Assignments

The purpose of the art assignments is to give you a reason to get some experience with some of the tools you will need to learn in the course.

For assignments, the minimum requirements are very light. Part of this is that it is hard to require you to create works of art. Hopefully, you will use these assignments as an opportunity to try out some of the things we learn in the class, and to learn about some tools that will be useful in your projects.

Also, you will be putting your creations on the web so everyone can see. Hopefully this will inspire you a little.

The programming assignment, which you may choose to do, is documented on its own web page.

Assignment 0 - Make a Web Page

For this assignment, you are required to make yourself a "course home page" and put it into the correct location inside the 838 directory. This page has to have your name and your picture on it - you can put more if you like. In the future, as you complete assignments you will place links to them on this page.

Assignment 1 - Make a Picture

For this assignment, you are to use some set of 3D tools to make a picture. This means that you must compose a 3D scene, place lights, textures and the camera, and render the scene. Probably, you should use this as an opportunity to learn a little about Maya (or some other 3D animation tool). Alternatively, you might try to compose your scene as a C program or text file and using Renderman (or some other renderer), which will teach you how hard it is to design a scene without an interactive tool. You should check with me if you plan to use something other than Maya.

At a minimum, your scene must have an in-scene light (that casts visible shadows), at least 3 different types of geometry, and at least 3 different surface types (including using a texture map). Hopefully, you will chose to do more than the minimum. You won't be graded on artistic merit, but trying will give you a chance to experiment with the tools. You may also turn in more than picture.

In your web directory, you should create a page called a1.html which has a 320x240 compressed (JPG) versions of any pictures on it. Please name your image a1-1.jpg (and other images, if you choose to make them, as a1-n.jpg). In the text of the page, you should describe what the picture is supposed to be and how you made it.

Assignment 2 - Make an Animation

For this assignment, you are to use some set of 3D tools to make a short and simple animation. The purpose of this assignment is to make sure that you have a full set of tools at your disposal, and to give you some idea as to what animators are up against. As in assignment 1, you may either use Maya, or some other tool to create the animation (if you plan to use something other than Maya, please check with me).

At a minimum, your animation should be 5 seconds long, have at least 2 objects that are moving, and have a camera motion that is "intentional" (e.g. that there's some idea of why its there). If you simply recreate the examples from the Maya tutorial, and add another moving object, and move the camera, that would be acceptable. Again, I expect you to do more than the minimum, and use this as an opportunity to experience some of the things we discuss in class, particularly keyframing.

As part of this assignment, you will have to use some tool to do "post-production" to turn your rendered frames into a video format that can be put on the web. The preferred method will be to create a quicktime movie using Adobe Premiere. If you want, you can add audio to your animation.

You must create a movie file (either quicktime, avi, or mpeg) and place it into your web directory. Please call it "a2.???" (where ??? is either mov, mpg, or avi depending on what's correct). I have a very basic set of Premiere instructions.

You should turn this assignment in by creating a web page describing the animation, including a "poster frame" from the animation and a link to the movie file, and having a link on the page to the animation.

Assignment 3 - To be determined

Last modified: 17:23 Feb 19, 1999