Education Feature: 'Student Day in the Life: Robert Smith'

Author: by Beth A.

Today's Gamasutra educational feature, part of the expanded Gamasutra Education section of the site, plots out the daily routine as a game design student at the Art Institute of California for Robert Smith. In his junior year at the Art Institute of California in San Francisco, Robert Smith continues to learn mainly from class projects and assignments. With a school of industry professionals and labs at his reach, Smith is gaining a solid background for game industry work, as described in the following excerpt: "I get to school knowing I still have to apply my textures to the homework from the previous week before class starts. That kind of stuff happens when you don’t have the programs at home. Luckily, the school has all of the programs more or less readily accessible to its students at all times. All of the classes us students take at AiCA are designed to tie directly into the industry of our choice. Storyboarding, which is best described as similar to making comics from scripts, is all about prepping what will be on screen and making it visual for the team before modeling, animation, and other steps take place. That way we can figure out all of the problems, camera-wise, before weeks have been spent on a scene or level. Meanwhile my Lighting and Texturing class is designed to teach us how to make the levels and characters light up and become hued. Since normal models are simply a dull grey, texturing is the process through which all your favorite characters really get life. The cool mix of blue, purple, and black on Cloud's pants? That's texturing. Lighting the scenes is, as can be guessed, making elements of a scene visible. We learn about the theatrical aspects of lights and the gameplay aspects, like which things should be lighted in certain ways to keep the player on the right track." You can now read the full Gamasutra feature on the subject to get filled in on Robert Smith's full day (no registration required, please feel free to link to this educational feature from external websites).