Fifth Day of Teaching

So today was my last day teaching at Spy Hop.

Today was mainly about getting the students to do 3d modeling on their own, so I was mainly jumping around helping students with questions. The students had freedom to make almost anything they wanted, but I made sure that it wasn't too complicated.

One of the students was trying to redo the companion cube on his own, another made a computer, and made a cake. Even though it was a short week, the students got really good at the basics of Maya. I gave them links to other resources like Digital Tutors to help them keep progressing in their 3d modeling.

That's all for now, thanks for reading!

Fourth Day of Teaching

So today's lesson took longer than I thought it would. I can do the model of the companion cube fairly quickly, but showing a group of people took me pretty much the full time. A lot of the students were really excited to do this project since its based of the game of Portal. 

The reason why I picked this model is because its harder than it looks and it also teaches a lot of tricks for 3d modeling. For example, if you take a look at the companion cube its really only made of 4 parts and its just a matter of making one and duplicating them. 

Tomorrow is the last day of teaching, and I have to say that I really wish there was more time for this class. Thanks for reading!

Third Day of Teaching

So I think I'm finally getting a little more comfortable standing in front of people.

The point of today's lesson was a simple introduction to how UV's and materials work in Maya. Since this is a one week course, there is no way to teach everything there is to know about Maya but at least a simple intro would do.

I gave the students access to this file that I got from one of my professors when I was going to school. This is a really simple Maya scene and the main point is to make it look more complex than it really is. Applying a few simple tileable textures can really make the difference on that scene.

It won't look like a AAA game quality work, but the point of this exercise is to get a general idea of how textures work in Maya. That's all for now, thanks for reading!

Second Day of Teaching

This is harder than I thought it would be since some of students are still a little nervous or shy about being in the class. I tried to slow down on my presentation since I could tell that some of the students were not able to follow completely yesterday.

To start things off, today I went over the overall process of the art pipeline using this great article I found on IGN. It does a really good job at explaining the overall process but with the right amount of detail that its not too general. I also added some of my personal experience with game development with how some parts of the pipeline can be affected if you skip over or don't do some of the things in the article.

After that we created the basic model for a fire hydrant. It took a while to get started since Maya is still really new to them, but we managed to get through it. At the end, I showed them how to add some of the other detail since we wouldn't be able to keep going with the lecture without going over on time.

I hope that I will get less and less nervous while talking as time goes on, I think that's part of the reason that I start to speak faster. When I get nervous, I start to speak faster so I may lose some of the students. That's all for now, thanks for reading.

First Day of Teaching

So today was my first class at Spy Hop, and it went better than I expected.

I think at parts I was going a little faster than what the students could follow, but I tried to slow down every few steps to see if anyone had questions or if they needed help.

For today, we made a simple chair model. And I could tell that many children weren't really exited about it. But I think that by the end of the lesson, they understood why I was using a chair as the first model that we were going to build together.

Tomorrow, I'm going to be teaching about the art pipeline and make a fire hydrant together as our class exercise. Hopefully, it won't take as long as it did today to make the chair since they should all be more familiar with Maya.

That's all for now, thanks for reading!

Companion Cube Render

Here is my finished Companion Cube. I used Maya for the 3D model, and Photoshop and Illustrator for the texture. I used Xnormal for baking out the normal map, and occlusion map. Finally I used Marmoset Tool Bag for rendering the final image.

Here is my texture map:

I think I'm having a little issues with the normal map, so I might be able to redo it. But for now, this is what I have. Thanks for reading!