In this project, you will apply creative 3D production workflows to develop images or other media using 3D software tools. You will pursue your own interests while balance solving for the project's theme.
Project theme: “Balancing __”
Balance is both a verb and a noun, it’s something that can be possessed, taken away, created, and dismantled. You hear about balance in sports, politics, wellness, work, personal life, relationships, religion/spirituality, and as a core formal design principle. How do you know when something is not in balance? Can balance something that is exciting when it’s gone? Is a lack of balance damaging or constructive? Can demonstrating balance help tell a story or explain a principle?
For this project, you will complete the project theme by choosing an emphasis word and filling in the blank. For instance, if you choose the word stone as your emphasis word, you would write “Balancing stone” and use this word pair as the project theme. Apply a creative development process to create an image or images that convey your ideas. You will need to choose a project format that corresponds with your media interests, participate in peer reviews, and follow the weekly production process. You will critically reflect on the work you have created and the project theme in a 150 word work statement.
A successful project will demonstrate understanding and mastery of 3D tools and processes, application of formal design principles, attention to detail and composition, and lead to discussion about your work during a critique.
Choose a format that you can reasonable accomplish within the timeframe of the project. Do not use motion or animation in the final output.
What makes for a good concept: Concept Definition, Concept Formation, Design Concept Thoughts.
jpg or png images of sketchbook pagespdf file.
doc formatLASTNAME-project1-files.zip file
LASTNAME-project1-statement.docA work statement is a clear articulation about what you’ve made, why you have made it, and how it connects to the project theme. This is not a journal entry, where you might feel compelled to complain about problems you’ve had with software, or that it didn’t turn out how you wanted. Instead, imagine this is being printed in a magazine, or put on the side of a gallery. What do you want your viewers to come away with?
Example projects with work and artist statements:
Include the following to create a clear work statement:
All assets used in the production of the work must be created by you, be appropriately licensed for use, or be appropriated in a transformative way that significantly alters the nature of the original asset. For example, you can use a texture pack you downloaded from a texture website, however, if you render an image of just a flat plane with the texture applied, this is not really creative transformation since the entirety of the image is work from someone else. Your transformation and contextualization is what’s important. A render with a background that uses an image from Google image search (please don’t do this) that comprises more than 50% of the work is also not really enough creative transformation. If someone reviews your work and says that the image’s background is their favorite part of the image, you’ll have to then explain how you didn’t make the background, which is not a great situation to be in.
Q: I’m having trouble coming up with a project concept. What do I do?
A: Don’t panic, this is the hardest thing there is beyond learning technical production skills. First, look through the “inspiration” links to see what other artists and designers are doing. If that doesn’t spark any ideas, download and try the concept development worksheet. Many people are able to generate ideas from this worksheet. If the worksheet isn’t helping you come up with any ideas that you are interested in, the third recommendation I have is to use your environment to generate ideas for you. Through observation, ideas can come to you. To do this, write down everything you see, think and feel, and apply a filtering process to establish relationships between those things. This is part of a design thinking process, and there are many design thinking processes to choose from. How you develop your concept doesn’t matter, and the concept itself doesn’t matter. The important thing is that you are going through some kind of creative or generative process to articulate a concept, and can then respond to it by creating creative works. I often find that listening to other artists and designers talk about their process inspires my own. Often, the stranger the process, the more interesting the work is.
Here you can see Andrew Jones demoing Alchemy, a drawing tool, to generate shapes for a character design process.