Summer 1999
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During the 22 years between the first and latest Star Wars films, digital technology has shifted into hyperdrive. Consider the spectacularly rapid evolution of the personal computer, the Internet, and the computer-generated special effects with which George Lucas and company will wow audiences this summer.
Twenty-two years is also the age of some students in Associate Professor Ying Tan’s 3-D animation class at the University of Oregon.
"These students have grown up along with computer-generated 3-D graphics in video games, movies, and television. They are very interested in learning how to use these remarkably powerful new tools," says Tan, who teaches in the UO Department of Fine and Applied Arts.
Tan spent much of 1996, her first year at the UO, responding to this growing student interest by developing a new and expanded 3-D design curriculum for the department’s visual design major. The next fall she began teaching a year-long course sequence in which her students learned to master a powerful software program called "3-D Studio Max." The program is sophisticated enough to make highly complex and realistic 3-D computer models, environments, and lifelike character animations. It helped create special effects for the motion picture Lost in Space, and the television series Ally McBeal, as well as a number of popular video games.
"The Studio Max program is quite challenging. It takes one term to learn some of the basics and a year to become fairly skilled with its more advanced animation features," she explains.
But powerful software such as 3-D Studio Max requires brawny hardware–more brawny than the machines Tan had at her disposal.
"My students had to use an all-purpose university computer lab, which offered very limited access time," she says.
So Tan, along with several other faculty members and university administrators, sought out and secured a gift from Intel Corporation of approximately $300,000 worth of computer equipment. The 24 Pentium II computers that made up the first installment of the gift established the new Architecture and Allied Arts Multimedia Lab, where Tan’s students now have 24-hour access to the graphics systems they need. A second gift installment of still more advanced Pentium III computers will arrive from Intel later this year.
"This gift from Intel is of great use to UO students as they work to acquire advanced technical skills and use this technology in the creative arts," says Robert Melnick, dean of the School of Architecture and Allied Arts.
"The applications of 3-D technology are growing very rapidly in many fields. In education virtual-reality environments are making the learning experience more immediate, more direct and more like real life," Tan says.
One of Tan’s own projects points up the usefulness of 3-D graphic work. She contributed to the award-winning series of medical videos titled A Time of Diagnosis that explain to patients the nature of their illnesses and the treatments used in response.
Tan notes that 3-D graphic technology is being applied in a number of other areas as well: film production, fine arts, previsualization of product or architectural design, scientific visualization, video games, even medical applications such as the training of surgeons.
"As each of these areas of application develop, there will be an increasing need for artists with the skills to create 3-D graphics," she says.
Many of Tan’s students have landed jobs–some while still students–at Dynamix Inc., a video game maker located in the Riverfront Research Park adjacent to the UO campus. In another partnership between the university and industry, Dynamix has agreed to keep Tan’s 3-D animation courses supplied with the latest software for two years.
"This technology is an extremely productive area of human endeavor and one in which we are working very hard to stay in the vanguard," she says. "My students are benefiting from and participating in this exciting period. My hope is that with the tools they gain here at the UO they will be more empowered to contribute their creativity to society."