[Bf-education] A litle more about my self...

[Nuno Estanqueiro]

Hi all,

I've been reading the past couple of months of threads, trying to figure out
what initiatives are going on in bf-eduction, but I'm still a bit
confused... Anyway, I hope that in a few days I sort things out in my
head.... hopefully I can get a hand from Rui, since I'm Portuguese as
well...

I teach 3D graphics to university students attending a "Audiovisual &
Multimedia" course in Escola Superior de Comunicação Social, in Lisbon for 2
years now.
I've started there as a teacher about 9 years ago, teaching video editing
and compositing, then moved to teaching web content creation, on to
multimedia integration (with Macromedia Director, mostly), and now... 3D.

I've been part of the team that developed the "Audiovisual & Multimedia"
course, about 4 to 5 years ago, and have been responsible for the 3D classes
that are now part of this course.  3D classes starting on the 3rd year of
the course, so, a couple of years ago I had to make a decision on what 3D
software to teach to two 20 student classes, and blender was the choice,
against 3Dstudio Max.

I work with 3D for quite some time now, having started out of curiosity in
old  3Dstudio R3, for Dos.... on to R4, Max 1 to 6.... until I found
Blender.... the 2.23 version.... I've been working with it ever since, and
have dropped max completely, even for bigger productions I made (3D
freelances).

The 1st. course I teach is, as I posted earlier, divided into 3 hour
classes, and starts slowly, explaining the main concepts of 3D graphics (in
general terms: coordinates, vertex, edges, faces and normals....the scene
hierarchy, pivots and stuff) then I introduce Blender, explaining it's
interface (just the main functions: the views, the cursor, the 3 basic
transforms...) and I propose a first exercise based only on primitive
modelling (thus only working in object mode to start)... modelling a basic
dinning room... just table and chairs... a couple of things more....

I move on to explaining the difference between "object mode" and "edit
mode", and so we add a few new extras to our dinning room, and I introduce
the extrude, spin, and subsurface... by the end of this class we have
refined the furniture, and created dishes, wine glasses, forks, knives and
spoons...

As the students get the hang of extruding, I propose to extrude one vertex
into an edge, and keep on extruding this edge to create shapes (introducing
a few extra concepts on the interface, like using an image of a blue print
of a house in the view port), and then extruding the edges to create the
walls. Extruding combined with scale  is also used for opening doors and
windows, (I found Boolean operations to be much more confusing to first
timers in 3D, particularly in blender, because the meshes got really
"dirty"). Other functions are always being explained, but in a slow
"crescendo", so that students always feel that they can achieve what they
are being asked for.

The exercises grow in difficulty, as they then have to model a car from 4
different blueprints (top, side rear and front view) and a human
character.....
A simple introduction if given to materials and textures, and as the course
goes on, UV's are introduced, as well as advanced materials, and lighting
basics (really bare basics) are taught.

So by the end of around 45 hours, students have completed at least 3 complex
models, and from my experience, feel confident to move on expanding their
knowledge in blender.....

those who do achieve good results in these models can proceed to the next
course..... animation! but that, I'll post later as this post is getting
really big.....

Hope this is somehow useful to anyone, and excuse me for the long post!

cheers,
Nuno Estanqueiro
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-education/attachments/20060421/1d8f25bb/attachment.html>