CGMA Spring Registration: 2 Weeks Left

If you're not familiar yet with CGMA, the school was founded by a group of industry professionals and art educators who recognized that students fresh out of top art colleges weren't fully prepared for the industry. To break this cycle, CGMA provides over 130 skills-based courses on entertainment production, including concept design, storytelling, animation, and more. Students learn from the best artists and designers in the field, gaining insight into how top studios operate. CGMA courses are open to everyone, including high school students and established professionals seeking to upskill. Today we'll have a look at some brand-new courses at CGMA.

3D Character Creation Mentorship

A 10-week advanced mentorship focused on creating high-end, realistic 3D characters. During the course, you'll upgrade your skills in Maya, Arnold, Zbrush, Marvelous Designer, Adobe Substance 3D Painter, and Photoshop. The mentor of this course is Pete Zoppi, Lead Character Artist at Treyarch. A couple of months ago we had a quick glimpse at one of Pete's projects.

This structured mentorship program provides personalized feedback and advanced instruction to help students advance their character art skills. Weekly live sessions are available for specific questions, while flexible course topics allow students to tailor their learning experience to their individual goals. In addition to learning new techniques, students will gain valuable insights into character art pipelines and troubleshooting, and gain the skills needed to assess concept art and plan for success.

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Houdini Production Studio: Destruction FX

An 8-week course on creating feature-film-quality destruction effects for the film. This advanced Houdini course teaches students to develop a smart and efficient workflow for creating realistic destruction effects. Through fracturing assets, working with rigid body simulations, and adding secondary debris, dust, and smoke, students learn to destroy any asset in any way, using any material. Emphasizing attention to detail, art direction, and workflow, this course equips students with the knowledge needed to tackle any production-level challenge.

The course's mentors are Louis Manjarres, Lead FX Technical Director at Sony Imageworks, and Ray Tjernstrom, Lead FX TD at ReDefine.

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Grooming for Animated Characters

An 8-week course focused on creating high-quality character grooms for animation. This class focuses on teaching students the skills needed to create top-quality grooms for animated characters. In addition to using hair grooming software, students learn to identify character design details, problem-solve in 3D, and tell character stories. The course mirrors a studio environment, complete with design kickoff meetings, routine reviews, and a feature film quality groom target. Students learn to troubleshoot grooming software and hair shaders and create a high-quality portfolio piece. Grooming principles taught in this course can be applied to any grooming software, with Houdini being the primary tool used in the lecture videos.

Your instructors will be Shading and Grooming Artist, Ethan Dean, and Lead Groom TD, Chris Bolwyn.

Ethan Dean is a Character Shading and Grooming artist at Pixar Animation Studios. In his time at Pixar, he’s helped make characters in Coco, Toy Story 4, Soul, Turning Red, and Lightyear. Before Pixar, he worked as a look development artist for commercials and short films at Psyop and Moonbot.

Chris is currently a grooming lead at Pixar Animation where he has helped create characters on films such as Coco, Incredibles 2, Onward, and Turning Red. Prior to Pixar Chris worked at ILM, Sony ImageWorks, and Laika. Chris considers Sony ImageWorks to be his second home where he worked as a groom and tailoring supervisor and helped create many characters on films such as Surfs Up, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Hotel Transylvania, and Angry Birds.

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3D for 2D Artists

This class teaches students how to use 3D techniques to create full scenes from 2D drawings. They'll learn essential 3D tools, render multiple scenes, work with complex organic scenes, and create environments based on their own sketches. The course also stresses the importance of 2D composition and color knowledge for a professional-looking piece. Blender is used for 3D techniques, but the skills apply to other software too. (For specific syllabus info, select the instructor and click "Request Syllabus" below.).

The course is mentored by Sergio Castaneda, a Concept Artist. He created concept art for titles like Last of Us Part 2, Call of Duty Mobile, and Arena of Valor, among others. Starting his career as a 3D technical artist, he decided to jump into the professional concept art world in the last years starting from scratch. He is constantly looking for new tools and techniques that allow him to move quickly and get the job done in a short time. Always searching for the best way to tell the story in every single image.

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You may find more courses available on the website and enroll while registration is still available.

CGMA Spring Registration: 2 Weeks Left

3D Character Creation Mentorship

Houdini Production Studio: Destruction FX

Grooming for Animated Characters

3D for 2D Artists

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