Australian CG Artists

#81

Woah did i discover this thread late or what?
Hi guys, good to see such an active Australian contingent. I’m working at Animal in Sydney, part of the max team here that does all kinds of wierd and whacky stuff.

hey Allen, your demo reel rocks man! what sort of stuff is Cutting Edge up to these days ?

as for training courses and whatnot, they are usually good for teaching the way software works, not necessarily how to do great stuff. Fine art/industrial design courses are a better road to travel, but hey, even a 2 month course learning Maya will save you a year of bashing around at home by yourself. Oh and the animation course at QCA rocks (if you can get into it…i couldn’t…but I’m not bitter :rolleyes: )

Matt S

#82

Hey Matt, thanks glad you like it :wink: Um cutting edge is just working mainly on George 2 at the moment along with rsp and Beeps. So nothing too exciting going on right now here, probably going to be freelancing again in Jan and heading back down to Syd as there’s some cool movie projects apparently starting in Jan.

Cool to see some more locals on cgtalk :slight_smile: What are you guys at animal working on? Do you know Geoff Valent? I think he’s in the max section at Animal, American guy.

#83

hehe yeah Matt, the animation course at QCA is pretty cool :slight_smile:
I’m in second year there :slight_smile:

It’s the only actual uni animation degree in Australia.
Ya probably know that though.

Ya learn apps faster in ya own time, but it’s learning the traditional animation skill etc, that most courses lack. That’s why this course is so great :thumbsup:

#84

Well, time to stop being a lurker I guess… :wink:

I’m living in Canberra ACT and while I work for an internet development company I do use lightwave for the odd piece of graphics. (I initally bought 5.6 simply as a hobby 4-5 years ago as a break from programming) I basically learned from buying 5 or 6 of the training videos and from some icq lessons from Fabio Passaro amongst others… plus lots and lots of practice of course. I did look into doing a course but there was nowhere here that taught Lightwave.

It’s great to see there are far more aussie’s here than I ever realised. :slight_smile:

Richard.

#85

Haha, I applied for the animation course at Griffith in Queensland, but all I could put in a showreel up till then was some little animations I had done in Deluxe Paint on my old Amiga! That coupled with the fact that I accidentally said I was an Aboriginie nearly led me to a free flight to queensland for a meeting with the elders. Needless to say, it was an unsuccessful application :frowning:

#86

Hey Allan

I am one of the ex students from the sgc and i’d have to say keep away from the place.

Basically our graduating class got todatally ripped off. this included being passed on subjects we had never done and blatent and obvious lack of knowledge in the teachers at the centre.
Most of our second year our teacher spent the classes doing his own showreel, and harldy ever helped the students.
His obvious lack of knowledge show’ed in the way he always said just try something else, even when asking the most simple questions.
other apparent things are lack of internet access and after hours access, also not having all materials for teaching, reading from the text book that we had in front of us, and then the bigest ****up was thats most of the time he didnt understand what was in the book so he skipped to the next file on the cd.

As you can see Its one you should stay away from mate:) and anyone else for that matter.

:slight_smile:

#87

doh! That sucks,
I have a mate, Sandy Sutherland who went and did that course and is looking for work right now. he’s a pretty talented and enthusiastic chap

#88

yeh i know sandy :slight_smile:

well, not really.

i applied for a scholarship at sgc…i’m starting to think that i don’t want to win it now. can i decline it? i guess i can.

#89

Hey Fasty

Sorry it’s taken so long to respond to your question about Ballarat. Have been in meetings in Melbourne today and this is the first time I’ve had to sit down and respond.

Your question was…

So what’s the industry like locally? Is there much demand for the kind of stuff you’re doing? How long have you been working in Ballarat?

Ok here’s the situation. Ballarat has a small population and budgets are super tight even though the client often wants a much bigger production than they can often afford.

I can fill my week freelancing here in Ballarat by taking on a wide range of jobs. (Let me say right here that my long term goal is to be a full time 3D animator working for a studio. But until that day comes around I still need to eat and feed my family.)

So the jobs I take on are

3D modelling/animation
Character design
Product modelling
Television commercials
Illustration work
2D animation
bit of web stuff
CD Rom authoring inc. Lingo scripting

Some of the recent projects have ranged from
working on camera placements for the Burnley and Domain tunnels in Melbourne for local engineering firm,
Character design and 2D anim for Childrens book sites,
Modelling of plastic water tank for promotional brochure,
Interactive CD Rom authoring, and now currently on Shockwave player for Web based interface. (heavy programming)

If I didn’t spread myself across all these areas, I wouldn’t be able to fill a week.

Having said all this, there are 2 major drawbacks.

  1. Because of the low budgets, everything has to be done quick and fast, which means I never get the time to show what I am truly capable of.

  2. I don’t get to spend as much time as I would like on developing my craft as an animator, this is usually left to the wee hours of the morning.

I believe I will eventually get to where I want to be (full time 3D animator) it’s just going to take a little longer.

hope this helps

Paul

#90

Realised there were quite a few of US from Canberra. perhaps we should all get together for :beer:
I’m in my 2nd year doin B.A (Digital Arts) at the Australian Centre for Arts and Technology(ACAT) of the ANU if anyone has heard of it…
We use MAYA for MAC here but I guess we learn more animation techniques than we do the software…which is good and bad really…
The good side is…everyone pursues, learns and applies the software to the respective needs of our individual works.
The bad side…is perhaps a longer and more tedious learning process.
STILL, we manage to churn out works of animation every semester together with work from our other specialisation stream.

Anyway, here’s an invite to all to attend our end-of-semester showcase, ‘DUST’ which is happening TOMORRW(today being Wednesday in Australia)
Details as follows :

Date : Thu, 14 Nov 2002
Time : 730pm - 10pm

#91

so I missed out the venue…

Once again, the details for ‘DUST’, ACAT’s showcase for semester 2, 2002 is…

Date : Thu, 14 Nov 2002
Time : 730pm - 10pm
Venue : Garden of Australian Dreams, National Museum of Australia

There will be works of Interactive Multimedia, Digital Video, Computer Animation and Computer Music.

Cheers

#92

It’s the only actual uni animation degree in Australia.

umm, not quite true. I do know that here in melbourne, both VCA and RMIT offer animation courses. Dont know much about the VCA course, except that they charge $50 to even apply. RMIT’s course is a 1 year graduate diploma. They now also offer a masters degree in animation, both by research and coursework (extra half year on top of the grad dip for the coursework one).

#93

The Australian Film Television and Radio School also do funky animation short courses occasionally.

http://www.aftrs.edu.au/

#94

Hey Erilaz,
I ended up asking alvin and francis (from swinburne, of course) who you were. They said you name was martin and even described how you looked to me. Your name is familiar, but do you think I can actually remember you?!?! Grrr. how frustrating.

#95

Curse your spy-network and it’s resourcefulness! :smiley:
I’m not really what you would call a memorable person. How are Alvin and Francis these days anyway?:smiley:

#96

hehe.:beer:
Yeh, they are going well. You probly wont believe that they both were helping out with the character animation part of the advanced multimedia subject. Oh, you might believe francis would. It had been ages since they had both done 3d though. They literally got thrown back into it:) Not that that subject is really indepth anyway.
I think they have a fair bit of business too these days, which is always nice to have.

#97

Hi lricho

Yeah while there are other short courses out there like the ones you mentioned, they aren’t actual university degrees.

So if ya wanna do like a full 3 year animation uni course, QCA is the only one. So you can’t get like a Bachelor of animation, honours, master etc, from anywhere else.

Not saying that is the only way to go, or that I think low of short courses out there. Just that if you want an extensive course that is recognized as a uni degree, QCA is the way to go.

#98

Wow I so missed this thread!!

Currently I’m working as a 3d artist at Auran, a Brisbane games company, mostly doing character work.

Before that I went to AIE (the microforte sponsored one) in Canberra, which was fairly useless but I got a few good contacts that eventually got me where I am now. It’s probably not so bad for newbies, but over the 40h week/6 month course I only learnt anything substantial on 4 days… yeah I was taking count.

Previous to that I had been using 3D Studio since the dos r3 at highschool (CTHS) in Sydney since late year 8 (1995 I think).

I’ve got some game industry friends that work with some qantm graduates, and the comments are always troubling… but no first hand knowledge so I can’t really comment.

Amckay>> What’s going on with bris DLF meetings, as there are no set dates for the next outing… and Dooley’s is currently closed and getting a face lift.

Wow, I had no idea cgtalk was aussie…:buttrock:

#99

hey sadist, are you serious!

I went there as well! :eek:

I just finished up there last year. you would have finished in 99? :slight_smile:

that’s where i started using 3ds max. started with version 2.5 and taught myself. the teachers knew nothing… :stuck_out_tongue:

#100

Haha, no way man! Actually kabab was in my grade aswell, and yes finished in '99.

What’s your name and whos your sister?! How’s maynard going, he was an awesome teacher, but yeah, you relied more on his artistic skills than 3D experience.