes, assignments and projects. All these are explained using an open-source software called Blender which you can download for free and practice at home. Welcome to this free course on basic 3D animation using blender. What we have in this course is a wide range of things actually although it is a very basic course, but it starts off with very minimum things like what system you should have and how you can install blender, what is the user interface of blender and so on and so forth. But it gets into the skill part where it tells you how to do the modeling, the 3D modeling of the objects, how to apply textures to it, how to put light sources and how to create animation. So in fact by the end of the course we are supposed to create your own animation clips, small clips but not really big ones but yeah, you have to create some animation clips and I will show you some examples also. It also talks about some basic animation principles which are very important in giving life to the kind of objects we animate. There are lots and lots of assignments because this is a practical course, it is not like theory you read somewhere and then you should be able to do it. So you have to do animation yourself, you have to create models and you have to submit those videos that would be a bigger part of the course. We have quizzes for assessment which means that if you want to certificate then you have to attempt quizzes and get at least 50 percent marks in the quizzes. Right now the course which is uploaded on IIT Bombay X is a self-paced mode course which means that it is open till a bigger window of almost 4 months now. So it started off in June, it will be open till September and during this period you can pick up any time to login and start the course and you can pick up any time to finish the course. It depends on you, how you want to look at it. So people have seen this course in 9 days, the record I have been like a person joined the course and within 9 days she finished the course and she has given all the quizzes. So this is how it can happen because now the control is in your side. So you do not have to wait for 2 months to finish the course although it is a 8 week course you do not have to wait. Well how to go for that? This is the website where you have to login. This is called www.IITBombayX.in. If you go to this website you have to register first of all, if you do not have a registration please register. You can use your email as your registration ID and put on a password. For example people who are not registered should click here sign up for IIT Bombay X today. By registration it means that you are a member of the website now. It does not mean that you are a member of or you have taken up this course. What you have to do is after you register and you get a confirmation email then you can login back to IIT Bombay X and find for some courses. When you see select courses option you have to scroll down a bit till you get to this point where it is called SKNI 1 over XA. Why A? Because this is the next offering happening so we wanted to label it accordingly and this is a self-paced mode course which is offered in autumn this time. It is called SKNI 1 over XA. Just select this course and once you enroll you should be able to get into this screen actually. Let me just show you probably how you can do this. I have this particular course here. If you login and I am giving my credentials now which are displayed here and once I login to this course you can see things like the welcome note presented here. This is an important point look at this big button here. So if you are the first timer on a course like this then we suggest that you just go to IIT Bombay X demo and then understand how to navigate this course. I am going to show you in a very shorter way. If you click on the left button on course where you can see that there are week by week content being presented there. You have week 1 and there are two types of content here. There is a week 2 here. If you click on that you can see it starts with introduction and system requirements and how to install for windows and so on and so forth. If you click any one of these items here then the video for that particular weeks will be opening here and there can be multiple videos. For example here is a video then there are the slides for this video then there is another video here and then there are more slides here. These are the slides which you can click and download for that particular lecture. So now this is how you just navigate within the course that is pretty easy but more importantly you have another option to interact with the instructors which is the discussion forum. If you click on this discussion button here you can see that you can post a new query here if you have any doubt and you can click here you can type a new post it can be a question it can be a discussion anything of that sort and you can also see what others have asked. For example somebody has submitted assignment number 4 and they are asking what could be the suggestions what are the activities here and interesting discussions can happen here. For example how to apply timing and spacing for this particular assignment is a question. So all sorts of queries will happen here right coming back to the course so I was just discussing this course were here and we had offered this twice already we had offered this once in 2015 and another one in the early part of 2016 in 2015 we had over 1300 participants in 2016 first time offering we had more than 5000 registrations now out of those the passing rate has increased really nice way and it has reached around 20% passing by for the course which ended in April 2016 this is a good number and that is good because we had some interaction with the students who were sitting on the other side so here is what you can see we had reached out to more than 900 towns and cities in India and the percentage of passing has gone up to 20% when it was offered in 2016 not only that there has been very interesting participation for example the videos have been found very interesting by people and they have mentioned in their comments why they like these kind of videos and the main point what they have mentioned is because the videos are a combination of what we call as the screen capture plus the person who is speaking as well as the slides which have been shown at times so you can see the slide here you can see the person speaking here and you can also get the video of what is happening inside now I can just full screen this probably and now you can see that this is a mix of all three so you know where are you what are you doing how to select a color and the same thing is shown here so you can see the mouse movement inside the window wherever the slides are not necessary this becomes full screen so that you can see clearly where the instructor is trying to show the demonstration right so this was one of the particular ways which was loved by people there was another thing that the assignments were open ended what we mean by that is that we never used to try and reduce the creativity of people what I I just show you another example of that when we started in 2015 we gave this assignment create a chess piece and we had given this image for reference that can you create something like that obviously the submissions were mostly around this topic next year when we offered we actually removed that and we just said now create a model of a chess piece of your choice what has happened is if you look at the kind of submissions we have so here are different submissions people have tried to create the chess board they have created the queen or the king and they have tried with different materials they have created using maybe marble wood plastic or even sometimes different type of wood textures have been utilized they have created a glassware I do not know but how many squares are shown here they are like certainly not 64 is a complex chess board probably anyway what I wanted to show you was that the moment the assignments were open ended then interesting submissions start coming in and people can do the things creatively there is another interesting part that when we opened it up for people to discuss about it then we found out that for example this gentleman from Gujarat Mr. Virabhadra submitted this entry and we liked it so much and everyone was appreciating it so I requested him that can he post a video of how he did it he responded positively and he actually created a video by recording himself teaching about how he made this this was the video by Virabhadra and as you can see he has shown everything here how he created the chess board and how did he create the smooth effect and all that this was viewed by so many people and what we were particularly happy about that the submission quality increased exponentially lot of people started creating such interesting submissions after that and then they were successful in getting the effect what they were trying to achieve so in short what happened was overall quality of the course went up this is how things happen inside this course and therefore it is very interesting course for people but why should you take it like why what will be the advantage for your institute well there is a 3D graphics course lab in every curriculum I know for sure there is this lab in Mumbai University and a college in Ratnagiri is definitely going to implement this course as a part of their lab it is also good for people who are techno savvy and they want to learn any new thing which comes up so this is very good and I was showing you earlier on that we had different projects in this area going forward in gaming or e-learning or maybe making apps and other things this would be an interesting tool to learn therefore I wanted to just talk to you and let you know about the features of this course now you can contact me on the following email IDs you can write it down it is canny blender at gmail.com for any queries on the course we also maintain a Facebook page which shows some of the submissions of people and people can go and have a look at it for example this is the page what you can see here are various submissions of people we also used to go and meet people who have completed the course and these are the photographs of the avu sessions happening and these are some of the submissions how people have created the ball bounce and this submission is uploaded here some of the queries or comments about the course so all these things are updated on the Facebook site which you can have a look at therefore this is what we intend to do using this course and therefore we welcome you to this 3D space so enjoy 3D visualization using this course called SKNI 101X thank you