CGMA's Fall 2019 Registration is Open!
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CG Master Academy is open for 2019 Fall Registration! Their commitment to providing quality arts education by facilitating over 100 courses taught by the industry's leading artists has been motivating artists to improve their skills for almost 10 years. With 8 new courses this Fall, CGMA continues to provide courses that speak to industry demand in order to better help students amp up their portfolios. Artists serious about equipping themselves with the skills they need for success should check out their new courses and many ways to pay for the Fall term.
What follows are the courses and programs available for 2019 Fall registration. Connect with the Admissions Department to discuss registration or portfolio review requests – either via email at registration@cgmasteracademy.com or by phone at 1 (800) - 959 - 0316.
NEWEST COURSES
Intro to Perspective
with Robert St. Pierre — Production Designer (Disney)
This is a basic, introductory course in linear perspective drawing. Students enrolled in this class will learn the most fundamental, basic rules, concepts and principles in perspective. The lectures, demos and assignments are created and designed with students who have no, to very little, understanding of basic perspective in mind. Students will gain confidence in fundamental perspective skills. This is not a class for students who already consider themselves to have a solid grasp of basic perspective.
Character Design Mentorship with Carlos Grangel
with Carlos Grangel — Character Designer (Grangel Studios)
In this course, students will be mentored by award-winning character designer Carlos Grangel as he shares the methods he has developed over 30 years in the industry. Carlos won an Annie Award for his character designs for Spirit at Dreamworks Animation, and he has worked on several Oscar and Annie Award nominated projects--including Hotel Transylvania, How to Train Your Dragon, Kung Fu Panda, Madagascar, and Tim Burton's Corpse Bride. In this limited-seat mentorship, students will begin by determining, under Carlos' direction, what art style and shape language best tell the story. With Carlos' guidance, students will then explore their characters through rough sketches, expressions, and poses, and then take their designs all the way to a finished presentation and model packet.
Mechanical Rigging
with Tim Coleman — Character Technical Supervisor (Magic Leap)
This course is an exploration of solving various mechanical rigging challenges in Maya. Topics include model preparation, rig organization, joint hierarchies, rig controls, dynamic rigging setups, and much more! Students will work with 3D assets provided by the instructor and put everything together in a final project, and will have the chance to learn this key aspect of VFX from a long-time industry professional.
Keyframe Illustration for Production
with Ricardo Lima — Freelance Concept Artist
The main objective of this course is to learn how to create beautiful and cinematic keyframe illustrations. Using a mix of rendering techniques, we will approach important subjects when creating key frames such as composition, color, mood, and lighting. The course will be composed of two parts: first, we will study the fundamentals behind cinematic images in order to get familiar with those structures and languages. In the second part, students will tackle a small project where the goal is to create a set of keyframes using the knowledge learned in the past weeks. This course will help you to improve your work towards a more cinematic feeling, as well as to improve your workflow using industry standard techniques.
Fundamentals of Houdini for 3D Artists
with Varomix Wey — FX Technical Director (Mix Studio)
This class will take you from zero to hero with Houdini’s procedural workflow, and give you the tools and resources to take the content you learn and teach it in your classroom. You will gain confidence and experience in all areas of Houdini’s powerful 3D pipeline including procedural geometry, particles, fluids, dynamics, shading, lighting, and rendering. This is a great course to take before intermediate and advanced courses because it breaks down the fundamentals, giving you a deeper grasp on how Houdini works.
Costume Concept Design
with Phil Boutte — Costume Concept Artist (Marvel)
Costume design is an essential part of character design. From a character's clothing down to the smallest accessory, what a character is wearing helps make the character memorable and is a crucial element of storytelling. Students will be taken through the process of creating costume concept designs from thumbnailing to final presentation. The course covers mood boards and thumbnailing, posing, head and face studies, color and how it relates to story, fabric and texture, and best practices for presentation. By the end of the course, students will complete costume concepts for several distinct characters, and present them as if pitching it for production.
Storyboarding for Animation
with Eugene Huang — Storyboard Artist (Titmouse)
This class will help you fall in love with the cinema, if you haven’t already. One of the main reasons we make art is to tell a story and/or to communicate an idea or emotion. However, the power of storytelling is often overlooked. This class will walk you through some of the fundamentals, such as framing and cutting your scenes, as well as ways to transition into the next one. How do we compose a simple dialogue between two characters without it being too boring? What about three? How can we make a fight scene more than just a series of cool moves? How do we overcome the fear of montages? Eventually we will also go over the process for boarding a sequence for a typical TV animated project. Even though the class has an emphasis on the application for animation storyboards, the core knowledge should be applicable to any other types of visual storytelling students may encounter in their future endeavors, such as live action projects, commercials, illustration books, comics, etc. By the end of class, students will be expected to learn how to think like a director of any storytelling project.
Art Direction and Design for Films Mentorship
with Anthony Christov — Art Director (Pixar)
Taught by a veteran artist in the entertainment industry, this course will allow you to produce a series of images that will bring to live your short story of choice. Furthermore, you will be exploring the connection between storytelling/character building, and set/environment design in film in order to create cohesive and effective visual development images. Learning the role of art direction as a visual storytelling element of filmmaking is a very important aspect of a successful production that connects with the audience. Additionally, the course will cover production workflow and how art departments fit within the production line.
Character Creation for Films/Cinematics
with Pete Zoppi — Senior Character Artist (Treyarch)
The objective of this class is to understand character creation for film and game cinematics in terms of a character's profile, and its ultimate purpose in a composition or narrative. Each week we will focus on a different aspect of character construction and explore the technical ways of assembling a final character. We will begin by analyzing and assessing various reference materials prior to initial sculpting. Then the class will dive into the fabrication of hard surface components, clothing, and other accessories needed to finish out/polish a high-poly asset. From there, the emphasis will then switch over to surfacing your character using advance painting and shading techniques. These will include look-development of skin, metal, and various other material shaders prior to outputting final renders. Finally, we will end the course with discussions on and demonstrations about color theory, render manipulation, and post processing.