Teaching 3D at High School
Hey Polycount! This past summer I competed in a national high school/college animation competition and took gold (I made a thread about it earlier). As a result, it seems that we have a new 3D animation class at school this year. I'm really interested in teaching it, and the teacher in charge of the class is all for me helping out. So! Now to the point.
I've never taught 3D to anyone before, except to my partner who competed with me. My teacher, though he's a smart guy, has more experience with architectural drafting and inventor than animation stuff. I have a whole school year to teach, but there's so much to cover. It's obvious I should start with UI basics, translations, etc. But what next? Seems like so much to teach, where do you go after the basics? How would you teach modeling? I could come up with a mediocre plan on my own, but I want to hear from you guys who have been doing it a lot longer than me! How would y'all go about teaching a 3D class to students who are beginners to it?
Note that this is not a game art class, just a standard animation class. Thanks in advance!
I've never taught 3D to anyone before, except to my partner who competed with me. My teacher, though he's a smart guy, has more experience with architectural drafting and inventor than animation stuff. I have a whole school year to teach, but there's so much to cover. It's obvious I should start with UI basics, translations, etc. But what next? Seems like so much to teach, where do you go after the basics? How would you teach modeling? I could come up with a mediocre plan on my own, but I want to hear from you guys who have been doing it a lot longer than me! How would y'all go about teaching a 3D class to students who are beginners to it?
Note that this is not a game art class, just a standard animation class. Thanks in advance!
Replies
My first sugestion would do UI first, then walk through creating a 200 tri model, like a wooden toy sword, or a lamp post, or something they can get a little creative with but it's not going to be crazy, give them the poly limit, and make sure they are all modeling the same thing. Have them unwrap it and create textures for it, and explain diffuse, normal, gloss, and spec. Have them view it in a model viewer.
Then I would have them do a building or house in a small scene, talk about how tiling textures work, and planing ahead. Also make sure they understand when it's okay to have things as seperate meshes, or to combine them. Probably have them use nDo2 or crazy bump to generate normal maps and put the building in a game engine.
After that I'd either go into into subdivision modeling, rigging and animation, or lighting, depending on what you want to get out of the course. at this point it'd be better to explain about things like topology and edge flow, before just make sure they aren't using n-gons or wasting tris by over smoothing.
After this teach basic parent-child hierarchy so they can set the go-kart up so you can move the go kart as a whole, but you have control over the tires turning and other animation properties. Lastly, teach the basics of keyframing and have them make a basic 10-20 second animation of the kart driving around.
That is what I would do at least.
This was a Day 1 assignment in my first ever modeling class and really helped in wrapping my and everyone else's heads around manipulating an object in 3D space, which for the majority of people was something they had never even thought about. Having to move/scale/rotate things a few thousand times right out of the gate will get them comfortable quickly.
I hadn't considered teaching game modeling before 'regular' modeling (or at all for that matter). I was definitely planning on teaching UVs though, and game modeling would be a great time to introduce that. I think teaching both game modeling and non-realtime modeling is a great idea, and it can show a larger view of what you can do with 3d. I just wish our school had tablets for texturing game models, but I suppose a mouse is sufficient for a first year course. The PCs aren't that great either. I know they can't run UDK, and I'd be lucky if they ran Unity decently. But I gotta take what I got and run with it. Thanks for the suggestions!
I really like the idea of starting off with using just primitives, to really get the feel of translate/rotate/scale. It's a good starting point for editing too like you said, having all the pieces in place. I really agree with everything you suggested, thanks for the comment!
The lack of tablets is going to be a problem for the texturing side, you might want to see if you can get that mandated as a prerequisite for students who want to attend the class if the school cant pay for it (they're not expensive as long as your ok with using something other then Wacom: http://www.monoprice.com/products/subdepartment.asp?c_id=108&cp_id=10841)
We will have access to both 3ds Max and Blender. I can use both, but I'm much more comfortable in Blender, so that's what I'm going to teach. I know Max is much more used in the industry, but I'd rather teach something I know rather than stumble through lessons trying to remember where a button is in Max. Plus, as I found out when I learned Max, the technique is what counts and that's transferable to any program with a little effort.
Classes are 45 minutes each. Not very long, but enough I think. About animation and being well rounded, you are right in that I want to introduce as many topics as I can without overloading too many people. I want to show how everything works together and teach the basics. If people are really interested they can build off the basics on their own time, though of course I want to get a bit in depth with universal 3d skills like modeling, animation, and rendering.
I can look into getting tablets, but I don't count on any students willing to buy anything for over $10. I go to a public school, and half the people in the class probably won't even care about 3d. The school might go for tablets that cheap, but again I'm not getting my hopes up.
The 12 principles eh? I smell a good matching test incoming!
Thanks for the advice guys
- This september i was invited to teach 3D at university level as a guest lecturer for the first/second years!
So this is pretty darn similar to what i wanted to ask!
I'll be using 3ds Max 2010/2011 & UDK on industry standard rigs but most of the class with have little background in 3D so i need to introduce all the core principles etc to them.
Very rough lesson outline as follows;
1. Introduction, UI, core principles what is triangles etc, practical will involve opening 3DS Max and following the intro tutorials. so they can get used to it.
2. Primitive building
3. Modifiers, stacks general mesh editing
4. Animation, keyframes etc
5. Rendering, Lighting, cameras etc
6. Rendering & animation, creating tracking cameras etc
7. Uv mapping, more advanced methods, polyflow/topology.
Really rough jist of it, 12th august i'll be discussing the lesson plans and what's needed to be included due to curriculum and to sync up my lectures with the standard lectures so i don't repeat anything.
I was gonna hold off posting a thread on this till the 13th but if its here i might aswell get ideas from you guys too :P
In my opinion it's a lot more important to keep people motivated by letting them do interesting things than it is to build fundamentals or whatever.
Speaking from personal experience of trying to motivate others to learn 3d... pushing points around and explaining why a quad is just two triangles and how to properly unwrap an object is not particularly stimulating subject matter for typical artists.
-The first thing to teach is navigation and the absolute basics of the UI. For Blender specifically one of the first things you should teach is that it's OK to delete anything/everything in the scene otherwise they'll be concerned about it breaking something.
-For modeling start out teaching extremely lowpoly, challenge them to do as much as they can with as little as possible. Students will want everything to be smooth and detailed (and they'll likely complain a lot), but it's unbelievably important that they are taught detailed does not equal wasteful.
-UVs/textures; this should be taught from the very beginning of learning lowpoly. Students main problem with working in restrictions of lowpoly is that they want to add detail, you need to show them that even lowpoly can be very detailed but it's done through textures instead. For the textures, keep it simple by teaching general color theory and having them paint color(diffuse) textures. Don't jump into normal maps and such prematurely, make sure they really understand color first. Check out XRGs blender texturing videos, if you haven't already, as an example of where you should be aspiring to help them reach.
-Animation should be taught in advance of rigging, as without knowing how to animate they'll have no basis as to what is and isn't important in a rig. Don't teach automated solutions (CAT/Biped/etc.) or the students will rely on them and avoid learning the proper methods whose knowledge can be transferred between apps. Also make sure to do more then just characters with animation; do mechanical things like pistons/gears/treads/etc. as well as some physics based stuff like crumbling walls / cloth / etc.
This is also a good point. A lot of students will have no motivation to learn so you'll have to find some ways to keep them motivated aside from grades.
One assigment we got in our first lesson in the first year was to make a vehicle out of only primitives and using a couple of easy modifiers (bend/taper/etc).
was a really good exercise to get used to the UI, getting used to all the basics (moving/scaling/rotating/ui/stack/selections/symmetry/centering things/etc) without diving in the deep end the first lesson and immediatly having to model something with poly's.
we also gave that in the introduction course, and gave them like an hour or so to model whatever they want (and just help them with all the usual issues) and people had a lot of fun with that.
and yes, from experience don't go to fast, our first year looked like this:
1st half: Purely low poly modelling/Uv'ing/diffuse only texturing (started out with some really simple props, flowerpots, streetsigns, and then build on to some more complex things/buildings to make a small scene)
2nd half: Highpoly modelling/materials (materials in max), learn what spec/gloss/etc is, and then learn about rendering)
we didn't touch stuff like normal mapping etc untill the 2nd year, and it was actually really great that way.