Syllabus
Course: 3D Modeling Seminar
Number: NSC648
Credits: 1 or 2
When: Tues 3:30pm - 4:50pm
Where: Digital Media Lab, Snyder Center for the Arts
Faculty: Jim Mahoney
An exploration of 3D digital art using Blender, a free and open source tool for modeling, animation and all. You will practice 3D concepts and techniques, following a variety of tutorials and sources. We'll also use our 3D printer to make some cool plastic thingies.
The course will run as a once per week one credit learn-by-doing seminar open to all levels of experience.
The specifics of how this course will be run will be up for discussion during our first meeting,
so what follows is tentative.
We're going to concentrate on the
Blender platform since it is open source
(free as in beer), cross platform, powerful, and has a large community of users.
Blender is also scriptable in python, a program language that we use in the "Intro Programming"
class and which many folks on campus are comfortable with. This means that we can write
code to generate and manipulate blender objects, for example to create fractal landscapes.
You may take this course for 1 credit (i.e. 3 hours of work per week)
or 2 credits (i.e. 6 hours of work per week).
Everyone will choose a series of projects, and share their work with
the whole class on a regular basis. Most of the seminar time will
be spent either working on these projects, individually or in groups,
or in presentations.
Students enrolled for two credits will also turn in midterm and
final papers explaining a specific completed project.
Possible topics include
- modeling (i.e. creating a virtual wire mesh surface)
- textures (adding color and light reflection properties to the mesh)
- rendering (turning the mesh+texture info a photo-realistic image)
- rigging (adding bones and joints to a character model)
- animation (placing a character model into successive poses)
- compositing (combining items, backgrounds, etc - blue screen stuff)
- 3D printing (we have a small printer)
- motion capture (we're in the process of getting some sensors)