Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/4522
November 2009 38 a thick 3D Studio manual, but it was in English, and I didn't understand [the lan- guage] then, so all I could do was look at the images and try to follow the instruc- tions as best I could," he explains. "I re- member getting tired of it and just using the manual as an inspiration of what could be done, and drawing my own conclusions and discovering how the tools worked on my own." Education: Part 1 When it came time to study at the uni- versity level, Liobera chose to focus on computers. "I wanted to do animation, but there was no such career in Spain at the time. My parents wanted me to study computer science—It has computers in it, right? Just like computer animation," he adds with a chuckle. e reason for his parents' misgivings, Liobera says, was mainly due to the fact that there's no degree off ered per se in ani- mation—it's too specifi c. " ey didn't see it with very good eyes, and for them, it was really important that their children receive the best possible education, to have the best chances in life," he explains. "While I really appreciate that, it clashed with the fact that my dream was not a higher-edu- cation discipline." Liobera never received his degree in com- puter science. "I abandoned it, much to my parents' dismay, to pursue animation," he says. "It was tough to try to convince them that this was what I really wanted to do, and I remember that they gave me the one chance to study at IDEP [in Barcelona] for a year so that I could try it for myself and see whether I really liked it." Nevertheless, the time spent study- ing computer sciences proved invaluable; Liobera had learned programming skills that he then used to write animation scripts and tools. While computer science is a technical discipline, Liobera's interest was more artistic in nature; now, though, he looks back and sees that his skills are in- deed a combination of the two. "I remember messing around with Maya Version 1 and learning that there was this thing called MEL scripting, which was 'Maya's own language,' and that a lot of Maya's tools and actions were, under the hood, being executed in MEL. Even more, users could do all their own MEL scripts if they could program a little bit," says Li- obera. So, he dived in and starting script- ing in Maya, learning the programming language on his own and experimenting with it. "Even today I use many scripts that I have written over the years in my day-to- day work fl ow," says Liobera. "Back when I started, I shared some of my scripts with the Internet community. Nowadays, I have shared many others with my co-workers at Blue Sky." Education: Part 2 e next stop along Liobera's career jour- ney was at IDEP, the only private school in Barcelona that taught computer animation. e school off ered a two-year course, with the goal of producing CG generalists. As Liobera explains, in the fi rst year, students learned Maya from zero, starting with the modeling tools, moving on to texturing and rendering, and then rigging and ani- mating. Next, the students (approximately 15 to a class) worked in groups for three months creating a short fi lm. e second year entailed a similar struc- ture, albeit the tools were more advanced, including Maya modules such as Cloth, Dynamics, and Fur. Sprinkled throughout the school year were classes on narrative structure, storyboarding, fi lm editing, and audio recording. "Generally, the teachers were working professionals in Barcelona, with ample experience in TV commercials or architectural modeling," Liobera says. With Maya being so new—it had just been released when Liobera started his fi rst year at IDEP—the teachers were unfamil- iar with the program. " at was frustrat- ing to us eager students, to see that the simple action of creating an extrusion took so long. We complained, so the school gave us the manuals for Maya—about 10 thick volumes!" recounts Liobera. He read through them, along with free materials The former student created this piece for another Animation Mentor assignment. In Class 2, called Body Mechanics, the students had to animate a character pushing a heavy object up a hill. Liobera did so, and came up with an entire story to augment the animation. Education