Computer Animation Arts

Incredibly, that's it.  We're done, dusted.  The fat lady has sung.  After thirty weeks of briefings, lectures, interim crits, final crits, personal tutorials, seminars, film screenings, life-drawing, digital painting classes, character workshops, animation workshops, presentations, pitches, Maya tutorials, After Effects sessions, work placements, and group projects, the CGAA year is over.   A veritable confetti of 'Don't touch - Rendering!' notices now litter the carpets of the computer rooms and silence has settled eerily about the place as the whine of oven-hot hardware powers down.  The ambient temperature of the CGAA baseroom has dropped from 'sauna' to normal, and the colour is at last returning to the faces of our students and soon-to-be graduates who have slept at last, their systems purged of the twin toxins of taurine and  Pot Noodle ... The end is nigh - but not quite yet.  For some of our graduates, it's New Designers 2012...

Introducing Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, a father-son pairing from Germany who specialised in hand crafting glass sculptures of  underwater fauna and flora to a remarkably accurate degree.  Like the projects you're working on now, the Blaschka's mixed scientific accuracy with brilliant artistic craftsmanship, creating work which went beyond the category of simply being defined as 'scientific models'. Exquisite stuff! I like the Jellyfish the most...  

With just four weeks to go before the end of the academic year, CG Arts & Animation @ UCA Rochester is powering up for its busiest period.  Soon, little slips of white paper will appear on keyboards everywhere scrawled with the words, 'Don't touch - Rendering!' and the course team will go about the campus shouting into the pale faces of sleep-deprived students, imploring them to 'Back-up your files' and then,  'Back-up your files again!' .  The air will take on the sickly-sweet chemical tang of energy drinks, a heat haze will rise from long-suffering harddrives, and at least one student will burst into tears for no clear or discernible reason.   It's an exciting time, a fraught time and a transformative time, as cg assets born of ambitious production pipelines seek to become greater than the sum of their parts. Right now, those 'ambitious production pipelines' are pumping out exciting appetisers and this month's PWTM beg...