Resources


STRESSED OUT??!?! 
Students are under a lot of pressure - deadlines, financial worries, family expectations, relationships, new surroundings.. Stress can make learning difficult and negatively affect our health. Many students find it hard to manage it all. Did you know George Brown has FREE counselling for all students?
Counselling St James Campus Room 582C (SJA)
416-415-5000 ext : 2107
letstalk@georgebrown.ca
Office Hours
Monday to Thursday 8:30am – 4:30pm
Friday 8:30am – 4:00pm
Summer Hours 9:00am – 4:00pm
Website
www.georgebrown.ca/counselling





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File Backups - better safe than sorry!
In a perfect world, files would never get corrupted, hard drives would never fail, and your USB sticks would last forever. The truth is, all hard drives tend to just stop working within about 5 years.  Keeping the only copies of your work around on portable drives is just asking for disaster. Industry best practice is to back everything up at least 3 times - 4 is even better.  You should get in the habit of backing up your files each day to multiple drives in more than one location. Better yet, set up an automatic backup every day. Worst case scenario, you'd only lose one day's work. Trust me, you don't want to have to go to a client or a teacher and say, 'I just lost all my work' because that should never happen.  You can't prevent drive failures but you can prevent data loss.

Here are some tips on file backups:
  • Save important data in at least 3 places, preferably not all in the same location. For example, when you leave for the day, send your stuff to yourself using DropBox, or email, save it on a a portable and back it up to your home computer when you arrive at home. You don't have to save every iteration, just the most recent (compressed) image or video and maybe the last few working copies of the file. Zip it if you need to save even more space. 
  • Use an online backup sevice. 'Backblaze' is highly recommend.  Unlimited storage starts at $5/month, so don't balk at the price. The best thing about it is it backs up automatically. We used Mozy for years. 
  • For longer-term storage (like portfolio files!) you could trade a hard drive or even a stack of DVDs with a friend or family.  It's nice to keep a copy of rarely-used but important files offsite. 
  • Here are some more ideas:  http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2395766,00.asp
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How to Forward Your George Brown Email 
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Dozens of Drawing and Digital Drawing tutorials:

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Download Clips from YouTube:
SaveFrom.Net 
KeepVid
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Create a custom Maya HUD
Here's a nice little script to create a custom head's up display in Maya:
This could be handy for displaying your name or copyright info for assets.
Copy script in script directory
Restart maya or source it.
Enter in the command line:  "source mg_headsUpScene; mg_headsUpScene;" 
The dialogue box should open. 
You can create a shelf button to open the source script.
You can always add a Current Frame counter in the Display -> Head's Up Display. The colours can also be changed in Settings/Preferences->Color Settings.


Click image to embiggen

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Animation Education Online Resources
Spline Doctors podcasts - interviews with animation heavyweights:http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/spline-cast/id212448390
Texturing articles by Leigh Van der Byl:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1617070/TexturingforDummies.pdf
UDK Basics:
http://www.worldofleveldesign.com/categories/udk/udk-basics-part1.php

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Life Drawing Classes in Toronto 
There are classes every day of the week! No excuses for a dusty sketchbook. 
Click here for the downloadable list