Hands-on Intensive 3-Week 3D Animation Workshop

In the Film Academy 3-D Computer Animation 3 week Workshops, classes are held every day, Monday through Friday. Students learn the major concepts of animation. The bulk of students’ time outside of class is spent in supervised labs. Lab time is used to complete and to expand upon assignments, as well as to work on their final animated films. The students final animation is output digitally and projected at a celebratory screening.

This course teaches students the principles of animation (movement, timing, weight, character development, etc.) using Maya—the industry standard high-end 3-D computer program. Students progress through basic modeling, motion and rendering exercises en route to the completion of a short 3-D computer animated film (with sound) of their own design by the end of the course.

TOPICS COVERED

MODELING
• Building objects and characters from primitive shapes using polygonal modeling,
• Basic nurbs modeling

INTRODUCTION TO SHADERS
• Using hypershade
• Applying textures to models and characters
• Photoshop
• Shaders
• Textures
• Introduction to UV’s
• Planar maps

RIGGING
• Introduction to rigging
• Building the skeleton – understanding joints
• Inverse kinematics
• Constraints - they make a characters eye follow an object, a hand pick up a glass
• Skinning - Binding a character to the rig.
• Local rotation axis
• Controllers
• Set driven key
• Blend shapes

LIGHTING & CAMERAS
• Basic 3 point lighting
• Directional light
• Ambient light
• Spot light
• Depth map shadows
• Creating cameras

INTRODUCTION TO ANIMATION
• Key frames
• Squash and stretch
• Bouncing a ball
• Walk cycle
• Acting for animators
• Creating animation reference materials
• The graph editor

RENDERING, EDITING & COMPOSITING
• Render - Creating finished images - a sequence of completed frames of your scene to be composited to make the movie for outputting to your editing program
• AfterEffects
• Final-Cut
• Final-Cut: Sound design