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guidance regarding Colleges for my Majors


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hi..i guess this is a bit off beat topic :)

I have finished my Bachelors and I specialised in Advertising. At the same time I started learning VFX on my own while finishing my college. Now having graduated I would like to do my Majors in VFX....Its a huge investment for me so I would want to be prepared.

I would like to specialize as a TD so yes I wanted to check universities with Houdini (along with others too..but Houdini is just my prefernce)as an important part of their curriculum.

I have selected few universities and I would like to know a general consensus about my selection.

These are the one's I have shortlisted for now (on the basis of Quality of Education + The facilities provided in terms of Softwares etc in labs)..but its really difficult to judge these factors..I'm open to any suggestions regarding other Universities I may not have considered.

1) NCCA, Bournemouth University, UK

2) Academy of Arts University

3) SCAD

4) Drexel University

5) Ringling University

These are in order of my preference.

I request you guys to please guide me with this :)

(I do also understand that at the end its very much up to the student to succeed but a good university is always a huge boost)

Thanks.

Edited by bhaveshpandey
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I have selected few universities and I would like to know a general consensus about my selection.

4) Drexel University

I went here.

They have second-to-none resources (Boxx workstations and farm, Houdini, Maya, Massive, Nuke, Prman, Realflow, 24 hour labs, etc) but the program is still fairly fledgling and not visual effects oriented. Its a great choice if you're highly motivated prepared for lots of self study.

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1) NCCA, Bournemouth University, UK

I am here at the moment, doing the MSc course (almost finished my master on fluids in houdini - I'll post some results really soon - might make some tutorials about it too). It's a great place to be. If you give it your all and open your mind to more than just houdini you can really harvest huge amounts of power and knowledge.

The Ma Digital Effects course is a good course if you have never done any compositing/tracking/filming before. But since I did my Ba at Bournemouth Uni as well I sort of covered that area. So I chose to go down the more technical MSc route learning more on renderman (PRman), Maya, C++, python, shell scripting, houdini, Nuke, massive, and mathematics for computer graphics. Some of that stuff is in my showreel: http://www.peterclaes.be/

Check out Jon Macey's website for the MSc in Computer Animation and Visual Effects:

http://nccastaff.bournemouth.ac.uk/jmacey/

and some of the previous master projects:

http://nccastaff.bournemouth.ac.uk/jmacey/MastersProjects/index.html

Check out this page to see some of the Ma Digital Effects projects:

http://www.youtube.com/user/NCCADigitalFX

The teachers are knowledgeable and the resources are good - if you know how to use them. Some of the labs are on 8-core machines with quadro 4800 cards in them - however some machines are a lot slower dual core machines. I wrote some shell and python scripts to do distributed simming and rendering through several labs. Knowing a bit of pipeline can make you much more productive. 80% of the labs is on linux, only the MA Animation is on windows using Softimage. Which means you can ssh into a lot of machines and kick of whatever you need to do remotely - houdini is really suitable for doing stuff through hbatch.

The price is around £5500 a year, I believe. It's 12 months and you have 24/7 lab access.

Bournemouth is a good place to live and you are really surrounded by people with the same interest. In the Master level people tend to be quite motivated and you get a friendly drive and cross pollination between different courses (MSc's helping out MA digital effects or Ma Animation, etc..). The NCCA has got good ties with industry in London and speakers from industry come down to give talks and often tend to hire Bournemouth graduates as TD's. This year was the NCCA's 20th anniversary and they know what industry needs - this tends to be reflected in the curriculum.

I personally came from Belgium to study in Bournemouth as it was either studying in the Uk, or starting to work in 3d in commercials in Belgium. I have not regretted it one minute. Your mind really opens up, not just in terms of cg knowledge, but also in terms of ambitions and possibilities to work all over the world (as previous Bournemouth graduates have spread out far and wide). There are many houdini users who studied at Bournemouth, some are on odforce as well.

It is intense and not for everybody, some of the other master courses here will seem very laid back in comparison to the animation courses. I find balancing intense focused developing and studying during the week combined with some time off during the weekends works well for me - that way you can actually socialize and network a bit/go to London & meet people.

About the other Universities:

I have heard and seen good things about SCAD.

My personal other choices that I considered as alternatives to Bournemouth were the Filmakademie in Germany - they have a Vfx course and use houdini. Or the Vancouver Film School. VFS is a bit pricy though. Being Belgian, and therefore part of the EU, part of the course in Bournemouth is subsidized by the government. I think for non-Eu it's about £8500 or so.. (- which is still waaaay cheaper than the Gnomon Maya training course -> which also does not give you a degree, but a certificate instead - which is not the same when you come to visa application for different countries later on in your career).

I believe I wrote some more stuff on 3dbuzz.com about Bournemouth as well, you might want to do a search. (Steve Twist who created the rigging dvd's on houdini has just finished his Ba at Bournemouth and will be doing the MSc here next year, so you might want to chat to him too.)

Good luck with your decision!

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I am here at the moment, doing the MSc course (almost finished my master on fluids in houdini - I'll post some results really soon - might make some tutorials about it too). It's a great place to be. If you give it your all and open your mind to more than just houdini you can really harvest huge amounts of power and knowledge.

The Ma Digital Effects course is a good course if you have never done any compositing/tracking/filming before. But since I did my Ba at Bournemouth Uni as well I sort of covered that area. So I chose to go down the more technical MSc route learning more on renderman (PRman), Maya, C++, python, shell scripting, houdini, Nuke, massive, and mathematics for computer graphics. Some of that stuff is in my showreel: http://www.peterclaes.be/

Check out Jon Macey's website for the MSc in Computer Animation and Visual Effects:

http://nccastaff.bournemouth.ac.uk/jmacey/

and some of the previous master projects:

http://nccastaff.bournemouth.ac.uk/jmacey/MastersProjects/index.html

Check out this page to see some of the Ma Digital Effects projects:

http://www.youtube.com/user/NCCADigitalFX

The teachers are knowledgeable and the resources are good - if you know how to use them. Some of the labs are on 8-core machines with quadro 4800 cards in them - however some machines are a lot slower dual core machines. I wrote some shell and python scripts to do distributed simming and rendering through several labs. Knowing a bit of pipeline can make you much more productive. 80% of the labs is on linux, only the MA Animation is on windows using Softimage. Which means you can ssh into a lot of machines and kick of whatever you need to do remotely - houdini is really suitable for doing stuff through hbatch.

The price is around £5500 a year, I believe. It's 12 months and you have 24/7 lab access.

Bournemouth is a good place to live and you are really surrounded by people with the same interest. In the Master level people tend to be quite motivated and you get a friendly drive and cross pollination between different courses (MSc's helping out MA digital effects or Ma Animation, etc..). The NCCA has got good ties with industry in London and speakers from industry come down to give talks and often tend to hire Bournemouth graduates as TD's. This year was the NCCA's 20th anniversary and they know what industry needs - this tends to be reflected in the curriculum.

I personally came from Belgium to study in Bournemouth as it was either studying in the Uk, or starting to work in 3d in commercials in Belgium. I have not regretted it one minute. Your mind really opens up, not just in terms of cg knowledge, but also in terms of ambitions and possibilities to work all over the world (as previous Bournemouth graduates have spread out far and wide). There are many houdini users who studied at Bournemouth, some are on odforce as well.

It is intense and not for everybody, some of the other master courses here will seem very laid back in comparison to the animation courses. I find balancing intense focused developing and studying during the week combined with some time off during the weekends works well for me - that way you can actually socialize and network a bit/go to London & meet people.

About the other Universities:

I have heard and seen good things about SCAD.

My personal other choices that I considered as alternatives to Bournemouth were the Filmakademie in Germany - they have a Vfx course and use houdini. Or the Vancouver Film School. VFS is a bit pricy though. Being Belgian, and therefore part of the EU, part of the course in Bournemouth is subsidized by the government. I think for non-Eu it's about £8500 or so.. (- which is still waaaay cheaper than the Gnomon Maya training course -> which also does not give you a degree, but a certificate instead - which is not the same when you come to visa application for different countries later on in your career).

I believe I wrote some more stuff on 3dbuzz.com about Bournemouth as well, you might want to do a search. (Steve Twist who created the rigging dvd's on houdini has just finished his Ba at Bournemouth and will be doing the MSc here next year, so you might want to chat to him too.)

Good luck with your decision!

I totaly agree to what Peter mention above, but just for further info about price £5500 a year is for EU students and about £8500 for non EU. But I heard that University is planing to increase there course fees to about somewhere near to £11000 for non EU.

Being from asian countries another thing you need to keep in mind, where ever you choose to study is about the *Visa*, to take some professional experince in the following country. The advantage of studying in U.K is that you will get 2yrs work permit after your master graduation, whereas in U.S its only limited to a year on top of that there masters are mostly for two years.

even after they increased there fees, I would strongly suggest you Bournemouth University, for quality of education and safe option for work permits.

Cheers,

Junaid

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hey thanks a ton guys..

so it looks like I did choose good ones..

@peter Yes my first preference is BU. I'm looking for MA DE 2010 (actually I was trying for this year but got late for my applications and now am on a waiting list which is not looking very promising for me right mow)..Could you give me some feedback regarding the same? I have pretty good knowledge of compositing now..but my focus is VFX (3D)..I read about the curriculum and it looks that they have good focus on Houdini and compositing..How would you rate it from VFX point of view(ie. while focussing on CG VFX more)....but BU has only one intake which means i'll have to wait for quite a long time..so I'm also looking at other universities..

@brian yes Drexel is definitely in my list but I just want to be sure about things..(lotta money involved for me)

Also SCAD looks like a good place..Earlier I was more inclined towards Academy Of Arts University (in respect to other American uni) but somehow I am not that inclined now..

I would like some more feedbacks.

Thanks a lot :)

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@peter Yes my first preference is BU. I'm looking for MA DE 2010 (actually I was trying for this year but got late for my applications and now am on a waiting list which is not looking very promising for me right mow)..Could you give me some feedback regarding the same? I have pretty good knowledge of compositing now..but my focus is VFX (3D)..I read about the curriculum and it looks that they have good focus on Houdini and compositing..How would you rate it from VFX point of view(ie. while focussing on CG VFX more)....but BU has only one intake which means i'll have to wait for quite a long time..so I'm also looking at other universities..

The MA DE tends to create two types of artists. 1) compositors and 2) vfx artists (generally oriented towards Houdini, sometimes a bit of massive or realflow as well)- some of those vfx artists will also go into Td positions. The course is great and very much biased towards a "if it looks good it is good" philosophy, which means creative solutions (ie. hacks to get around a problem) are encouraged. Less attention is given to scripting or more in depth technical aspects than in the MSc, but more attention is given to integration with live action footage, color matching and color theory to establish a certain mood, setting up renderpasses, etc. The main lecturers on the MA DE course will teach you houdini and shake (maybe nuke next year) in a thorough manner. The way Phil Spicer teaches houdini is especially open, encouraging students to explore the various nodes as long as they try to stay consistent with the flow of the network.

There have been some very technical students as well in the past in the MADE that have turned more towards tool development within houdini, but those kind of people are more the exception than the rule and overall you are more likely to find that type of student in the MSc course.

If you have missed the application phase for this year you will probably have to wait till next if you really wanted to come to Bournemouh as the application rates are high and the number of seats limited - chances are you are not the first on the waiting list.

I missed my own application phase for the undergraduate course and went to a local university to study part-time programming and mathematics for a year. The rest of the time I spent at a reseller of 3d software creating cool stuff and exploring various software. Initially I thought it would be a bit of a wasted year, but it prepared me a lot more and increased my chance of getting into Bournemouth a lot. A year is not such a long time if you are an independent learner and have self-discipline - and there is a lot to learn! At the end of that year I was either going to Bournemouth or start working in commercials in Belgium, I wanted a degree and wanted to travel so went to Bournemouth.

There are several ways into the industry, but most of it will still depend on your own motivation and focus. Bournemouth University (or any of the colleges above) will offer you the tools and give you some of the knowledge, but good 3d takes time and hard work. If you were to study something else in the meantime and learn houdini in your spare time, you would have a head start on the other students. The knock-on effect this has is that they will often come to you with their problems for advice. If you are a sharing helping person you will help them out and you will learn from their problems. Your own learning speed will increase a lot because you are required to solve many problems. In a similar fashion you can decide to help out people on this forum and make suggestions for their problems. Some will initially be way over your head in terms of complexity, but as you go you help other new houdini artists so the new batch of students gets help too.

Bournemouth's main competitor in the Uk is Teeside University, you might want to check out their curriculum too. Although they tend to be quite technical as well. Whatever you decide, I would steer away from "certificate" programs unless you have time limit - but really one year in your life is not that long, and you can fill it up with interesting projects really quickly.

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hey thanks a lot Peter..its really great to know how you moved about for your admission process.

I do have planned to take up some computer scripting classes etc..but unfortunately there are very few Python classes out here (none that I know of...I'll have to dig further)..though I have a basic foundation in C, I would like to polish up my scripting :D

I am as of now trying to put some stuff together so that I can atleast apply somewhere as an Intern for this year. But its taking longer than I expected..so yes its pretty frustrating for me..

Yes I do agree with you on the "certificate" courses..and fortunately I have been well aware to keep distance from them..

As of now I can just keep working and hope for the best :)

(all fingers crossed)

Thanks a lot for your guidance.

cheers.

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hey,

here's an other school you might have a look at.

Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg, with the Institute of Animation, Visual Effects & Digital Post Production

the TD Course is a post-graduate so you'll need a bachelor, its project based with a couple of workshops with industry professionals.

They have about 10 Houdini Licenses and arround 3-5 TD students each year and a lot of nice projects!

http://animationsinstitut.de/

cheers Seb

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  • 4 weeks later...

hey Seb..sorry for a late reply..did not come to know about your post....As a matter of fact I did consider Filmakademie but I am not European and cant speak German....Even if the classes were in English, living in Germany without any verbal sense of German would be pretty difficult..

I have set my eyes on BU and SCAD for now..

If I get any communication regarding BU 2010 batch I would happily wait..else I would head to SCAD..

What I was told by BU personnel was that since they are still handling applications and admissions for 2009 batches (which still have vacancies), they could give me any substantial offers only after this October.

I'm yet to apply to SCAD..I'm just waiting for a Transcript from my college..

Thanks a lot :)

cheers

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Hey Bhavesh, just thought I'd jump in here. I'm a SCAD graduate and I think it's the best school for VFX in the North America. Considering the Houdini work coming out of Bournemouth, I would say they're tops worldwide. SCAD is very expensive but it offers amazing and plentiful resources, great foundations courses and excellent instructors and good industry connections. Plus Savannah is a great little town, I had a blast there and really miss the community (and coffee shops). That said, Bournemouth appears to have the upper hand when it comes to Houdini education. Good luck to you!

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