One of the most satisfying parts of teaching is watching students become more confident in their skills each semester and start to express their own individual creativity. My students will often hear me repeat the phrase “Portfolio, Portfolio, Portfolio” in every class. I’m a very strong believer that, while a degree is certainly important, employers are far more concerned that a potential employee can demonstrate their creativity and technical skill through concrete examples displayed in their individual online portfolios.
The primary software tool used for the examples below was Blender. I’m a big supporter of the Open Source Software movement and have been amazed to watch the rapid development of the capabilities of this software tool in the past few years. I’ve also been fortunate enough to attend multiple SIGGRAPH conferences and meet various Blender developers and Power Users.
3D Capstone Class
This is a collection of student homework and final projects from my 3D Capstone Class. Topics covered include Camera Tracking, Motion Capture Character Configuration, Photorealistic Lighting and 3D Game Logic.
Particles and Fluids
Blender does an amazing job simulating both Particles and Fluids. Saint Paul College is in the process of developing a Render Farm which will allow future fluid simulation to be rendered at a higher resolution for even more realistic fluid simulation.
Flex Rig Animation
One of the first assignments utilizing the Blender Cookie Flex Rig involves a recreation of one of my scenes from “The Karate Kid”. Students have also incorporated a “Bullet Time Effect” with the camera in these examples.
Character Lip Sync
For part of the final project in 3D Character Animation, student spend a lot of time studying phonemes and various 3D modeling Lip Sync techniques. For many student, this is the first major assignment incorporating character facial expressions with various body movements.
Basic 3D Modeling
These examples are all from the very first class student take called 3D Animation Fundamentals. It’s very rewarding to see students who know very little about 3D modeling and animation at the start of the semester create the following final projects by the end of a semester.