First Experiences at Gnomon.

Sorry for the long lapse in posts, we haven't really done anything noteworthy, until now. Monday, classes began at Gnomon. To answer Elliott's and Matt's question before either of them even asks, we are taking;

Matt:
-Lighting and Rendering 1
-Character Creation for Games
-Creating 2D Textures for 3D Art
-Anatomy in Zbrush (5 weeks)
-Texturing in Zbrush (5 weeks, after Anatomy)

James:
-Texture Mapping 1
-Character Creation for Games
-Polygon Modeling 1
-Intro to Zbrush

Josh:
-Dynamic Effects 1
-Character Animation 1
-Compositing with Shake
-Character Kinematics

So far Josh has had his first Dynamics class (for the Moms, dynamics in terms of 3D, is creating things like smoke, rain, water, stars, fire, explosions, etc for use in 3D scenes). Apparently he already has a great deal of work, creating a Nebula simulation or something of that sort.

James' Texture Mapping (creating the textures that are placed on models of environments, characters, objects, etc) class was unfortunately canceled on the first day, the teacher got caught up meeting a deadline at the Studio he is employed at. Par for the course I assume. If we want education from working professionals, we have to be understanding of their more important commitments.

I had my first Lighting and Rendering (In Momish: This is essentially the process of making a 3D scene look as though it is real, accomplished through adding realistic lights and shadows, fog effects, and then rendering out the scene through a render engine, which, in a sense, takes all the aspects of the scene such as environments, characters, lights, textures, and animations, into a viewable movie....more or less) class yesterday. It is taught by the lead lighter at Rhythm and Hues. He recently finished working on the film "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor". Regardless of how good the movie was, the visual effect warranted a Oscar nomination. So needless to say, this guy means business. Luckily for myself, much of the understanding of how light works is very similar to same concepts used in photography.

The campus of Gnomon is a wonderful places, with a very similar feeling to the interior of the Art Dept. at Springfield. It is an incredibly creative environment, with comfortable lounge areas, and very advanced computer labs. Many of the computes are set up with 30" monitors! Goodie.

So that's basically the gist of recent events. I will keep you posted as we complete projects and experience new classes, posting stills and videos of our work.

Thanks for reading!

For more details on our classes, see the course descriptions here:
Gnomon School of Visual Effects Course Descriptions


Ive included a few images of Gnomons "campus".