3D Animation
Intensive Introduction (suitable for beginner to advanced students)

Maya, the computer animation industry's leading software, has the capability to create limitless imagery, from the ape in King Kong to the magical world in The Chronicles of Narnia.  In this class, students learn the fundamentals of modeling and animation, moving on to texturing, lighting, and rendering a short scene.  Through hands-on practice, you will learn technical standards and the production workflow used in the broadcast, commercial, and film industries.  Lectures, in-class discussion, and critiques help you to create a great-looking animation for your demo reel.  Starting with an overview of the Maya interface you will first learn to grasp the work flow Maya has to offer how to efficiently create, manipulate, and organize your scene, objects, components and cameras.  We will then begin working with different surface types, e.g. modeling with Polygon Meshes and sculpting NURBS surfaces by creating inorganic objects, adjusting pivot points, parenting objects, and grouping objects together.  From there, we will learn to assign materials and textures within the Hypershade as well as working effectively with UV's and texture projections.  Additionally, we will cover the creating of particle simulations, an outer space environment, and lighting our scene.  The course is designed to cover all aspects within Maya.

Required skills: basic Photoshop
Drawing experience is not required but useful, as students will normally design there own ship.

Course Outline

Students will create and model their own highly detailed spaceship and outer space sequence along with particle effects, paint effects, basic animation, and rendering techniques.

Essentials

Setting up a Maya project
Navigating in the perspective view, working with the camera
Exploring the U.I.
Viewing and shading geometry
Essential Shortcut keys for efficient work flow
Channel Box and layers
Grouping and Parenting
Maya's Hotbox
Selection Masks
Understanding different surface types

Modeling

Primitive Shapes
NURBS techniques - extrude, Loft, revolve and working with curves
Polygon Techniques

Extrude faces
Inserting edge loops
Merging Edges and vertices

Duplicating objects
Instancing
Duplicating Input graphs

Boleans
Setting up image planes with space ship designs created by students

Rendering
Overview of the Hypershade
Applying textures and shaders

Working with
projection maps
3D textures

Bump Mapping
UV layout
Overview of Lights
Overview of shadows
Rendering cont.

Light Linking in Maya
Setting up a 3 point light system
3d camera
Creating Particles

Animation
Setting Key frames
Overview of the graph editor
Animating Cameras

Course Title: Animation
Tuition Fee: RMB 3200

Spring Session 2012: March 6th to May 13th

Section A: Tuesday evenings (6:30 PM - 9:00 PM)
10 weeks from March 6th to May 8th (Course Code: AM103)
Location: ELC Learning Center

Section B: Sunday afternoons (1:00 PM - 3:30 PM)
10 weeks from March 11th to May 13th (Course Code: AM104)
Location: ELC Learning Center

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THIS COURSE

Registration Procedure:
Please register online first to reserve your place.  You will then receive a confirmation email with further details.  Next, payment must be made on site at the ELC Learning Center during the payment dates shown below (you can come in person or send someone).

Tuition payment for the Spring Session 2012 will take place from 11:00 AM to 4:00 PM, from Monday, February 20th through Monday, February 27th, 2012.  Payments will be received in the Registration Office at the ELC Learning Center.  Click here for map.

Please note: classes are kept small for the students' benefit (generally between 8 and 12 people).  Register early to reserve your place.  Payment must be received on time to complete your enrollment and maintain your reservation in the class(es) for which you have registered.  (Any course that does not meet sufficient enrollment may be cancelled and a full refund provided upon presentation of your original receipt.)