Mike Davies Character Creation Starts 16 July

Michael Davies

3D Artist and rigging specialist Michael Davies, who has worked on VFX blockbusters such as Batman vs Superman, Doctor Strange and Thor Ragnarok, is teaching our new character creation course this summer.

Character Creation is part of our new Summer School, and is an intensive 6 week course that starts on Monday 16 July and runs for six weeks until Friday 24 August.

Character creation is all about designing, modeling, rigging and breathing life into your own characters.

Learn from the man who rigged Smaug

Mike Davies
The course is led by industry veteran Mike Davies. Mike's credits are impressive: he rigged Smaug (for The Hobbit) and also The Minions for the Illumination-McGuff studio.

As well as his industry work, Michael also has plenty of teaching experience teaching, and gets great feedback from our students. 

What's this course all about?
You’ll learn all the basic skills needed to create your own characters from scratch, including design, modeling, rigging, texturing and animation.

This course all about how characters and creatures get put together.  The course focuses on the art and craft of creating a 3D model and making a skeleton structure that makes it work, so that you can breathe life into it and create a performance.

Mike Davies

Where 
This class will be held at Mid Town Campus on High Holborn.   
Address: 190 High Holborn, London WC1V 7BH.

Start date 
Monday 16 July until Friday 24 August. Duration: six weeks.

Mode of study
Full-time.

Michael's main areas of expertise are rigging and modelling, but he has also worked as a generalist and supervisor. Michael has been developing future creative talent by sharing his skills since 2014 and is also an Accredited Trainer for Maya at Autodesk.

Course Details

• Character Design Theory - How to flesh out a Design with a Narrative and Bio
• Using Anatomy to aid Design
• Intro to Maya - User Interface, Introduction to Modelling including using orthodox graphic views
• Intro to Zbrush - User Interface, Sculpting Tools, Maya to Zbrush Pipeline
• Sculpting details - using Alphas and downloading custom Alphas for skin (creating own custom alphas)
• Retopology and Edge Flow theory
• UV Coordinated for texturing
• Create maps in Zbrush: Displacement, Normals, Bump and Cavity etc.
• Map Manipulation in Photoshop
• Importing maps to Maya
• Painting Textures and Shaders using Substance Painter
• Look Development in Unreal and Arnold Renderer
• Character Rigging in Maya
• Import blend shapes with Maya
• Import a sound track and animate the character speaking
• Character Presentation - Rendering Turntable Animations and other Character specifc Animations ready for a showreel

Any Questions?
Email: admissions@escapestudios.com

To see an interview with Mike Davies, and find out more about his work, follow this link.

The Escape Studios Animation Blog offers a personal view on the art of animation and visual effects. To find out more about our new BA/MArt, now recruiting for September 2018, follow this link.  To apply, visit the offical page here.