All art colleges have their strong points. Some are good at traditinal arts while others at computer arts while others at publishing arts. I personall got my degree from Acadamy of Art College in San Francisco. I can tell you about the college based on my experience and nothing more. AA has a very strong computer arts following in both 2D publishing and 3D modelling as well as Electronic Editing and Digidal Compositing like blue/green screening. Their traditional arts are not that great but still good. When it comes to 3D, AA uses 3 different softwares, Maya, SoftImage and Lightwave. They are more biased towards Maya and Lightwave and so have more classes concerning those two softwares and since visual effects houses tend to use those 2 softwares for organic modelling, I gues you can say AA is also a bit biased towards that as well. All 3D stuff are done on PC's and 2D like Photoshop and Illustrator (publishing softwares) are done on Macs. Webdesigns are mostly done on Macs. Digital editing and Compositing are mostly done on PC's.
It really helps if you know exactly what you want to do. Just saying you want to study 3D is very vague. Everyone specializes on something and it would be almost impossible to study all aspects. Different aspects of any 3D software are:
-Organic Modelling
-Object/Structural modelling sometimes called Props Modelling (Sci-fi spaceships, bases buildings are in this area)
-Lighting
-Texture
-Special Effects (partical fields, explosions, water etc..)
-Animation
I personally took up Object Modelling cause that's what interests me. The lecturers at AA are not really what you call teachers but workers in the field who come in to teach part time. They have a very good Pixar class where the lecturers are from that studio and you have to take time out to be an intern at Pixar (mostly organic modelling/animation).
Overall you will end up taking classes in topics you did not or do not want to in order to get a more rounded knowledge about graphics. I had to take traditional arts like Figure drawing, color painting, sculpture, story boarding and industrial design. I also had to take some classes like Photoshop, Compositing, blue screening and digital editing. All colleges are like this if you plan to take a degree in Computer arts. For example, if you want to specialize in lighting you have to take classes in both digital lighting as well as real lighting and photography so you learn how light behaves in real life etc...
All in all it's hard work. A lot of work. More work then you ever imagines while in high school. It's not a walk in the park. But's it's also fun! ... and expensive!
You do learn a lot!
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