Student Showcase: 3D Modeling, Animation & Design

[Music] what's up everybody what's up motioneers out there we are very excited today to have our first student showcase and we're going to have a lot of fun today basically anyone who's out there that has known of school of motion knows about our courses and they're like i wonder what it's like to do that thing to go and take a course over at school of motion where we're going to give you a sneak peek into what that looks like through the eyes of some of our students and some of our tas and speaking of tas we actually have one here one of our very professional tas luis miranda there he is how's it going man he's a fellow denverite so he's like i can see his house like right outside my window not really but uh yeah i've been i've known luis for quite a while but uh how you doing man pretty good you know just had my coffee and uh had my little morning stroll so i'm feeling pretty good got your burrito shirt on you ready to rock and roll they're technically owls with uh night vision goggles but they look like i mean well for my vision it looks like burritos so i'm just going to keep sending the burrito yeah maybe i'm going hungry for lunch maybe that's it yeah i mean i do live pretty close to chipotle so that might be good so luis you're uh you're not teeing a you're not teeing this session but you have ta many sessions in the past of like all of our 3d courses right yeah so i did i've been like before i took a break i think i did it for three years and i started with a base camp then upgraded to ascent and then most recently i did a lights camera render so yeah man like i saw your progress through that course and even i mean what maybe we'll give everyone just a tiny bit into your background but you started in like sports graphics right yes and broncos stuff yeah so i started like tv uh commercials and stuff like that then eventually i got hired at the broncos where i pretty much just you know it was very abstract you know make noise animations uh and then eventually you know started going into more like uh professional uh commercial work and then now i'm trying to do more like cinematic looking stuff yeah and we i you know you do tutorials as well which is you're really great on your own channel plus you've done some for school of motion as well uh but we'll share your website uh link and stuff like that but i mean you can look at luis's work you know once we get the link in the chat but there is like a definite progression uh and like you took lcr and i feel like from the beginning to when you finish that course like your work is completely different do you want to talk a little bit about some of that stuff you learned as far as lcr goes and we'll of course get to more in depth into all these classes but i think lcr for you specifically kind of like opened up a lot of possibilities for you yeah like it definitely felt like an inflection point um because like before that you know i felt like i had a pretty good understanding of like how to make things look cinematic and whatever uh but when i took that like some of the biggest takeaways they i had were like how to light properly uh and also how to utilize it when you know the fact that when you're working in 3d you're like it's very uh it's not re non-reality so you're not limited to like lights so you have all these lights that you can utilize and make them any size you want make them soft whatever and so being able to recreate like these looks from movies like really helped me kind of like create like the vision that i was looking for and it also kind of helped distinguish it a little bit from my previous work which kind of felt like i was still learning whereas in this one i felt like i had i was a lot more confident in my abilities to light something so yeah when you can make those informed choices about even lights and composition and storytelling it's it makes a huge difference in everyone's work so basically today's stream i mentioned it before but we're going to be taking a look through all of our 3d classes and that includes cinema 4d basecamp ascent and lcr which we were just talking about and we're going to be looking at them through the eyes of our students and our ta here luis so we're going to be kind of should be showing examples of the assignments that you might be taking in these courses as well as the ta critiques that you'll be getting because the ta critiques are really some of the you know the biggest value as far as our courses go you know this isn't a passive learning situation where you buy it and you let your course sit there and you kind of become an education or like a training hoarder or you just buy whatever courses are out there and you just let them sit like this is very much an active learning situation where you have your community that you're put with when you join a course and you also have a ta to provide that critique um we're also going to be taking q a so if you have any questions about school of motion how our courses work uh what course might be best for you like basically we're trying to help you find out what that next step in your career is and how we can help you take that next step so any questions we're going to be taking them all throughout so put them in the chat and uh we are also going to at the end towards the end of this stream we're going to bring in an alumni who's taken like a ton of courses including uh pretty much all of our 3d classes as well just to get a little insight into you know what that's like that journey of you know where you start from and you you have a goal and how school of motions courses has kind of helped uh francisco who's going to be our guest kind of leveled up his career so if you have any questions for francisco yeah we have his website right up here so if you even want to go to his website you can feel free to do that and check out his stuff and ask him any questions you might have but he's got like killer work in the breadth of his work is incredible so i'm really excited to uh chat with him so the first course we're just going to do like a course tour as far as our 3d courses go and we're going to start out with cinema 4d base camp and luis uh you've ta this course can you tell us a little bit about like what you see students learning in these classes yeah it's really interesting seeing them from like the beginning and then seeing what their final project is a lot of the people who have taken it either have had like 3d experience where it's not related to motion design and then there's people who have only done like 2d animation and seeing how they kind of like both kind of end up at this point where they're like making really cool stuff making really cool camera moves and yeah it's a it's a pretty cool progression seeing it especially towards the end there yeah i think you know 3d is definitely hard but you know we teach in cinema 4d which in my opinion hands down is the easiest app to learn 3d and it is really cool to see people like the very first orientation assignment you make your first 3d render and just the feeling that people get to get those easy wins is really cool to see and then of course you know you you build from there and there's highs and lows it's not easy you know it's definitely a slog but you know you come out the other end and people are like landing their first 3d gigs and it's super cool to see that so we're going to go ahead and we're going to see luis go ahead and give a little bit of critique to one of our students emma elizabeth who has taken many classes actually uh he's she's taken animation boot camp character animation boot camp uh explainer camp design boot camp a lot of boot camps c4d base camp uh advanced motion methods illustration for motion and cinema 4d is sent so she's taken like she's almost like the bingo board is like filled she's won bingo like three spooled motion bingo three times over but it is interesting to see how all of the like 2d curriculum that we have kind of informs and helps uh elevate the 3d work that our students do so let's go ahead and check out this critique of emma elizabeth [Music] today we're going to be looking at emma elizabeth's assignments for hustle and bustle and we built the city so we're going to look at her city built out and then we're going to look at how she animated it all right let's go ahead and get started okay so here we have her city all laid out which is looking really cool we also have a nice little close-up and also another version with clouds added so i think yeah overall it looks really nice one thing i am noticing is that this cathedral looks kind of small compared to the rest of the buildings that is something that i would say definitely like bumping up in size can definitely help it uh fit within the scene a little bit more uh feel a little bit more realistic especially here you can kind of notice that the door is kind of like um shorter than the car um yeah so i would definitely just try to make it a little bit bigger uh also over here i'm noticing that the playground is on asphalt or concrete uh i think expanding this uh little uh sandbox to encompass both the swings and and the little carousel can definitely help out uh just so that it looks safe i guess uh yeah because it kind of seems a little uh a little dangerous putting uh swings on top of an asphalt like that uh cool so yeah then we got these clowns over here one thing i am noticing is that this guy and this guy look pretty similar uh one's kind of like a little bit bigger i would definitely recommend maybe just throwing one over this way and just to kind of maybe cover up a little bit of this area or maybe down here um but yeah i think overall it looks really nice um there's a nice little you can tell that there's like little bits of detail that you would see in a real city so like the little crosswalk stuff normally you know you would see these on sidewalks and so i would kind of add like an additional sort of layer uh showing where the sidewalks actually are um but yeah i also like how there's like little parking lines and stuff like that cool so let's actually just look at the animation uh so that we can kind of talk about a lot of like different animation principles that she's putting into play so let's go ahead and switch on over and expand this guy all right so let's go ahead and hit play and watch it play through cool all right and then she gives us a nice like uh end where we can see all the details kind of play out for a while which is really nice okay so starting over one thing that this particular lesson kind of emphasizes is using the jiggle deformer so that we can create nice little waves and so you can see that especially in these two buildings here um so you can see nice little jiggling going on which is really great uh but another thing is that um she is using that same sort of jiggle deformer here on these two blocks that kind of create the foundation of the entire city so when you look at it there's kind of like a little wobbliness but because there's only two layers they're kind of like creating a bit of a jitter rather than a jiggle um i think a quick way to fix that or to like make it look a little bit more like these guys is to add several layers so instead of having one big block have that block be made of smaller blocks so it could be like sediment so you can have like little layers of sand and mud dirt whatever uh that way i can kind of make it feel like it's you know like a little bit of peace that got kind of ripped out uh from you know like the planet or whatever and so has like little layers and that way you can have that nice little uh effect that you see on the buildings but yeah i think the jiggly effect is not as effective when you're doing it on just two layers uh it definitely works best when you have multiple layers like these games right here cool uh so another thing that she's doing which i find really interesting is that she is actually uh sequencing these really nicely so if you notice it starts here and then it goes over then across down and then back so yeah it goes here over there down uh but the one thing that i would say is that i always try to make the first and last be the most interesting of the animation so here you have this nice little little um office block i would definitely but then you end with this park so i would suggest making the park part of this building um and then finishing with this cathedral because the cathedral is like really cool looking and um and i think it would be a really nice way to kind of end the scene especially since you know you're building out everything out really nicely and this guy is very unique compared to the rest everything's very blocky and this one's a little bit more angular more triangular in shape but one thing that i am noticing that i would definitely try to address is that when it's moving to the right if you notice the buildings are actually moving to the left so so yeah if you notice they're starting from the right moving that way but the overall animation is moving to the right so it's kind of you're creating this like conflicting motion between them the cathedral kind of just builds straight down which is fine but one more thing that i am noticing is that these building i mean sorry that these cars are kind of vanishing as they reach the edge and that's pretty much caused by the cloner uh there's like a spline there and just cloning onto the spline and then as they uh reach the end of it uh there's a little function that basically causes it to just vanish and then it goes to the beginning and starts again uh one thing i would try to doing here is that similar to how she's animating it using uh planes and like linear fields uh adding a little bit of a box field here and making those cars shrink as they get closer to the edge that way they can kind of ease into nothingness rather than suddenly just vanishing that way the viewer you know doesn't get too distracted by those little poppings and then they can kind of view the rest of the image so if you notice uh this carousel is kind of like spinning the entire time and i found that uh like a nice little detail but i kind of didn't notice it at first because i was kind of getting distracted by these things kind of popping in and out and so having like little kind of like rounding the edges a little bit like that uh can definitely help the viewer you know be satisfied and then go on to the next thing and uh start noticing a lot of the smaller details um so yeah i think overall this thing is looking really cool so this was like her first um assignments like this are actually done really early inside of the course um she actually took this assignment and redid it from scratch using all the things that she learned after the course was done so let's go ahead and look at that and so this is her um redo of the entire assignment which i thought was really cool so you can see that um she had a nice little ripples to the water uh she made the cathedral pretty much like front and center and uh yeah like put a lot of lights in here so it kind of gives it a little bit more of a mood also kind of just added even more elaborate things but also she even did an animation for it so when you check this guy out you can see like there's nice little swinging on this little ferris wheel things still spinning nice little camera moves you can see like the water is rippling really naturally now yeah and there's like just like the lighting overall it feels much more confident uh much more like experienced and so yeah it's it's a really cool um to go from you know this one which looks nice to see this one which looks very much like uh i don't know it just feels much more like artistic and more of a representation of the rest of her art so yeah really awesome work and i really i'm really glad i was able to see both beginning and end uh just to see like your progress even just in the short wakes that you're in it so yeah awesome work um that she went back and kind of redid that assignment because that's kind of the thing where it's like as you progress through a course you're you're totally stacking all this knowledge and all these skills that you can easily go back and be like wow like i came from that point and my work is so much better and that's one of the cool things to see uh with our alumni um and one of the things i forgot to set this up and i apologize but basically the whole point of this assignment the assignment goals was like the the lessons are basically teaching how to use mograph to procedurally model how to use deformers to animate and how to use mograph and cloners and fields to animate a bunch of objects very easily like when you use cinema 4d using mograph is one of the most powerful tools you can possibly learn and probably one of the things that you're going to be using a ton because it's just like mograph and cloners and fields put cinema 4d on the map as far as uh in the industry and you can see how how quickly you can animate all those buildings and all that stuff uh with just a few you know fields and of course adding that jiggle which you know i hope you gave bonus points for yeah i do um i did pay attention to everyone who used the jiggle yeah because that thing you know it's funny how you can just uh throw it in and it kind of just makes everything look so much nicer yeah yeah now i just want to pull up uh elizabeth's uh website here because you can see that she actually is a very good like illustrator as well and that's kind of you know i think the reoccurring theme with all these students we're going to be covering in the stream is that they're stacking skills like you know the skills they learn from animation boot camp or design boot camp like you can tell whether someone has a an understanding of color theory of contrast of animation principles just by looking at their homework and when you're learning 3d like it's a massive subject you know i'm not gonna lie um and basecamp kind of just shows you all those key fundamental skills like modeling lighting texturing animation whether it's you know just keyframe animation or using mograph uh using cameras and then like compositing as well and you can see just your emma obviously has a really good handle on illustration on color theory and you know that translates to her 3d work you know and i think that is makes learning 3d so much easier to do when you already have that nice foundation that you can just kind of click uh 3d on top of it's so funny because i remember uh be grand and eddie started taking base camp and i was freaking out like holy cow it's b in class like this is crazy and like of course b is an amazing 2d animator like very pro profliffic in in animation and um just illustration as well and color design and she did the first orientation assignment which is just like hey build a thing with primitives and like it was the best thing i've ever seen in 3d like way better than anything i've ever made so she's a way better designer than me so it's like it's important to you know be strong in some of your fundamentals because you want to stack on a solid foundation versus a shaky one which i feel like when i first learned 3d i was i feel like i'm still very shaky in design and colors and stuff like that and once you add 3d onto it it's like if you're making bad stuff and then you're just at you just learn 3d you're just going to be making bad stuff in 3d too yeah i would uh i would say that at least for me um that like when you start in 3d and then um you kind of learn a lot of the technical stuff but the thing that helps a lot is if you have that design background it like it's not no longer about doing technical things like rigging or dynamics whatever it's just about making your design look pretty in 3d and uh yeah i think it's very just you can definitely tell when somebody started like in the technical side versus the art side yep that was me yeah and i think one of the cool things about your critique is like how many times have you made something and you're looking at it and you're like i know something doesn't look right here or something's not working and i just don't know what it is and you know you're just by yourself and you don't really have any and you're not going to go ask someone because it's like i don't want to show anyone because it's a it's very it's scary to show people your work especially when you know it doesn't look good and that's like why having tas like louise is such a an important thing in your learning journey through our courses because you have that experience set of eyes and you pick out all those things like those clouds like emma probably wouldn't have even you're so in the work that you don't realize like oh these clouds look exactly the same i should i should change that or like the scale of that church is way off in all those details and really when you start hearing feedback like that number one i mean feedback and notes is what you get in the real world when you're working for a client or a studio or an agency so you have to get used to taking those notes and adapting them and improving your work and and not being offended by it either you know sometimes it could be hard to you kind of be like well you know what do you know like i think this looks good and you know so just being used to that kind of feedback is super important and that's exactly you know what we get in our classes and constructively handling that feedback is a very undervalued uh self uh soft skill i would say uh and then even the animation like luis you pointed out that like the eye trace like that's something that you learn in animation boot camp where like should probably have all the things animating the same way and not having this like you know opposing uh animation because it kind of messes with your eye and how you're like taking in all the details and there's tons of animation details in this kind of stuff with mograph yeah yeah i definitely think that um yeah like when you take those animation courses um i don't know i think later on when we break down marinas i think uh that one's an example of like uh all the like really cool tricks that you can apply from animation into 3d and just like how it just makes it pop yeah yeah make it pop that's that's a client request that uh you get a lot um i mean that's and i think that's important too and i mentioned off the top like this is not a passive learning situation here at school motion when you sign up for a course like you are taking this alongside other students everyone's showing their work and yes it's it's it's scary to post work but our community some of the most caring and supportive communities out there and you know it's just great to see people kind of come out of their shell in that very first assignment which is just making your favorite place so i show how to make a ramen restaurant just using primitives so just everyone's getting used to 3d space and it's just so fun to see also like learn what their favorite place is because it shows a little bit about their personality and their interests and it's just really cool to see everyone open up and then you're in it together you're all learning together and that's such a cool part and then the ta aspect with you know experienced folks like yourself in there answering those questions and kind of you know utilizing that critique and getting that practice in of even seeing your work and and seeing all the things that you're missing and that you can improve on and the only way you're going to do that is by actually doing the work and practicing um so let's go uh go and uh that's cinema 4d base camp and uh marina like i said like if i showed her instagram but she's doing a lot of modeling stuff now which is great and i think that's you know one of the cool things about the courses is i even mentioned it in base camp where 3d is a massive subject you know and there's so many things to learn like lighting and you know all these things you don't really have to pay attention to in after effects like how many people use lights in after effects unless you're using like element or whatever but there's just all these things that you can get into and it's just cool to see people go through and figure out what aspect of 3d they like and applies to their current workflow and then they just kind of hit the ground running because i even mentioned like i've used cinema 4d for 10 years now and i probably know like 10 percent of it louise i don't know how how what percent you think you know about cinema 4d but i'm always learning something new um just like i didn't know that there was that tool for lighting the one where you can like click the lighting tool yeah i know that was a thing like i felt like it should be a default uh tool but yeah yeah there's i mean there's all these little things too where you know little helpful uh workflow tips and stuff like that that'll make you work faster and smarter as well um so that was base camp and uh emma elizabeth uh really excited to see her work and what she's working on these days um but next up we're gonna have a little tour of cinema 4d ascent and i'm actually gonna have some context as to what the heck this assignment's about so the students work that we're going to be checking out is marina nakagawa and she's actually in the chat i hear so hi marina thanks for uh being here but like marina's work holy cow uh you'll see in this uh critique her final project for cinema 4d is sense so in a sent i'll just kind of set up what you learn because this is kind of the culmination of all that plus all the other classes she's taken which is design boot camp animation boot camp character animation boot camp uh and she took base camp and you're gonna see all of this uh stuff kind of come to fruition in this final project but in a sense you're learning third party rendering and rendering concepts so whenever you're done learning those rendering concepts you can pick up octane like that or redshift like that or arnold or whatever you'll learn that what renders best is the wrong question to ask okay and you'll know why when you actually go through those lessons of third party rendering you also learn advanced animation concepts so all that mograph basics that you learned in basecamp taking it to the next level and using stuff like vertex maps and how that can help your workflow and just how can you animate more efficiently using mograph tools uh also cover simulation so rigidbody dynamics soft body dynamics all the little things that you're not going to find on tutorials of how to actually take control of all those kinds of uh simulations and uh rigging so rigging for mograph purposes not everyone wants to be a hardcore character rigger or animator you know you just need to know enough to do the job like if you learn miximo like louise you you use mix of mill a lot for your character animation i don't think you would consider yourself a you know a really good character animator but you know how to use the tools available yeah i mean i like i do know how to do like a very simple uh rig but if you ask me to do like those controls that you can like the i mean you can get way in the deep end but basically it's like i'm showing you in a sense all these things you should know a little bit about and if you want to dive in the deep end like you can go for it so uh yeah and we cover you know basic character rigging and rigging for mograph because rigging isn't just for characters it's for you know just helping you animate an object like rigging is the definition is just setting up a system for you to be able to animate an object easier it doesn't have to be a character necessarily so the final project is like the culmination of all those skills being taught and it's a client brief and it's basically for this fake uh social media company's app called concrastinate uh that's basically like you know stop procrastinating it has a really cool jingle that was actually produced by uh kaylee who is one of our producers here at school of motion who plays the ukulele like an angel uh and so that was a cool little thing so basically had to animate to this audio track follow the client brief there were boards provided and uh marina just knocked it out of the park so let's let's check out her stop procrastinating uh final project critique let's do it [Music] so this one is from marina we're gonna be checking out her final assignment uh she actually wasn't able to finish it during the course itself um so she actually did it afterwards uh so props to her for being able to keep herself accountable and still finish the homework assignment and um but also it's like really good and this is actually homework for uh ascent which is you know the step up from base camp and so it's much harder um and this especially the final assignment itself is extremely difficult because it's based around a client project uh so yeah let's go ahead and check it out and i think you're gonna be really impressed procrastinating can be fun but actually completing your tasks is way more fun that's why mombi created the app concrastinate now you don't have to smash your phones to your docs [Music] stop being a pro at craftinating with concrastinate from mombi smash those to-do lists not your phone awesome so yeah one thing that you know i can be said about uh marina is that she very much feels like a designer like a lot of what you see all the scenes are very design friendly and uh so i would argue that if you were to make the scene inside of or these this entire spot inside of um like if somebody were to sell animated or just do it inside after effects and 2d uh this thing would still be really impressive jesus happens to be doing this in 3d utilizing some of the tools that 3d uh makes available to her but all of the things that are impressive about this thing is her color choices how she lays out a scene and also how she animates it which are uh principles that she learned from other courses so uh you can kind of feel like the influence from animation boot camp um advanced motion methods and also design bootcamp all that stuff all pretty much working in unison to create this really awesome spot so from the very beginning you can kind of see that there's this nice little motion on the cube and right before it jumps it kind of does like a little bit of a squish down which is a little bit of squashing squash and stretch which also works to create a bit of an anticipation so which is if you don't know it's uh you know if it's going to move to the right you move a little bit to the left and then to the right it kind of creates anticipation and so you can see over here let me rewind a little bit more it squishes down and then it kind of moves so but you see a lot more of it later on so here you know like right here it moves the opposite and then it starts to swing over but then she combines it with something else called uh a match cut so when you press y uh the rotation then cuts to this phone which is also following that rotation and so that's something that you learned in advanced motion methods uh something that i like to utilize a lot as well uh and it's a really effective technique to kind of uh create bridges between from one scene to the next and then here you have this really cool shot uh this is probably the only time i would say like this is the uh like this is something that you can only really do in 3d and that's this like nice water ripple like you can do that like illustrating um maybe also in uh after effects using like uh fractal noise and whatnot but here you know you have all these tools that kind of just create that for you but it's all working together to create this nice little scene this is another particular area where i would say that uh using 3d uh it kind of helps cut down on certain tedious work so it you can draw these things kind of falling if you were to do it uh as a spell animation or even doing it in after effects but animating every single one of these things and having them fall and look natural it's going to take a long time if you do it just in in any 2d application but because you have the power of physics and dynamics you can pretty much just create a little cloner and then let physics take over and the dog will basically bounce anything off of it uh and and it looks really cool and it saves so much time oh yeah next one so yeah here you know basically doing another thing which is kind of going from i think it's called follow through where all the motions going upwards and on the next scene it's going to start at the bottom and then it's going to go up again when it cuts through it's down and then it's going up and so that's creating another bridge between the previous scene and this one and then again she does it one more time by using this cube having it spin pushing into it and then the next scene except that cube again and it's moving in the same motion and that's another match cut and then finally turns into a sphere goes through and then you got yourself a nice little resolve so yeah it's very much feels like if she grabbed all the knowledge prior to taking this course and then basically applied it using 3d as our main toolkit which is just really cool just it's like really impressive um but you know this is a critique so i do have to find anything to complain about so i'm going to do that right now just so i can feel like i actually did something so jumping in here um there's like a little bit of a scene there that kind of feels like it's kind of creating a weird reflection on the light you know let's uh let's keep it going let's see um here yeah that looks really cool love that yeah yeah i really like this like let's face it's so good um so here uh her animation on this guy looks really good uh the leg but if you notice it feels a little sharp uh i kind of would soften that sort of animation so that it feels a little bit more instead of it kind of like stopping i think you kind of have to like really pay attention to like really notice that it's actually like kind of a sharp sort of see how it kind of feels like it's happening almost like stopping suddenly uh here let's see yeah oh here uh this one kind of feels like one of the um balls is kind of intersecting let's double check yeah i don't know it kind of feels like it but i don't think it is and then over here you can kind of see that the texture is kind of warped in a circular fashion i think um giving it a little bit more repetition or even just changing the projection on it so that it feels a little bit more even across rather than being stretched circularly can match i think also if you layer it you can do one where it's stretched and then do one on top that is not stretched and more of a flat and then combine the two using like a noise like that could really help um but yeah that's pretty much all i really have to say in terms of like uh complaints because overall this animation is quiet uh quite impressive and uh really cool looking and the fact that you were able to do this outside of the course uh to keep yourself accountable like that's really impressive in itself uh but also this animation is uh really well done so yeah awesome work on this holy cow that was a great critique yeah with someone as good as marina you really have to poke and you really gotta work hard to poke holes in anything she does yeah everything it's just like you know i was like i do have to complain so she just might have a complaint but i mean this just goes this is the story of that we wanted to tell today basically is you know it's if you're into 3d like there's also some things you should learn before you even take that step into 3d that will help elevate your 3d work because like you mentioned in the critique you know you can see her design skills and her animation skills even her character animation skills kind of shine through and be applied to this new tool set which is 3d you know and thinking of 3d is just a tool a way to express your creativity and and when you think of it like that it's all about what the artist is bringing to it so if you have those solid foundational skills you're just way better off than you would without them you know because like once you have that base understanding you're like oh i know exactly what i want and i know how to do it right you don't have to like feel like you need to be super proficient with the software to be able to do anything like right just you're just going to do the thing regardless and so yeah and i think one of the funny things in this course is like i don't know what the percentage is but i think many people that take a cent are using a third-party render for the first time so we kind of learn rendering concepts slogging through physical render and the very slow built-in renders which you know you know remember those days yeah i do remember those but i mean it it just kind of like shows you that like this is not hard like if you've been in 3d and you're using physical render like it's not easy to make that next jump to redshift you know because it's the same i'm like it's the same terminology it's like gi over here and like a radiance cache and it's like it's the same thing in redshift as well so it's just shifting all that knowledge over and like the render times holy cow like how much more ideation you can get in how much more look development you can get in at a shorter amount of time with a third-party render is just incredible it's like you you you almost forget that you had to struggle through third-party renders for so long like one of the comments i get a lot when people will do that assignment that they have to use the physical uh they'll be like i i didn't realize like how difficult my life was because of physical and so then they get the taste of redshift and then they go back to physical and they're just like i don't know what i'm doing here i mean even that alone is like if you've been in 3d for a long time and you're afraid of like third-party renders you think it's like some big hulking subject to learn it it's really not i mean it can be but to just use it like we spend an hour and a half teaching redshift and like people are you students are using it and like they're blown away by like wait a minute i can have a blurred reflection and i don't have to come back to my render tomorrow or to see how it looks you know yeah um but i just wanted to pull up marina's website here where like it's incredible i always recommend like i'll switch over to her instagram when you find an artist you really like scroll all the way down and see their art their artists journey because i always say you know artists on instagram they're always showing their best days you know we kind of lose fact you lose sight of like there's a lot of work that had to get put in to get to where that artist is now and i think marina is just uh her instagram is a perfect example of that you can see how like this is some of her first 3d stuff it's kind of toon shade it's got like the boiled edges and stuff like that and then if we just see her progression like here's some assignments from base camp where you have to learn how to uh model a uh nintendo device or something like that uh so she chose the n 64 which is like that's hard and she just totally rocked it and this is from the uh lighting and or lighting and texturing exercise which she just totally nailed as well like again the color theory that she knows her design skills shining through here and then you can just see her progression where she's kind of doing like still leaning into that 2d stuff that she kind of started out with in her career and then you just see her go and progress over time to um and she's dead like uh these like daily uh like 67 or 36 days of type and like that practice and you know when she took base camp she didn't stop there like she kept learning about 3d and leaning into it and getting her first 3d jobs and like here's another modeling exercise she did which like i don't even know if i can model that stuff and and then we go to this where it's like holy cow like she just just like rocketed into a new stratosphere of proficiency in 3d where like oh my god just so adorable like the rigging skills are shining through here the animation uh just the appeal you know of that as well and her work these recent pieces she did which are all sold out on him she's like getting really big in the nft stuff and just this is just so beautiful and just so gorgeous so you just see that growth over time like when was this when did she take this was 2018 and this was just like a few weeks ago like five days ago she posted this and it's just that growth that's incredible um and here's some more on her website where she she was just all 2d and then you just see this progression where it's like you go from this and this to like boom like look at that look at this like it's just incredible i'll just let her real play here for a little bit but i mean let me turn this down first too but uh yeah it's just one of those things where being accountable being held accountable in these courses with the ta feedback and something like i'm sure louise you've seen some massive growth from a lot of our students um yeah like there's a i'm trying to remember her name her name was leah kopke i think her last name uh she started out doing kind of like um uh i was like rendering for like products uh but it was more for like a cad sort of application and so she had a good foundation on like the technical side of things but once she kind of like released her like creativity like lighting and all that stuff uh you just saw her kind of just like take those skills that you already had and just put this like sort of uh painterly quality to them and just yeah made like really awesome art uh that's not just like technical you know drawings or anything it's like actual art that you know you can show off and eventually animate yeah i mean and one thing we should mention is that you're every student is assigned a ta that sticks with you and stays with you till the very end of the course so if you're lucky enough to be assigned with uh louise here you'll you'll have that interaction and build that relationship over time throughout the course and i think like as a ta that's got to be one of the coolest aspects of being a ta is just having that one-on-one time getting to know the student and really helping them take their skills to the next level and seeing that massive growth and knowing that you kind of played a small role in that you know yeah and they're also very like every student that i've had has become very grateful to like just i don't know they they love the course and then like the little notes and then they just kind of see this progression and they're just like i really i really thank you for you know all the help you gave me and i just find that like i don't know i've always liked teaching people and so kind of seeing them grow you know you feel proud for them and you know you know like there's a personal satisfaction in seeing their success and stuff yeah and i mean it's such a huge shift from like i know when i tried to learn all this stuff it was just by myself in just tutorials and you know you have to make stuff to get better but it's like you heard the 10 000 hour rule or whatever and it's like that's kind of bs because i can be doing ten thousand hours of the wrong thing like you wanna you know i don't golf but like if you wanted to get better at golf and you spent ten thousand hours by yourself and your forms terrible and your swing is off it's like you just spent 10 000 hours and you're just you haven't progressed at all and you know if you actually had a golf instructor or someone there being like actually you know what you need to have your arm like this and like your form is off do this like in having that professional guidance and and input that's where when you spend those hours of practice that's when you see those gains and that's what that's why that aspect of having tas and even our community group that like it's just so cool to see even students inspiring and pushing other students like i'm sure in this session of ascent like everyone probably saw marina's work and was like holy cow like i need up my game or like match cuts like that's super cool i need to think about that and apply that to my next assignment and that's kind of the coolest parts of it is you're you're not learning alone you're constantly getting inspired and pushed uh by other students and it's that accountability that taking one of our courses gives you that you don't get anywhere else like like oh man i gotta keep up because marina's doing it and she's killing it like there's no reason why i shouldn't be able to do that like i want to show my work and learn from that and you know put all the things that i'm learning into that next assignment and show uh show what i can do uh you know in that next assignment and also the validation of the other students is definitely something that like motivates you to keep going because you want them to be blown away and so you go like i need to you know double time it and like crumb as much of your like personality and artistic taste into your work so that you can try to do that like thing where people are just like oh my god and want to share it with their friends and stuff yeah there's so and that's a very important thing to even bring up because even if you're just posting to instagram and you know you're posting into instagram don't you spend like just a little bit more extra time like okay i rendered that out like oh i noticed this thing like i gotta fix that like i'm not posting that on my instagram like i don't want people to see this so it does give you that extra motivation to make sure that everything looks really really good and you would not get that if you're just like i'm making this and no one's ever gonna see it and i don't care whatever you know you're not gonna really grow by you know being in a hole by yourself and not getting that feedback at least you won't grow as fast as you could yeah um the other thing uh the other thing i would say is that like on instagram when you post something uh you're probably just gonna get a bunch of likes a bunch of people yeah like whatever it's not good feedback yeah it's just like they're just telling you you're good but this one not only do you get like the validation but you also get like the constructive feedback which does actually make you better and then it leads to more actual people liking your stuff so yeah luisa like louise's cree critique isn't just like fire emojis and then calls it a day [Laughter] lit lit nothing more that's my notes um awesome so now we're on to our last uh 3d course which is like the capstone of our 3d curriculum which is lights camera render and you know you luis you said you've taken this you you've td t8 it you've been on both sides of this and you know this class will kick your butt in the best way possible and like i i mentioned from the very beginning like i've seen a massive jump in the quality of luis's work since i mean his work was already good but like there's just another level of polish and shine added to it with what he's doing now and the cinematic type of work that you're doing now as well um but yeah lights camera render is all about taking the language of cinematography and applying it to the world of 3d where you know you have all these lights and they're not physical and you're using a third-party render you're using octane it's super fast feedback so you can really learn about all the nuances of lighting and composition because you have that real-time almost real-time feedback using a third-party renderer so our uh the the student that we're gonna be highlighting for lights camera render is actually gonna be joining us uh soon but he uh he uh it has taken design boot camp expression session which is you know really uh cool uh level up which is our our class that is free that you can actually take whenever you want by the amazing ryan summers uh which basically just talks about like how do you get to that next level in your career and then after you took level up he actually took cinema 4d ascend and then lcr so it's just in you'll see this when you see francisco's work that you can see the design boot camp you can see the expression session stuff because he's done like he's worked on a ton of like hud foui type of work um and then of course 3d the 3d skills he's learned in ascent and lcr um but let's go ahead and this critique uh the assignment that uh luis is going to be critiquing i don't you want to set it up luis yeah so it's a title sequence during the course first you design the uh the style frames and then once you have your designed uh frames done uh you'll then uh animate them by creating like a tableau so everything's like frozen you just have cool camera moves and trying to tell a story without a bunch of movement of characters but rather movement of the camera and also uh movement of light so you have like lights coming on or moving and uh yeah being able to tell a pretty cool story and i think francisco did a really good job in that yeah i think when you're when you're watching this critique like just see what you can do with just an animated camera and it's pretty incredible the stories you can tell and i think when you know that like it just totally puts a light bulb the light bulb comes on your head of like this is like i can do that with just the camera it's like yeah yeah it's preferred actually right exactly yeah versus like animating a bunch of characters yeah yeah so let's go ahead and check out uh francisco's uh work here critiqued by louise [Music] so here we're going to be checking out francisco and his uh simon for uh ltr so for lights camera render um so something that i've noticed a lot is that people have made some really awesome work uh for the title sequence part of that assignment uh which happens relatively early on uh but i think a lot of people really get into it i know i definitely did when i took it uh so yeah it's really cool to see what he's done so let's go ahead and check this out and uh so you guys can check it out for yourselves [Music] so trust what you believe walk across the ice into history [Music] [Applause] yes [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so let's go ahead and start this over let me mute this guy real fast so here we got some really awesome uh initial shots uh with nice little depth field yeah and you got like all the nice little titles kind of kicking in so one thing i do want to point out is that there are some kind of like very close and the the titles are to the edge and so there's a thing called title safe um and so in after effects very easy you can activate little guides and it shows you like where you you should definitely keep your uh titles so that they don't get cut off because a lot of times when you're working in film or whatever um having things too close to the edge can usually lead to them getting cut off when they're being shown on tv or any other application really so having these a little bit closer away from the edge can definitely help out but yeah so you got some really cool shots here so let's go ahead and start over here uh check this one out nice little blue and orange i think that's really awesome definitely kind of gives it that cinematic feel then you got this one so you're using refraction and then you have this nice little texture going on uh to kind of break up the um the reflection or sorry the refraction also kind of give it a little bit of grime and it looks really cool and also having the light cut through it and illuminate parts of it like that that looks like really cool and really cinematic uh so yeah showing all these different ones inside of like like ice cages or cryotubes whatever i think that's a really interesting uh scene it definitely kind of makes it feel a little bit more like i don't know it's a good way it kind of reminds me of like like halo where like master chief's being woken up feels very much like that you got like these crazy alien ships which i don't know like i've seen like they give you all these assets in the course and so it's always really interesting seeing what people do with these and i've honestly never seen anyone make this thing look so big uh it's just like it feels so like the scale of it feels so big and just it feels like you know you could have like hundreds of um ships inside of it you know it's just it's so big itself you know it's really awesome nice little cinematic shot got the gun and like books on the hand which is really cool so this shot right here is really interesting because it starts out really abstract with like the field but then you know as it comes together it reveals that it's a little bit more of a blade but then this is my favorite part uh has a nice little uh light stripe going across it which i thought was really awesome that itself is kind of like uh being able to time that and making it look like that clean like that's that's in itself a an art form uh here i really like this particular shot because uh how evenly lit like it feels like the moon is kind of lighting them i think there's a lot of uh tendencies within like 3d to kind of throw in a bunch of little lights uh kind of make like the edges pop and all this stuff and the fact that he's able to like this with like a single source and not do that shows a lot of restraint but also shows a lot of confidence in his abilities but then also on top of that he's contrasting all of that blue with these nice little red eyes and kind of like little dark silhouettes of like the aliens so that and so like that's really cool like this shot right here kind of like stuck with me because of that reason and here you got more shots which look cool now i love how the depth of field you know just kind of creates like that nice little bokeh with like kind of like a circle in the middle which looks really awesome then you got like this nice little um face off and also as this blade gets revealed i really like how the uh glow just kind of just gets more and more intense as more of the blade gets revealed and then finally you got the reveal which i think it's a pretty interesting application of how the um revealing of the text because normally yeah you can kind of like just do that like with like either like 2d text or if you do 3d you kind of like combine several things but to have it come out from like the fog forward i think that's really awesome i think that's a very unique way of doing it it also fits really well it feels very much like a game trailer almost like you know they're announcing like the next call of duty or whatever it has like nice very very nice layout um and also how the characters are sort of faced off and it just like creates a very nice little um balanced frame and your eyes pretty much go straight to it you know exactly what it says and uh yeah you're ready for this for this thing to start uh looks really awesome so uh like the same thing with marina i need to go through and kind of point out little little complaints that i have here and there which honestly aren't really too many i think my main overall note is the text how it's a little too close to the edge that's pretty much it but here are a few things that i did notice i try not to focus too much on like sampling or if there's noise because that can be easily fixed by just increasing things which just takes a while to do rendering here in this particular shot i kind of feel like there's a lot of focus on this particular area it kind of feels like you want to focus here but it kind of feels like there's just a lot here kind of taking up a lot of the frame i think maybe even just shifting the camera or tilting it over so that this guy is a little bit more closer to the center and we see sort of like uh the hand kind of reaching for the gun would definitely help play that a little bit more because if you notice the um the sort of center of the frame kind of seems to be like this little rock right here and then as it's rotating it's rotating around that uh it would be nice to have it rotate around the gun or the hand itself oh like this looks awesome yeah super cool i really love how the um it's like the outline mostly rather than kind of focusing on all these different like bits of details just like the outline sweet okay here i think yeah you got like one two i think you can have a few more because it you see one last guy and then it cuts um i think just adding a few more monsters here to kind of make the odds feel a little bit more overwhelming uh but i also look like how like one character kind of cuts across but it feels a little sudden like all right maybe it should take up more of the frame so that it blacks out almost this one looks good same thing here yeah yeah i i do find this like leg a little strange uh it kind of feels a little warped or something i think just having it stomped down would uh fix all that um yeah it just just seems like how is he standing you know uh whereas this guy kind of looks like he's diving forward it's kind of i don't know it kind of looks like he's dancing a little bit yeah honestly that's uh pretty much all my like complaints overall this thing is like really well done and uh should definitely be like front and center of your reel so awesome work dude holy crap that was it's just amazing seeing the chat just like the head explosion emojis and like he francisco did such an amazing job and uh he's actually been he's actually here with us live so let's bring him in welcome francisco incredible work man like it it's really an accomplishment to uh to do anything in lcr just because it pushes you to the extreme and i remember seeing your work in that session and just like blown away like i just know everyone was sharing it and just really impressed no thanks i mean that course is um it's a beast for sure and i think uh i i had to take some time off in mil in the middle of it because i'm like okay i really want to do well in this i just it's just the best way for me to learn and i took about a month during that course it just like i'm not taking any work i'm going to focus on this and uh yeah and actually i'm glad you guys like looked at that piece because i thought that was like one of my favorite pieces i got to work on yeah um let's just bring up your website here and again like i like going down let's even go to your instagram but like just going down to the bottom and then just seeing the progression is just like we see some lcr uh assignments here here's one just about composition you know we learned a lot of composition in uh in lights camera render got some animation stuff you know how to do a nature render in lcr as well that's from the nature render assignments just like everything you've made is just killer there's the uh cyberpunk city which like i know i remember seeing this piece as well during that class and just being like wow that's incredible but like just insane amount of work uh maybe we just kind of talk about you know what your career was like and you know what led you to take lcr like what was your journey to taking yeah because you've taken many courses before this no totally and just to caveat about that instagram i kind of started that during the pandemic because i have a personal instagram where it would work but it became you know when you have kids you're like okay i gotta personalize that i would make that a little private and so i just started that last year and it's kind of just been like okay this is the work i've been doing since the pandemic just to kind of getting really diving into 3d has been a goal for me for for some time and like yeah but it's like i you know to go back to where i started i started as an editor they're trying to get into like uh just both shooting and editing and i did that i mean going we were talking maybe 2008 was when i moved back to la and uh had done a little bit of editing and so i feel like the cinematic the storytelling thing was always part of the stuff that i was into like you know and like a lot of people like i started using after effects um through andrew kramer i think um you know motion graphics was a thing but like motion design wasn't that much of a thing back then and andrew kramer's like he's like a vfx guy like him who's doing vfx vfx stuff because i'm editing and people are like oh can you green screen this thing can you uh put these titles and i mean i i was a little afraid after effects early on like i actually was using apple motion because i was in final cut pro and for those who don't know i guess it's still around but it was like back then like final cut six days or something like that was like okay i can do titles in here but um coming to la i think uh seeing work i think early work of like ash thorpe and stuff like that really made me realize oh there's a place for motion graphics and cinema in cinematic storytelling which to me as i was called is always has always come out to me because i just love film love sci-fi love uh the use of like you know graphics to like push the story forward and you know i've kind of worked my way towards that you know it was it took a while because you don't just get into like doing motion graphics for uh tv or film i feel like i've had over the last few years the opportunity to do that but uh i did a lot of um there was a lot of years where i was either editing a system editing color grading doing motion graphics juggling a lot of things and i think hobbies with photography on the side and and then with vfx compositing i think i feel all that kind of played a role into like the stuff i i was doing in 3d because i when i first started cinema 4d it was probably about 20 11 2012 i opened it up for the first time and uh i had to do break a wall or something for a client it was like some industry video and i was like how do i break the wall i can't do that in after effects like you know we had a license at the little small shop i was at and like you know there was this plug and i googled and there was krakatoa which like breaks things and then there was like uh you know i think there was like c40 cafe or hello lux tim clapham stuff was always like the stuff where i kind of started picking up c4d and rob garrett lynda.com i don't know if you remember oh yeah going back to that but uh it was uh you know but i think you mentioned earlier like the bucket rendering i mean man i mean coming from like a very visual like editing shooting video like designing something and laying it out and then like hitting like render and waiting like five minutes to see your frame just to see the lighting is off i mean it was like oh it's oh it's gut wrenching i'm like i don't know if i can i can do this uh effectively without like you know a massive like form or you know whatever what have you whatever they do at studios so i think uh cinema 40 was always there in the back burner and as i was as i was like doing motion graphic stuff i always was like loading up my vimeo with like things i liked and like the work i liked and you know it's just like all these i think i became uh very enamored with like these kind of stylized uh 3d things with like the the movie lighting uh you know like the sim stuff uh just like the just this these kind of like little light reveal things i think i think of raw marks for example much later but the westworld titles like stuff like that like because i feel like you have like cg and you have like the stuff that you know like artists using maya and doing stuff like for animated films and marvel stuff but then you have this side of 3d where you're doing these kind of more esoteric design based things and and i kind of like i kind of i just gravitated towards that because i well one it felt like i could do that and i didn't have to go to like norman school of vfx or something and then try to go my go through the effects like work like career path but everything you know and it's like this motion design world is very flexible and i adapt very well to like the changes but uh that's kind of like you know i think being in la helped i'm from l.a and i think coming back here after spending a decade in the bay area um i think i realized that after a while you you know you network with people and i think eventually like job opportunities came that were like hey do you do you do uh like motion graphics or just solely motion graphic jobs and i think uh as those coming started coming through when i was excited but also it was like you get bought into a job at a studio and then you sign a contract with your day rate and it's like you know your role as a designer and i'm like i didn't go to design school i didn't even do like film school had my my best mind my wedding was a film major uh when i was doing my undergrad at uc berkeley and it was like uh he uh you know he did theory it was all theory so we were you know i knew films theory but it wasn't until i took a course there that had nothing to do with the film department where we where we were giving cameras that was the closest thing to actual production but it's like yeah that's film and design are two very different things so i think that's where school of motion kind of came in for me at some at one point and it's probably not school of motion related at the time but i was watching this uh youtube video with like um michael jones from mograph mentor and ryan plummer just talking about kind of like a state of the industry thing that you know brian plummer does see um brian summers who does these now uh and uh with the school of motion but uh it's you know got me just thinking about about motion design as an industry which i hadn't thought about at that time i think you know it's just like as an editor you're in editing you're kind of like kind of working with these other teams and you're kind of always like you're it's you're a smaller team focusing on the post-production side of things but i think really realizing there's this whole like kind of bubbling community of just folks with all these different styles i think you just have some great examples uh yeah yeah i mean you you mentioned that you got into editing first right and that was kind of your first foray and it's if we want to bring up uh francisco's reel again like even your title design like you add that let me try to find it again like just the title design of like just the placement let me try to find it again is it here like even just knowing how to stack text write and to add contrast in text and type is such a useful skill there's such a good variety of how you can use 3d and design just like all these philly elements and stuff like that like that's all 3d um and i think you know when we talked before you were saying how like expression session actually really helps you in this aspect in 3d which i think of most people taking expression sessions probably just thinking in terms of like you know after effects and not so much integrating in 3d but it looks like it's helped you a lot there too like yeah just your text design here is just really really good you're animate just animation fundamentals like all of those i guess the main question is like how i mean we can see it but how did the other courses you've taken design boot camp expression session level up how did those kind of help you with this 3d course yeah i mean i think uh so design boot camp was the first um of course i took at school of motion because yeah i'd been kind of doing things for a while i've been in cinema 4d i've been using after effects and you know i feel like okay i kind of got a sense of after effects i'm not doing so many explainers i was doing stuff more uh geared towards productions i mean it just wasn't full on motion graphics stuff um and design boot camp was really like my entry point or me accepting the fact that i needed like learn about design in some way and also this is releases uh motion design but um there was all these elements in there um just type the typography elements the arranging things values uh hierarchy things that i not aware of before like i you know i look back at any of my work i did before uh that and and it's just like you know the type it works but it's like it was always a guessing game i'm just like okay it looks good here but now it's like when you have like a theory behind that like okay i can go and then be like okay i want this line of text and i know this other text i want to like take some i don't know it could be like a golden ratio or some percentage values at work to create a big tech small text and then kind of create this balance um all of that like really just up my game and i remember so liam clifton was my ta in design boot camp and there was one c40 assignment there and even that one i just i enjoyed like thinking about 3d as a design element and style boards because i think i was thinking about cinema 4d from the animation perspective when you do learn tutorials you're always thinking about how you can do this how you can use the mograph modules but you know then thinking about like okay there is like this world of people who just design concepts and you know they don't even animate but you know i like doing both but i think the idea of like thinking about something stepping back and realizing if you make a board if you make a pretty picture it's much easier than going into an animation and then execute so i think design bootcamp is just essential for that and yeah i mean you sorry i was just gonna say i finally found that that piece that i was looking for where it's like you edited this whole thing and then the the text there is just great like as an editor like i don't know many editors that can design text that well that good you know like they probably don't even see like they'll put comic sans and it's like that's good right uh but just the design of this text and the slow push like you it's obvious you know some kind of you know animation fundamentals design fundamentals and stuff that you like you said you learned in uh design boot camp there yeah and not actually i mean all most of the stuff is like after design boot camp i would say um yeah those academy award things like it was a mix of like doing that typography stuff and although and all the actual images were for photograph stills that were provided to us so you know i was cutting them up and then doing that 2.5 d after effects thing adding the kind of the camera blur and and flares and you know you know there's all these things that come from being behind a camera early in my career and just like i used to go out and shoot uh friends events like late at night like these underground techno parties when i came back to la and so i was always working to talk about in dark environments and like editing videos and that was a way for me to like cut my teeth like i just kind of keep myself fresh because i know i was just trying to get work and i wasn't always gonna get the work i wanted to but doing that i think i learned a lot about photography and how light plays with photography and all the imperfections and all the things you need especially when you start going into vfx compositing like crane and you know how like bokeh or or how like yeah how how depth of field looks and it's not always like spherical it could be like oh you know it could be like a vertical it depends on a lot of things like the lens you're using how many blades are in the lenses how many blades are there are in the bokeh and all these kind of things kind of come into play with stuff i do yeah i mean this stuff is beautiful right here and is any of this stuff did you use expressions for that as entirely except for the camera movements everything is entirely expression driven i think there's one like hold keyframe to like set some parameter but it's all expressions that's the only keyframe in the actual ui animations that was the final for the expression sections of course that's awesome um let me turn that off uh so you know we have louise here you know how of course you were assigned some tas through all these courses how important was that having that ta and getting that feedback throughout the what five courses now that you've taken well four that actually have tas but yeah i mean it was i mean amazing like i think that was the game changer for me or just when i took my first school of motion course it was like okay i kind of knew like i learned from like having assignments having a little bit of pressure having like having a little bit of a time frame um because you can go and try to learn on youtube which i've been doing for years i think all of us have but you can also learn methodologies that aren't like production ready like i think being in la i realized okay i need to learn things because when when push comes to shove and there's like something to be delivered you got to make sure that like uh you can adapt it because it change and all of a sudden the way you build something is just like you just kind of built it based on this youtube tutorial you might screw yourself up and i think uh learning courses and and going to a place where i felt like there were there was people who work proactively in the industry was going to be vital for me and what i didn't expect is how beneficial it was like uh those ta sessions were i mean the notes are always great i going back to lcr i had a dj summit was my ta there he was like it's like having an art director with you like he's just like give you gives you these notes i mean support you know starts with the nice stuff and then like gives you like okay well here's what i would change and like but ultimately it's just very supportive it's like i mean you you also have the component of like the the the group the online group and your classmate's kind of looking at your work but i think it's just like that you know when someone dives in and looks at your work it really is helpful because i you don't do that yourself and often or it's hard to do it for yourself and it's also hard if i think a lot of people motion graphic design often might be one or two motion graphic designers on a project if they're kind of doing stuff that's facebook video and stuff so you don't always have someone to uh give you direction that knows like what you're doing to begin with or where or what can be done with the software and um that is really important because i think i i found when i do some of my freelance work like that's great or this doesn't work or i'll you know i'll know when i like it you know i think we can go our emojis but it's like uh i think it's having having just uh that is it really is helpful i mean i think anyone who takes a course is gonna probably realize that that that really is what one keeps you engaged and you kind of wanna you kind of take it in you take in what's being told and you kind of it applies to like every assignment moving forward in it and so you know it all builds up on itself these courses these courses seem to be designed pretty well where they uh they just kind of progressively like you know keep up your skills and yeah but yeah um luis did you have anything to add oh yeah the one thing i was going to say uh going off your art director note uh i think the thing that's different about like real life art directors versus here is that here i feel like they give you notes that make your art better whereas in the real world they have certain brand guidelines and so sometimes you kind of have to step your art back right and so here it's kind of like it's your vision we're just kind of helping you along the way rather than you know here's a client and this is the client does not want this thing to veer off whatever so i think that's the main difference between you know the two yeah ta is not saying like could you just make it pop more like you make that logo bigger or like could you move it a pixel to the left like yeah it's actually stuff that makes you work better versus like a lot of client feedback will actually make your work worse and you just save that like better version that you're gonna do your director's cut right yeah i feel like with the with yeah with client feedback i mean there's always i mean there's always a lot of opinions in the room and then especially when you're doing with like these companies and then you've got your like level of like whether it's your director creative creative director or producer then you've they've got their layer of people are talking to and then you come into a project and then you know it's i learned over time as a freelancer you come into a project and you're given like a thing to do but this project has probably been in the client's head for like six months so like they they've already kind of settled in on what they want and like they want you to bring something to the table and then you know you sometimes you're like oh i'm gonna make the thing that looks cool and well that's not what they want and so you know it's it's like these uh kind of rhythms of of the game per se and i i mean doing that title sequence i was like you know i had free reign to do what i wanted and you know a lot of it was like result of happy accidents um and then kind of begin getting to rhythm of like okay visually like what kind of story i want to tell here but i'm like yeah i can imagine like getting this done like for a show like how many people are in the room how many concerns come into play or like oh we you know we're gonna rearrange the way we want these names and how long they need to be on screen which i've been on you know when i worked i've worked on a few features as as an assistant editor so laying out like you know i was laying out like the names of cast at the beginning of the film and when that changes like the whole edit changes and like you're like trying to juggle all these things that so yeah i can imagine that just can be like it takes a project and makes it not so fun after a while yeah i mean one of the cool things about our courses is it like sets you up for success and those you know quick where you gotta like i gotta iterate this i gotta do i gotta build this project the right way and i know one of the lessons that i really love in uh lcr is like you spend time in premiere just like rendering out different shots and from different angles and quickly just like auditioning each of those camera moves or camera angles and just seeing what flows and like you're getting taught all the all the shortcut keys you need to work fast and premiere so like if your edit totally changes up like you know how to quickly just all right let's switch out this shot for this and da da da cause like it's not just a cinema 4d acting course like you're also editing you're also editing to tell a story to get the right pacing and all that kind of good stuff um yeah joel in chat asked a really good question who wants to know what you're working on right now and how did your school of motion experience impact the kind of jobs that you're asked to do now okay yeah i mean i think um so i'm currently working i mean i normally i've done a lot of nda work in a lot of over the years like half of my work is usually nba um just because i just got tied in with a group of folks that you know it's it's great work uh but i it's often not on my real or it's uh so i get to put a lot of personal work there right now i'm working i can actually say i can say i'm contracting for apple right now and it happened since march uh i can't say what i'm doing but it's you know it's fun work where like i'm you know sometimes it's after effects sometimes it's a cinema 4d i'm using octane uh i'm doing things like taking things into like taking illustrations into photoshop and cutting them up and doing camera projection i'm using all these different skill sets um and that has been quite cool and like i i hope one day maybe we'll see if i can talk about it uh but it's uh or at least i can i know it's the cool thing with being at home and working from home is like sometimes like you're at home and you're like okay i'm gonna take this idea work down here and make up my own version of it and kind of see if how that kind of works into my work which i think was hard when you go into a studio and then in l.a i don't get to do i don't always freelance from home you're kind of expected to go into the studio because you're like they're all here so you a lot of work stays in the studio and i felt that it was always hard to balance personal work or development because you get home and you're exhausted any work you do at home is personal work um but yeah so that's what i've been doing i've been doing that since march and prior to that i was working with a couple of studios uh uh during the pandemic and um you know motion you know it's like i think i was in a i was in a on a project and they were mostly using uh octane uh this was last summer and um uh 2020 and i didn't know oxygen i downloaded once before i used it a little bit then i just moved on to redshift because you know you just go you know you go on the render war stuff and it's like i mean that's a good question like what because like that's one of the things we teach in ascent is like once you know the fundamentals you can use whatever one you want okay on one job you're using octane like that's fine another job using redshift that's fine too yeah it's all like i mean it's like going back to also i did some v i did some vfx compositing and just like when i dived into nuke and i jumped back into after effects it's all just like the tools like it's all maths it's all like and and materials are all like layers and shaders understanding like things like diffuse and reflection and specularity um like what normal maps do and all of those things come into play and you know like i feel like okay at some point if i jump into arnold maybe and you know learn arnold but you know i didn't know octane and and i remember the cd on the job as john norlander who's like kind of a big enemy guy now but he was like oh it's just like you know it's plug and play because i was using magic going okay i turned out i was doing it i did it you know i did a few tutorials but then of course like um so you know i had done lcr you know i did a sense to plug some holes in my cinema 4d workflow but as soon as like they announced lcr i'm like okay that's gonna be my opportunity to really just delve deep into octane and kind of get under my belt because i've been using redshift for the last two and a half years awesome yeah uh we got some rapid fire questions here for you if you'd like um so you know we have a lot of people watching on our live stream and thank you all for the questions that are coming in keep them coming um one of the i think one of the questions is you've taken four courses now marina the student we just looked at before i think she took like five and then emma took like five or six like a lot of the students were showcasing here have taken a lot of courses and i'm sure a lot of people that are watching are just intimidated to take one class and you know i guess i just asked like do you have any good habits or routines that you have that have kind of set you helped set you up for success to get through all of these courses because it's it's not easy you know we've mentioned lcr is probably one of our most difficult courses and it kicks your butt in the right way but um do you have any advice for anyone thinking of taking a course yeah i mean i think the one thing after when i took my first course what i learned in that process is that uh because i fell behind a little bit i was working uh and it realized i benefited the most when i got to submit my work to the locker room in time for it to be potentially reviewed uh because i feel like that's gonna be the biggest takeaway from the course i mean like anything that you always can go back and do the courses even if you don't do that that's not that's not gonna be a make or break thing i like i often go back to these courses and just like i need to learn something right i need to i forgot how to do this one thing with both ascent and lcr and then like um i you know it's carving out some time for yourself i mean you are going to make some time to learn i think the core i feel like the courses can very widely ask you how much like attention you need to deserve you need to put towards them a week towards them in a week but i think um you know for me it's just kind of thinking about okay looking at the outline what are what are the places you really want to focus what are the you know what are the holes that you really want to fill and so i think sometimes you do have to kind of kind of weigh that a little bit and be like i'm going to put more attention into this side of things and with lcr like i mean i love title sequences i at one point would like to work like uh you know i've worked at vfx studios but i haven't really worked a motion design proper studio like a tendril or something where they when they have like a proper cinema 4d workflow or something like that i feel like so when i was doing this course i was like you know thinking about okay this is a place where i want to like really pay attention you know put my attention i also knew as with an editing background i could like you know i can kind of nail this a bit and i know i was gonna go and spend time and look for music and stuff and before i even like started like cutting the thing because that's just what you do as an editor for these kind of graphical things um uh but it's yeah i mean it's i think everyone's life is hard my my i have two kids my son was my second kid was born in september uh last year just turned one recently and my daughter just turned five but it's like he was born i think right as i was starting the scent but i was also taking paternal leaves so i was at home and i could like late night like i've always been in a bit of a night owl i try to i try to do that unless i die obviously more normal time these days but but when i need to like you know like i was on the computer like at night or you know have a baby strapped to your chest and hope they fall asleep and then you're on your sit stand desk and you're just trying to get the work yeah um and so i had that bit of a break and like i said it took time out time off during lcr which you know not everyone has like the ability to do that i i was freelancing and i was like you know i just had i had a fortunate amount of work because i think there was just a lot of work for some of the folks here in l.a during this last year and a half that when it came to that course i i had to prioritize like i can go around and be like okay i've been trying to learn cinema 4d like just just you know like you said there's so much it's such an expensive software i just want i've been wanting to learn it or plugged holes in it for years and it's hard when you spend three or four months on a project and you're probably doing after effects and some photoshop or illustrator work and then you come back and you're like oh i have to relearn this thing or you know you get home and you're exhausted you're just trying to do personal projects so i knew like i needed this time to kind of build up that muscle memory make sure ten thousand hours or work towards those as you say yeah i think i think lcr will take about five thousand hours so i think here ten thousand hours people forget the ten thousand hour thing is only applied to like to be the most elite at your field like actually studies say you only need about 20 hours and most of our courses are you know 25 30 35 and i think that's and and the practice you know and the right guidance like i said with the golf swing if you're just doing it by yourself you have bad form and no one's telling you you're gonna be ten thousand hours of bad form and probably pull your back before you get to ten thousand hours but um luis do you have any insight as far as like do you see students doing certain things that set them up for success to get through yeah so one thing i do want to mention because i know that it was something i said to myself when choosing a course but then i also noticed other people saying it after i had learned better and that was uh i remember i it was between animation boot camp and design and then i'm telling myself like oh i don't really need to take animation boot camp because i already know how to animate i already know how to hit f9 on the keyboard and so i took design and then like i liked it so much that i was like oh you know what i'll just take animation let's you know maybe i can work whatever and then i just realized like how much i didn't know and then i like you know learned all the things and so now when i see people say like oh i don't really need to take that because whatever it's like no you probably should because you know you're going to learn uh things that you probably didn't even consider but one thing that i do notice um students do and they revisit the homework uh and do like uh i don't know it's just like redo it on their own time and i think when they look back at their old project files they notice all the mistakes that they made and then they try to fix them and then they you know apply all their new sort of like lighting techniques and whatever uh and then that kind of basically since you already have like the foundation it's kind of like i don't know it's like a rough draft and then you go in it again and then you get like your final draft and that's the thing that you like really want to show off um and then other ones that i do like is when people uh grab like their final project uh release it but then do like i don't know like not necessarily dailies but just like weekly work that they try to build upon it uh and it kind of gives them that sort of practice but i think a lot of times if you go from one course then to the next one uh that's a step up it kind of helps you keep that momentum especially if you're able to run through the entire course you go into the next one you have all that momentum keep going and i think i've seen like maybe like a few people go from one to the next the next just like in sequence and they just had like all this uh motivation to keep pushing and did it and you if you look at their work i think his name is uh lee williamson oh yeah yeah he did incredible yeah he did like enough seeing him out of him and now he's just like insane in all these different categories so yeah yeah logan is another one of those alumni that he went into on he went to uh he took lcr and his go after lcr was to rebuild everything in unreal engine and it's incredible how he's just like kind of pushing himself you know it's kind of like if you get a gym membership and you just go and do things by yourself but if you sign up for a class or something where you're motivated you're with other people and you build that system almost where you have a routine you stick with it it's really hard to like get off of it like when you work when you say you're going to spend 30 minutes to work out every day you're going to spend 30 minutes a day watching training content or uh working on a piece you know like people's the prime example of this like you have 30 minutes in a day just find it and just work you know and look where he's at now not everyone's gonna be you know multi-millionaire but you know you never know but i mean there's something to learn about the consistency the good habits that you have that carry through all those courses in francisco you've actually taken two courses back to back and i know we had some questions about tips for uh taking back-to-back classes i think someone in the chat mentioned they're taking like animation boot camp and then base camp and then ascend so do you do you agree that that's like a good thing to do taking courses back to back to keep that momentum going i think if you can i mean for me it was uh i mean i saw lcr and i'm like i gotta do this now and like you know just love you know david ariel when he's done in the community and i was like you know it just uh i was a little hesitant at first but it's like the timing was right for also my career and like i'm like i really need to learn nothing i think uh you know i just love i realize that spending doing a cent and doing the and lcr back-to-back i spent like what felt like several months like a time like deep in cinema 4d and even between that i was taking like a mograph mentor just like a like uh it was like the uh one of the courses uh it was like a cinema 4d4 for design like designing boards but uh it um you know i just for me it just it's what i needed because i wanted to just kind of be in it be living in it and uh it you'll find a rhythm you don't have to complete all the assignments uh you can you can kind of pick and choose and you can i think you should give them all a stab but you realize that they're not all that mean they're not all gonna be final and like i think we heard people previously talking about how like they some of their work that they're doing is like stuff they did after the fact and i've re every visit work and i've tried to do or improve some of the work or get back to some of the notes but it's just um for me it's really it's really i think it's really beneficial to kind of keep engaged in the community of that course like kind of be engaged in the in the group i think it's everything's on square now and like being you know kind of the interactivity between like students and because you do build a community and i mean with lcr i mean we have like there's like a schwann area called the lcr family it's just like everything every we were in the first course but every time there's like a new batch of people just joining this this group and like it's just like it's just really a great place it's a bit of a it's a bit of a mind hype and you can go in there and ask questions of things i mean i know there's great slides out there i'm on the mograph slack often but um it's uh it's great to just have people who went through a course and it's easier with people who were learning in the process and sometimes you're on a slack and someone has they've been doing cinematic for so many years so it's like it's like sometimes the questions are kind of like you know i just really it's a better place to ask questions if you knew like there was an example of it in the course or if you knew someone in the course who has a little more of a stronger skill than something like oh they know how to how to deal with like you know human models and stuff like that yeah i think you you mentioned a good aspect of you know the community aspect when you take a course like everyone who's taken a course like knows it's not easy and when you get through that like the camaraderie you build going through all those challenges and seeing the growth all around you is so inspiring and you know it's the community group that is a big component of everything you're not learning to learn you're not learning alone and like i've heard of many artists developing like you know good friendships from their groups and you know when things open up hopefully we can all meet each other i know i've met a lot of people i can't mograph that have taken courses before and a lot of alumni meeting other alumni for the first time and it's just like you you're just family like an extended family which is really cool and even bigger bonus point is like sometimes those are the people that might be giving you freelance jobs or connecting you to your next gig so it's community aspect cannot be uh overlooked for sure totally school motion that that's a huge plus i would say it's just the other community around that and like i've met i've met people who i will hope to meet in person one day but then you follow people on twitter or on instagram and then you know i i did end up going to cambodia graph and which i was just wanting to be a part of that community and i got to meet people like you know five pixels i know he's in the chat and like you know i followed him forever on twitter and then like just different folks i'm like hey it's like it's kind of funny because it's like i meant you know i met you in person briefly there and it's like i like i've heard your voice for for years watch i've always gone back to your eye design tutorials and then it's like oh then it's like it's kind of funny because you look at you meet someone and like you you're kind of familiar with everything in their cadence name but they've never met you so it's it's a fun little thing um let's see just looking through these questions here uh so there's a question from tunji who i think he was just on a whole a clubhouse last week good to see him in chat but he was asking if students will be able to use retain these assets in the uh after the course and i will say that um a lot of them you can we did have an artist i i kind of dropped his name in the chat uh giuseppe sarcy he made a lot of uh like the building models and stuff like that for the first one of the first assignments that you do in lcr and those are you can use those in commercial uh work but a lot of the assets are just for uh personal for you to learn from and stuff like that um uh joel asks uh how can we self-evaluate if we have the required level for that course for a course like lcr or something like that and i would ask i would say um you know don't don't hesitate to like reach out to anyone here at school of motion and you know me specifically if you want to talk about like your goals and where your work is now and stuff like that um but i think you know lcr is definitely a it's it's definitely difficult but you kind of start out easy and then it really ramps up so you don't wanna you wanna have some experience with third-party rendering you want to have experience in cinema 4d you definitely don't want to go from like base camp to lights camera render but i would say if you're you feel comfortable very comfortable in 3d and octane you could take lcr and be totally fine even if you're very new to octane at the beginning of lcr there's a whole here's how octane works and get you up and running uh very quickly um we've got matthew zipper who says his school of motion looking into creating a unreal engine course we're always looking at courses that uh people might be interested in so if you wanna there's a course out there that you're looking to see if we're gonna make it be sure to be sure to let us know what those courses might be we're always we're always looking um let's see and i think this question also came up a lot balancing course and full-time job and family uh i mean you francisco you and even luis you guys both were taking these courses while balancing full-time jobs and i think one of the things that you've even seen with some of our students here like emma she went back and redid some of her work and made it better like louis louis said um that happens a lot with our students you know it's sometimes work gets in the way and you have to take a client project and it just overtakes your life and that's fine but i say this in some in all the courses that it's not about you know when you finish it's just that you do finish and like marina is a perfect example she didn't she wasn't able to finish that final project on time but she followed through and she held herself accountable and i think those types of you know being accountable to yourself once you get out of a course is something that you know is so valuable to have that discipline uh to be able to follow through like that i don't know luis or francisco if you have anything to add about you know balancing yeah i mean i mean with kids i mean it's always like i learned to bounce a lot of things once i had kids i think that made me scheduling a game kind of how to go up a few notches but you know this last year and a half alone uh i think i don't know if by i don't know how i would have looked the picture would have looked if i had to go into a studio and also like help out with the kids my wife also works and and then do the courses but i think being at home and also you know i mean we have we have family in that late so that that's a big benefit so it's not the same for everyone but being at home the one thing you learn is like sometimes when you have down time it's your time which i that's what i look at monitor that i realized because i could be on a job at a studio and like i'm rendering or i'm waiting for notes and it could be a few hours and then you're gonna go do a render walk or go you know find a buddy and get some coffee and so that's when you're at home like uh you might be rendering something in the background and then you might be able to just jump on something some personal work and and also uh i mean the days do get blurry like that that's the reality like i think when where the day starts when it ends when you're managing all these things but i think that allowed me this that last year and a half i i think being at home being in front of my computer allowed me to realize okay i do want to sit here and spend time on this stuff and you know if you're working from home right now it's probably an easier time than it has been in the past for years kind of courses so that's something to consider it's very true yeah now's the time when you everyone's working at home you don't have that commute anymore replace the time you spent your commute with learning a new skill yeah another thing i would say since i don't have kids uh so it was a lot easier for me to like find time to do it uh like my first course that i took was while i think it was like uh the playoffs were starting at the broncos and so that was like one of the busiest times of the year and so in that time i remember i would try to incorporate the the lessons into my work uh so if we had just learned about you know certain layout technique and design uh when i got to work and they were like oh we need to do these um like match up graphics i started using kind of like what i saw and putting it into my uh like actual work and kind of noticing that there was like a bit of an upgrade there but also i found that um i would watch the things like at night so after like the game's over or whatever i'm super tired i would just lay down and watch the um the lesson and i would watch it once and then kind of like let it simmer and then the following day i would watch it again while doing the homework uh and so you know while working i would have it on my second screen and like doing the actual work but using the lesson as a sort of basis to sort of drive it forward and so that was one way of trying to do that um after that i became freelance and so it was a lot easier to find blocks of time to do it uh but yeah so that's like the only thing i would say in terms of uh trying to do it while working that's super smart 1.5 x is your friend on class oh yeah just don't do it at 0.5 because then i sound like a friend very awkward yeah i mean one thing i can say about being at home is like my daughter probably now has a better understanding than like most family other family members of what i do because she walks in on my office all the time and she's like did you design that like yeah what is motion design dad like what the heck is that speaking of your daughter i think this was this was so adorable so when we were doing our like pre-chat for the show uh francisco told this story about his daughter and i don't know if we want to set that up francisco will we get this image loaded up yeah i mean uh i would be working on weekends and right after lcr like i was really into these environment renderings and then she she'd come in she's like papa i wanna like design something with you one day i was like oh i mean you know your heart melts of course but you're like okay how did we make this work and so one weekend in the morning in the morning we were like okay let's design like a pretty little scene you know you know like we sat you know she sat on my lap and we went through like i oh i think i'm in an adobe stock library account or something and so we went through like 3d models like what can we download for free and animals and things like that and then i have forester which i've used for some projects and so we just sat there and she directed this whole thing here she want you know hummingbirds and plants she wanted a pond she wanted lily patch for sure and she was i'd be playing with the octane scatter like is this enough no no no how's this and you know like kind of telling in the sea values a bit uh and just uh yeah at some point she like wanted a dolphin popping out of the pond i kind of had to like you know direct that i might kind of mix that one like we'll do that for version two but uh it's uh she was just amazing because she really like got into the idea of picking the flowers i mean she uh we had a we had a crash an acting crash and so like at some point you do and so we went downstairs and then you know we grabbed a snack and then we came back up and then finished it off and yeah it was it was great i mean i i should be doing more of these with her it was it's awesome that's amazing is your daughter a guard director oh you got a job do you got a future job in our field she knows that she knows what she wants you know for her and you know she's like a great little like kind of voice in her own right just trying not to say she's she's just exploring but she loves great uh she loves grabbing my art books and i've got like a spider-verse kind of art book and book of life stuff and she's always going to those and just sitting there and like going to the pages so it's awesome oh the book of life is one of the most beautiful films i've seen in a while i just remember finding that randomly on netflix and like this is gorgeous yeah i can't wait to watch this new project that's just i just saw a trailer for maya and the three and that looks really really cool awesome awesome well thank you guys so much we're gonna land the plane here thank you for hanging out with us for almost two hours but i hope everyone out there got a sense of what we do here at school of motion and the value of our courses and the value of our tas the value of our community and kind of how we're different uh how we do things differently here at school of motion so as always we're always here if you have any other questions after the stream's over i'm over on twitter and instagram at iden we also have our amazing people at school of motion that you can always ask questions for and if it's specifically 3d question or something they'll pass that along to me we also have a support chat on our website at schoolmotion.com if you have questions there you can always use our support chat there or ask questions through the the email address their support at schoolofmotion.com um but yeah thank you so much uh both of you luis francisco and kyle behind the scenes coordinating everything this was really fun and i hope we can do a lot more of these in the future and uh we actually will have two more uh later on this week uh that you can tune into um tomorrow is the design showcase it's at the same time noon eastern and then friday we have the animation uh showcase at noon as well uh both hosted by uh ryan summers and our tas sarah and frank and we also have a lineup of amazing students who have taken our courses and you'll get a lot of the same kind of stories of what their experiences were how ta feedback critique is in those courses and the assignments that you'll be working on in a lot of those classes now one last uh note is that registrations open the fall session actually starts on monday october 8th uh one big piece of news here is that some of our courses will not be available in the winter session that starts i believe sometime early january so you want to get in them now if you want to take any of the following classes so it's character animation boot camp and rigging academy design kickstart explainer camp lights camera render which we've been talking about a lot so if you want to get into lights camera render get in there now because it won't be available at least uh for the winter session it'll be taking a session off uh expression session demo reel dash and vfx for motion so yeah i hope to see a lot of you out there in some of these next sessions and i can't wait to see i mean we've seen so many artists and how they've grown through school of motion and i'm excited to see that next wave of alumni come through so again think thank you so much everyone out there thank you louise thank you francisco and kyle behind the scenes we'll see you back here again tomorrow at noon and ryan summers will be here uh going through some of our 2d curriculum bye everybody thanks guys [Music] you

Channel: School of Motion

Views: 7,706

Rating: 4.9819818 out of 5

Keywords: Motion Design, Motion Graphics, After Effects, Tutorial, Tips, Tricks, Technique, Learn, Basics, Design, MoGraph

Id: awf5LWn2ywI

Length: 113min 5sec (6785 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 29 2021