Starting this April 19th I’m giving an 8 week (once a week every Monday evening) course in Blender 3D at the SKVR in Rotterdam. I believe some spots are still available right now. Also I’m giving a 3.5hr workshop there on Saturday the 27th of March. You need to reserve a seat if you want to take part. Go here for more information about that.

I created a small model that we’ll use during the Saturday workshop.

This is a simple little exercise I came up with for showing students how to convert 2D to 3D and vise versa. The idea is to not go straight to 3D, but in stead give them a hands-on task that gets the idea into their heads. It’s not a completely new thing for most students, but the relation to UV unwrapping is. And of course it is fun to try to make it challenging as well.

The example

To give my students some idea of what I expected them to do I showed them an example I made the night before class. It’s a basic svg I made in Inkscape that I printed on A4 paper.

I could have just made a single T shape to make a single cube, but since I was teaching university level students that was a bit too simple. In stead I made this, which turns into 2 cubes that are connected at a corner. The real world result that I glued together the night before class, and showed my students in the morning is below here.

The task

After showing the students my example, I provided them all with paper, rulers, pencils, glue or tape, and scissors. Then put them right to work. The task I gave them was was rather simple…

Make something more complicated than a single cube!

The results

As usual my students surprised me with their inventiveness. The range of designs they came up with was really nice. Especially the surprises and “misinterpretations” that I really didn’t see coming. All I did during the class was walk around and give some pointers.

Round up

That’s basicly all this class was. After finishing the exercise we got stuck in in Blender 3D to UV unwrap the models they had made the day before. It was a lot easier for me to teach them that technique after they had done exactly the opposite with paper (which is what this exercise is). All in all this was a fun hour to break up the week of staring at computer screens, and I’ll definitely repeat it in future.

I hope this helps you, and if you have similar fun ways of teaching your students, please let me know. I’m always looking for novel ways of getting these complex ideas into students heads.

Dolf

For a number of years now I have been giving workshops/lectures on creating artwork and animations in 3D. I am a Certified Blender 3D educator and also a member of the Blender Certification Review Board.

Feel free to contact me for more information.

A few institutions & events where I taught/lectured

• SKVR
• CBK
• Kunsthochschule für Medien
• Sideseen
• Doe het niet zelf
• The Slobodni Festival
• Hogeschool Leiden
• Hogeschool Rotterdam
• Hogeschool Zeeland
• Hogeschool Amsterdam
• Hogeschool den Haag

I did a small talk about 3d/open source, and how much fun it is to do cool projects with volunteers at the animation days at ‘Vlaams Cultuurhuis de Brakke Grond‘. The event there was organised by the people from ‘Doe het niet zelf‘. See their website for more information.

I gave a talk and workshop at the Slobodni Festival in Cakovec Croatia (Slobodni means Free). It was a great pleasure to meet all the people. I spoke about Petunia on the 12th and showed some 3D tricks in Blender on the 13th.

We were in luck, because the actfest was in town as well, so in the evenings we could sit in the grass on the outskirts of town to enjoy some punk music and hotdogs!

On March the 27th there’s a big special day at the Hogeschool Rotterdam. The students will get the chance to take a look in the kitchen of several occupations. I have been asked by the departments of Games & Simulations, Grafimediatechnologie to tell them something about 3D design and games development.