THE Animation Workshop

Transcription

1 interview with Morten Rasmussen - Coordinator, Computer Graphic Art Spotlight THE Animation Workshop

2 About The Animation Workshop, Denmark The Animation Workshop ( enjoys a strong reputation as a top education provider for the international film industry. It strives to make the best foundation for specialized education and courses in animation and is dedicated to the development of all aspects of the profession both artistically and commercially.

3 WHAT ARE THE SKILLS YOU REQUIRE OF YOUR STUDENTS? We do not expect students to know any software packages before they start school. We focus much more on their abilities to draw and to have a good sense of colors, making characters, backgrounds etc. This means that there is a lot to learn during the first year they need to acquire a lot of technical skills.

4 Pale masked cave dog by Karina Venneberg Sorensen Mathias Norgaard TELL US ABOUT THE TEACHING PROCESS AT THE ANIMATION WORKSHOP. The Animation Workshop relies solely on teachers from the industry coming to teach for a period of up to three weeks. This brings a great dynamic to the classroom and we were lucky to have two really talented teachers for the look development and lighting, rendering and compositing part of our recent student project called Quadruped. Brian Freisinger taught and supervised the students on look development, giving an introduction to V-Ray and Chris Smallfield took over with more focus on light and integration.

5 Pale masked cave dog View Project

6 JINX-310 by Stelios Stamatiadis and Rune Maansson Teaching V-Ray is a nice change from teaching other Render software. For starters it s very intuitive. A beginner can quickly and easily get something to render looking pretty good right out of the box. Getting an early victory of a good looking image is really helpful to both the teacher and the students since it s really encouraging really quickly. The students at Animation Workshop had some excellent training in CG before I arrived to teach the class. It s a great school that makes sure to cover all the foundation skills with its students. Because of this, and V-Ray s ease of use, the students picked up on it very quickly, and were turning out great images right away. As they got better and better results, they got more encouraged, and so more in depth with the software. Brian Freisinger, 3D Artist and Guest Lecturer at The Animation Workshop

7 JINX-310 View Project

8 The Antler Eater by Kristina & Sophie Students at the Animation Workshop bring a four-legged creature to life. It is their first encounter with a VFX project and their first introduction to V-Ray. In the beginning of January students of the Animation Workshop come back to school after the Christmas holidays and gather in what they call The Høgni - a meeting place and a lecture hall. On the first day after holidays everyone is trying to catch up with friends and grab a coffee. But just like in production studios, a new project is waiting for them to start on immediately. PROJECT QUADRUPED AT THE ANIMATION WORKSHOP DENMARK Project Quadruped runs from January through March. Students have to create a four-legged creature in Maya and integrate it into a live-action background. The process starts by creating the initial design for the creatures. Maya and ZBrush are used for sculpting, V-Ray is used for shading, Mudbox, Zbrush and Photoshop for textures, and students do the lighting and rendering using V-Ray again. Finally everything is composited and integrated with the live-action background in Nuke. In a way this project is like watching a documentary with Sir David Attenborough, who has discovered at least 20 unknown species. This is how we feel when we see the creatures fully created in 3D and integrated into a live-action background. We hope you will enjoy them.

9 The Antler Eater View Project

10 Sancai Tiger by Jules Garreau & Line Bering WHY DID YOU CHOOSE TO TEACH V-RAY IN YOUR CLASSES? At the beginning, students work with Mental Ray because it is part of the Autodesk package and we try to give them a thorough understanding of what they can achieve within that package. But in the spring semester on the second year this all changes when we introduce V-Ray. V-Ray is becoming more and more of an industry standard for small and midsize companies. Basically, companies who have not developed their own proprietary render engines use V-Ray, so our students will likely encounter V-Ray later on in their career. It also seems that the turn-around for getting decent looking renders is much faster compared to other rendering engines. The simulation of believable lights is easier to achieve and render passes are much easier to set up. I think students really enjoy using V-Ray in our classes.

11 Sancai Tiger View Project

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