Visiting professor at Metropolia University Helsinki

Last week I went to Helsinki’s Metropolia University as Visiting professor. I kept a course of 30 hours about realtime and pre rendered images.

I started my lessons with an introduction about the project management, then the course changed direction , towards a practical and technical one. I talked about Autodesk 3ds Max in productions, pipeline and workflow problems, assets management and social troubles during a production period.

My lesson was deeply focalized on UV, texture and shader importance, in both cases, realtime and offline renderings.

We used Photoshop, UDK and Maxwell Render.

We also did a practical project but the time we had was not so much. I would have needed another week to complete all my argumentations and practical process.

By the way, it was a really great experience, I'm already teaching at Naba Milano, and I’ll start soon with SFEI, but this was my first teaching experience abroad.

I also had the time to visit the city during the evenings and in the weekend. Helsinki is a really great and well organized city. The school is a proof: they said “we’ll do this course”, and we did it! Generally in other situation I experienced in the past (in Italy), every project had “strange” problems and delays some days before the beginning.

What people say here about Finland and scandinavians is right: precision, efficience and respect of human knowledge. I am really satisfied about this adventure.

There was a lucky cohincidence while I was in Finland: I was there during the AnimaTricks, the animation happening, in wich I saw some interesting animations, I heard about the tricks behind the French Gobelins school and I listened to the necessity of Finnish animation companies, like Anima Vitae Ltd.

At the end I have to say thanks to Mona that hosted me some days in her home after the course end, I hope there will be a new possibility to go back there soon.