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Prepairing For NYFA 3D Animation Courses

Published on April 2, 2009

If you have registered for the NYFA 3D Animation School one-year intensive course, or even the one month course, advanced preparation is helpful or even essential to get the most out of the program. Because attending the animation courses entails full speed ahead from day one and warp speed thereafter, having a familiarity with computers (mac or pc) is essential.

Knowing the basics of Photoshop will greatly aid your progress as we use it for texture creation, and although we do teach Photoshop classes it will ease your emersion in to what is a very demanding year of study to be acquainted with it before we start.

Of less importance but a definite advantage is a familiarity with After Effects, which basically is Photoshop in motion. After Effects is a very important program, is used extensively in the film and broadcast industries for motion graphics, visual effects and compositing, and thus can be a help in getting you into a job.

The main 3D program we use at the Academy is Maya. Maya is a vast and difficult program to master and thus having even a little experience with it will be of great help to you when entering the program.

You can download a free 30 day trail of Maya from here. If you are a student you may get a copy of Maya with a substantial discount from educational software distributors such as journeyed.com or the academicsuperstore.com

There are many beginners books and DVDs on Maya and you may want to visit your local bookstore to find a book that you like. I will be sending out a reading list along with other important information to those of you that have registered for the one year course before classes start in September, so be on the lookout for that.

Happy learning!

Robert Appleton, New York Film Academy 3D Animation School Instructor

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3D Animation School Student Thoughts

Published on March 10, 2009

For our 3D Animation group project,  I am doing the character’s motion in a number of scenes and making it realistic.

At the beginning, it is not easy to make the character lifelike. I had to think about which part of body would be affected when the character moves such as walking.

Considering the body’s balance and weight is very necessary for the animation. For instance, I needed to consider the “bounce” when the superhero sits down on the floor. Reference motion is important as a first step, it allowed me to set the animation blocking easily (blocking is setting the initial extremes of movement).

I spent a lot of time studying the movie references for the character as well as continually acting out it out for myself, which is a process of internalizing the characters movement. In this particular scene, the character has had some bad news and slumps down against the car. This is a rough render called a “playblast” in which we can quickly see the the characters movements. These are rough (low polygon) models allowing me to animate the character in real time without the computer lagging and “distorting” the animation.

Pei-Cheng Wu, 3D Animation School Student

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