Lab Assignment Q & A Week 2

Since this is the first assignment for your portfolio, here is a one time Q&A explaining the process: (follow your TA’s instructions and suggestions!)

* What exactly is the assignment again?

Always read the assignment page – for this week it says:

• Port 1) Composition assignment Due week 3
Working in Maya with basic Polygons and Polygonal modeling tools, create 3 or 4 shapes in your environment, considering positive and negative space, point-of-view, depth, image plane and perspective. Export 3 .jpg images demonstrating an artistic study of this space in the 3D environment.

* So what is the final thing we are handing in?

- A saved mb file of the polygon tutorial

- 3 jpg images of one scene of 3-4 polygon shapes from different angles

- one of the shapes should be your hammer; creativity of shapes and placement counts

- some short captions or write-up of what you tried to do

* When exactly is the portfolio 1 assignment due?
All portfolio assignments are due Wednesday Midnight of the following week. This means that when we access your portfolio website afer midnight the assignment will be there, clearly labeled, so we can grade it right then and there. Else it will be penalized for being late.

* How do we put it up on our portfolio website?
Read the details on the assignment page. More specific info:

This assignment is called Port 1) Composition, so on your portfolio site at www.sfu.ca/~<your_userid>/iat241 the grader should see a home page with your name on it. On this homepage there should be a link to an assignment page and there we will find a link to port 1) Compostion page (or just Port1). There we will find: a short write-up about how things went ( no more that a sentence or two, maybe you want to point out something you want to make sure we see or what you were trying to create), a link to your saved tutorial (in this case the poly modeling) saved as an .MB file and then the image or mov files ( in this case 3 jpgs). You can have links to the individual jpgs or you can insert them on the page with captions. The point is no matter how you make the website, it should be easy for us to find all your work for that week easily.

* How professional does our portfolio website have to be?
We are not grading you for the website production. But think of us as your client to your product which we need to go to your website to view. It must be clear and obvious where the product is and what it is – your product is the assignments.

* How do you grade, what are you looking for?
Grading is clearly stated on the assignment site. It says:

Grading: Creativity, technical development, animation concepts applied, progress/ development.

So we will give equal points for each and average them together, since in this case there is no animation and no progress till you have more work, you will be graded for Creativity and technical development only. Again look at the assignment for details it specifically states:

“create 3 or 4 shapes in your environment, considering positive and negative space, point-of-view, depth, image plane and perspective. Export 3 .jpg images demonstrating an artistic study of this space in the 3D environment.”

So the “technical development” grade portion will be about how well you made interesting shapes using the polygon techniques your learned and your “creativity” grade portion will be how artistic they are and how artistic you put them together in a scene paying attention to the attributes discusses in the assignment ( positive & negative space, pov …)

We will be looking at shape, placement and camera angle only (for this assignment) not lighting or shading or texturing or anything you have not learned yet. This is about making polygon objects and placing them together in a scene is a creative way.