Don't forget the apple

It is that time of year again when students head back to school and teachers prepare lesson plans to educate them. Why mention this? Yours truly has been asked to teach again at the local college. My task will be to teach the students how to use Autodesk Architectural Desktop (ADT). This is exciting as up to this point I have only taught AutoCAD for this campus (multiple locations). I did mention to my boss after class one day last fall that I train the staff at the firm I work for during my day job to use ADT and that I also train other users/companies on a contractual basis. Now one year later they have asked me to teach a class in ADT for them.

I have been toying with the idea of writing a book for sometime now as a way to get the knowledge out of my head and in a legible written form that others may benefit from. The initial concepts for a specific book keep coming back to tying in multiple software packages and showing how they work together to get projects done. The first downside to this concept is that it is hard enough to sell a software specific book as it is and by tying in more than one piece of software to the book you limit your user base that you can effectively reach. A good case in point is my good friend Dave Stein. For those of you who want to learn Visual Lisp, Dave wrote a great book and after shopping it around to several publishers he has not found anyone to publish the book. So for a limited time Dave is offering the book to you free of charge in a .pdf download from his site.

Why did I mention the book idea? My boss at the college asked what other ideas I had for students. I mentioned possibly teaching a photoshop class and he asked how we could tie this into the curriculum offered. This seemed like the perfect time to pitch the idea of a "Digital Visualization" class, and so I did. I mentioned the idea of teaching students how to use photoshop with Max and/or VIZ render to get the beautiful images that are produced by many visualization artists. This idea seemed to have perked his ears up as he has asked me to put this information together and plan on doing this in the near future. So with any luck I can get this implemented as I start the book.

Reading between the lines (or what you should take away from this):
1. Self promotion and sharing your ideas is a good thing. Whenever possible share this with someone who can help to make it happen.

Happy Rendering...