Character Creation Summer School 2 August

Michael Davies - rigged Smaug

Want to learn how to design, model, rig and animate your own characters?

Why not learn the art of character creation from the artist who rigged Smaug (The Hobbit) and The Minions?

Escape Studios Animation tutor Michael Davies is a 3D generalist who has worked on VFX blockbusters such as Batman vs Superman, Doctor Strange and Thor Ragnarok.

Michael will be teaching our new character creation course this summer.

Character Creation is part of our new Summer School, and is an intensive 4 week course that starts on 2 August.  Character creation is all about designing, modeling, rigging and animating your own characters.

Michael Davies

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.

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.

Character Creation
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.

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

Start date 
2nd August 2019, running for 4 weeks.

Mode of study
Daily, 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

Official site
To sign up, follow this link.

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

Character Creation Evening Class 
We also run evening classes in character creation starting in June. To find out more, read this post. 

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 2019, follow this link.  To apply, visit the offical page here.