ESMA | France

ESMA's Cinéma d'Animaton 3D consists of five years of training in artistic and technical topics, to prepare the students to work in the VFX and animation industry.

The program includes courses in Art History, drawing (academic and illustration), storytelling, grading (Photoshop and Nuke), modeling, animation and rigging (Maya), surfacing(Substance), lighting, render set-up and rendering (Renderman) and  CFX/VFX (Houdini), with an emphasis on pipeline and collaborative work.

During the last year of training, under the supervision of the instructors and external professionnals, the students work in teams to produce short movies based on their own scenarios, and go through all the preproduction and production steps : writing and boarding the story, design the characters, environments and props, produce the assets, rig the characters and props, layout, animate, light, render and comp every shot, do the editing and encode the resulting movies for projection in a theater during the Graduation Show.

Houdini is used for the VFX in almost every projects, and has become central to many projects pipeline through the early adoption of Solaris and USD.