Computer Graphics World

Education Supplement "At some point, students need to display their work in order for it to have some real meaning," says Jim McCampbell, department head of Ringling College of Art & Design's Computer Animation program. "It's the one moment students can show what they have been able to achieve within a four-year education here. Having a theatrical showing of their work is what drives them as far as the academic experience. And when it's done, they are prepared to enter the industry." Oh Sheep! A selection in this year's SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival, 2012 Filmakademie graduate Gottfried Mentor's animated short film "Oh Sheep!" shows what can happen when two shepherds, at odds with each other, go to great lengths to keep their flocks separated. The comedy/tragedy contains 18 characters in total, including the two shepherds and 16 sheep. These, as well as the backgrounds, were modeled and animated in Autodesk's Maya, and for detailed sculpting and texturing, Autodesk's Mudbox, Pixologic's ZBrush, The Foundry's Mari, and Adobe's Photoshop were employed. Shading and lighting were done within Autodesk's Softimage, and then rendered within the Solid Angle Arnold renderer. Editing was performed in Adobe's Premiere and compositing in The Foundry's Nuke. According to Mentor, the most challenging aspect of the film was animating the large number of characters and rendering and shading them to achieve their "haptic" and touchable look while keeping acceptable render times. Getting that look required a great deal of detail insofar as the textures and displacement maps were concerned, as well as extensive work in terms of developing the shading networks. "The sheep's fur had to have the desired look of softness while retaining shape patterns on the animals' bodies; the sheep also had— in some shots—to look as if they were soaked with blood," Mentor says. This was achieved with hair instanced on a particle system. Hair setups were also needed for the shepherds' beards and coats, as well as the grass in the meadow. The animated short required quite a few complex tasks, including a muscle system for the sheep's fur, as well as clothing simulation for the shepherds' jackets and fluid simulation for the blood. At one point, Mentor and his group even contemplated a 3D stereo version of "Oh Sheep!," conducting several tests before opting against it due to time limitations. "We decided to keep our focus on other priorities, like the look and the animation," he says. From concept to completion, the animated short took nearly 20 months to complete. 4 • Education Supplement • July 2012 Attention-getting Films At Ringling College of Art & Design, a four-year college in Sarasota, Florida, ofering a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, students take a course called Animation Preproduction, where story ideas and designs are developed and iterated on speciically for the students' senior projects. Students then deine and reine their ideas into animatics during the spring semester of their junior year, while production of their ilms occur in both semesters of their senior year. The shorts are completed approximately a month prior to graduation. "The value [of the projects] is huge. Students learn an incredible work ethic," says McCampbell. "They learn to separate themselves from their work enough to look at it objectively. They learn to problem solve like you wouldn't believe. They become incredibly adept with the tools that they use. Perhaps most of all, though, they gain the conidence in themselves and their abilities. Nothing is more powerful than accomplishing something that even you yourself didn't believe you were capable of." At Ringling, students are able to select their own projects and choose whether they would like to work in groups or by themselves. While most of them opt to work solo, there is a growing trend toward group work, explains McCampbell. Students at the four-year New York City-based School of Visual Arts (SVA) graduate with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree—but not before they com-

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