"Very Cool!" - Professor Emeritus Randy Hester
College of Environmental Design - University of California, Berkeley
Fall 2012
Enroll now on Telebears!LA 254 Sec. 002 CCN: 48670
Tuesday 2-4pm 479 Wurster
Friday 4-6pm 479 Wurster
Prerequisites: LArch 132 or instructor approval. Enrollment limited based on first come first served of qualified applicants. OPEN to ALL Graduate and Undergraduates, priority given to MLA and BLA students. CEC#s are available to qualified Undergraduates.
Questions?
The landscapes of the virtual have existed throughout history; in Dreams, Literature, Art, and Cinema. Designers have embraced these virtual worlds of the mind for inspirational manifestoes, visionary architecture, and introspective cinematography to "narrate" their work. The "virtual" today inhabits a quite different but no less provocative medium; the dreamscapes of computing. These once nascent virtual landscapes have grown to proffer opportunities for socialization, visualization, and even political action. Designers can now become dreamer, writer, artist, director and activist in these dynamic worlds.
"World Builder" - written, directed, and produced by Bruce Branit
This course will explore the construction of virtual environments and their ability to communicate virtual space and narratives through COLOR, FORM, and SPACE; evolving from a simple digitally fabricated "space" to a virtually inhabited WORLD.
Students will be tasked to create a virtual "place", stressing the need to build, texture, and light environments.
( WORLD )
Students will be tasked to create a virtual "place", stressing the need to build, texture, and light environments.
( FORM )
Autodesk's Maya / 3D Studio MAX will serve as the 3D asset creation toolset
( COLOR )
Adobe Photoshop will be used for texture map creation
( SPACE )
TerraSculptor / UDK's Landscape will generate the expansive terrain typography
( WORLD )
Epic's Unreal Development Kit will provide the immersive real time environment authoring suite.
Students should be proficient in 3D modeling and 2D raster editing programs such as 3D Studio, Maya and Photoshop. However basic modeling, materials creation, and raster painting tutorials will be taught in the first few weeks.
Pedagogical Goals Objectives
This course will present three pedagogical goals that address three distinct levels
in the authorship of virtual landscapes:
Awareness of Context ( Pipeline )
an understanding of the foundational discourse and diversity of approaches to
virtual representation/immersion
· Comprehension of the impact virtual communities and immersive virtual environments have on online human socialization
· Understand the value of virtual landscapes in design practice, synthesizing theory
and practical methodologies to problem-solve effectively
Proficiency in Technical Canon ( Toolset )
a fluency in the standard methodology found in virtual world authoring
· Understand the foundation of various techniques, and how theory and experimentation fits into the culture of developing virtual technologies
· Demonstrate a basic competency in overall techniques of prototyping and pipeline production.
· Follow the professionally established virtual authoring conventions in order to produce an efficient, optimized, and polished description of a proposed virtual world.
Capacity for Visual Application ( Lab )
a mature and controlled relationship with a range of representational forms and
formats
· Display a moderate degree of fluency of skills to create immersive environments within a given technical constraint utilizing the appropriate array of tools
· Display a high degree of fluency in a specific subset of virtual authoring, selected by the individual student as most relevant to their area of focus within the discipline.
Core Production Disciplines
Course objectives will be explored in each of the discipline of authoring virtual landscape
• FORM – Geometric Generation, 3D techniques describing the typology of real world and designed architectural and organic form. 3D modeling will be explored as well as the best production practice for creating efficient logically ordered models.
• COLOR - Texture Description, 2D techniques describing the materiality/texture of architectural and organic forms will be introduced and the various techniques of geometric UV Mapping. Emphasis will be placed on exporting drawn 2D representation onto 3D form and the array of techniques that foster this transference.
• SPACE – Terrain Surfacing, Digital elevation data will aid in describing terrain typology. Additionally terrain generation techniques will be explored to create unique landscape geometry.
• WORLD – Assembly, Integrating all the assets in to a cohesive real-time environment adding lighting, interactivity, and post-processing elements
