Third Semester!

Ah, I am finally here, in third semester, the last semester!  The pressure is on to create a quality demo reel, and I only have four months to do it. In the final Think Tank semester, we are paired up with mentors who we get to see for several hours once a week. Mentors are, like teachers, current professionals in the gaming or VFX industry here in Vancouver, and are usually leads or supervisors at their respective companies. My mentor, who I share with another student, is Daniel Ho. This guy was able to create this amazing reel in only five months working on his own, and was even offered a job at Naughty Dog!  Check out his work!

I am excited to work my butt off and create some reel-quality stuff, which will hopefully look a lot like Daniel’s work

Last semester (2nd) was a tough one, we had 11 classes every week! It went well, though it was not quite as well-organized as the first semester courses were, but they were all valuable. I especially enjoyed Maya rigging class (taught by Darren R., a lead rigger at EA games in Vancouver), and Lighting class (taught by Nick, VFX supervisor at CIS Vancouver).  Acting was a really interesting class, and the instructor (an ex-Disney animator, I think he worked on Jessica Rabbit too had a ton of knowledge. The modeling and sculpting courses were awesome too, of course. I liked them all, well, except for the game engine course. I found the Unity class to be really difficult, as I had no prior experience of game engines or how they work. Our VFX course has really tough for the first half of the semester when we were learning to use Adobe After Effects, but got a lot more fun and fast-paced once we started learning fusion, and our instructor always had really neat stuff for us to do.

For my modeling class, my final assignment was to create a demo-reel quality mini environment or prop. I tried doing a little oriental market chicken and duck stand, but it looks like crap, so I won’t be posting it. Thankfully I learned a lot off that project and won’t make the same mistakes in my third semester.

My first environment I will be making is a downed WW2 B-17, crashed in a small forest scene of mossy ground, spruce trees and rocks. The pilot survived the crash, and made a small shelter and is hoping  for rescue. Below is a little block-out of my rough idea, taken into photoshop and colored a bit.

I will be posting updates!