lighting

Fall Semester 2008

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It’s amazing how quickly the summer went by. Classes officially begin today at the Academy of Art University. I have a full schedule with 3 classes (believe it or not). They are:

  1. Pre-Production for VFX
  2. Collaborative Texture and Lighting
  3. Production Lighting Principles (VFX 1)

The pre-production class here at the academy is where you develop your masters thesis ideas, along with the story, storyboards, concept art, animatics, etc.

The collaborative Texture and Lighting class is essentially a production class where we colloborate as a class to work on outside projects. We actually had to sign a non disclosure agreement on the first day. I wish I could give more details, but you’ll just have to wait until my reel gets updated after the semester.

The last class is Visual Effects 1 consisting of five projects, some group, some individual, beginning with character replacement in a film. This is probably going to be a ton of work, but I’m not too worried about that right now.

Luckily, my classes are all on either Tuesday or Thursday so technically school starts on the 9th for me. It should be another exciting semester. I’ll update the site with project work as I chug along.

UV Layout

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While in my advanced texture and lighting class during this summer, I came across an amazing UV unwrapping program called UV Layout by Headus. Unlike Maya, which has limited tools for doing UVs, not to mention the time it takes, UV Layout is fast, and far easier. It can read OBJ files and saves the UV maps into a new file or the existing one. You can then use Maya to transfer the UVs:

  1. Select the imported object with new UV maps
  2. Shift select the destination object in the maya to copy to.
  3. Set the Menu to Polygons
  4. Select Mesh
  5. Select Copy Transfer Attributes
  6. Select UV Maps to transfer
  7. Apply

The Headus website has very good video tutorials as well.

Summer Classes 2008

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My classes begin today. I’m taking the following:

  1. Conceptual Physics
  2. Advanced Texture and Lighting

I’m really looking forward to both of these. I haven’t taken physics since undergrad, but I’m not too worried. The class is going to cover the underlying physics in relation to the field of Visual Effects and Animation which will help me understand the fundamentals of science. We’ll be covering waves, particles, light, color, refraction, diffraction, motion, and much more.

The advanced texture and lighting class will no doubt help me tremendously. I’m familiar with the basics of texturing and not so much about lighting. Later this fall, I’m planning to take a lighting production class that will cover the rules for lighting during a green screen shoot, among other things. I’ll post updates on my work in the class. Stay tuned.