3D classes design

Creation

Well, there's a few sides to the 3D graphics / animation (3DGA) field, so know that goin' in — obviously the film and TV industry relies on 3DGA, and games do too, but don't forget stuff like real estate and architectural rendering, prototype graphics (landing on Mars for NASA, sexy concept reel for a rifle component for some defense company so they have something to show at a sales convention, and so on), medical visualizations, etc.. There's a few places one can end up, and arguably those latter examples are more numerous than the former examples.

If there's a (film and television) industry-standard CG software, it's Maya. It's getting to be a little long in the tooth these days — so it doesn't seem like a totally future-proof recommendation — but it's better than recommending anything else, I think. Don't go teachin' a new generation of kids Lightwave or 3DS Max or whatever; being able to individually make 3D graphics is fun, but if the idea is for these people to be broadly hireable, then they need to plop into extant pipelines and companies. Cinema 4D seems to be pretty popular among the motion-graphics set, too. (The Monday Night Football logo, stuff like that.)

Soft Skills

Yep, this all needs to be taught — and as I mentioned, there's several branches of 3DGA to consider, so maybe you'll need a few angles on this. At The DAVE School (where I went to school for this stuff back in 2006) we had probably half a dozen or eight teachers, most of whom were 'old pro'-types who'd take over a class for a semester or two when they weren't out working in LA or wherever, and they had plenty of valuable insight into the overall workings of the industry... that said, I don't recall much in the way of formal "here's how the industry works" conversation, with one exception.

The exception is demo reels. In the field of journalism, for example, what you've written, who you've written it for and a resume are your main tools for getting a new gig; in the 3DGA world, what you need is a demo reel. Where you learned this stuff doesn't matter, where you've worked only matters if your next boss is impressed by them, and you'll spend a long time in the field before getting anything "useful" (like, say, 'ILM') on a resume. For the most part, it's just the demo reel; a three-minute-or-less demonstration and breakdown of projects you've worked on, what you did, and how you did it. Once you control for the inevitable maxim of "it's all about who ya know!", the inroads to the industry are made up of demo reels and cold calls.

History

A lot of people would say this is irrelevant as a vocational matter; maybe they're right. But in a liberal arts sense, a few things would definitely be useful to have in one's back pocket — photography (composition, color theory, how light works, how lenses work) and digital imaging (working in channels, understanding and not-being-spooked-by color space, what constitutes a lossy pipeline), for instance. It would be very fun to curate (and attend) perhaps one "historical" people-and-events class — and I think that too would be handy to have in one's back pocket, going into the industry — but it's certainly not "necessary." Most of what there is to teach about Doug Trumbull or Ed Catmull or [list of forty names] won't actually apply to someone working on Iron Man 5, no matter how fun it is to teach that stuff, so keep that in mind.

Beyond what I've thought of here this morning, you might pick up a few additional ideas from this thing Ryan and I did earlier this year; it's basically a four-hour long "introduction to the industry"-type conversation for new VFXers. Call it supplemental material.