To keep yourself up to date with all that’s happening in computer animation, just watch the latest animation movies. My personal favorite is Madagascar. It’s the animation movie that went through a lot of computing advances and propelled what we would call to be a golden age in animation. With never-seen-earlier visual effects, my feeling is that you should analyze the kind of advances that the animtors reflected in this movie. I read somewhere that the animators broke through most animations in this movie that took 4 years to hit the theatres. So get the DVD and start learning now!