Educational impact of digital visualization and auditing tools on a digital character production course

Many Universities and Colleges are building interdisciplinary programs that overlap engineering and fine art departments allowing a focus on games, special effects, animation and other forms of invention that require interdisciplinary efforts. With increasing demands for education linking the Engineering Sciences and Fine Arts, fueled by the competitive nature of the industries that recruit graduates, educators need to become more efficient and effective in their jobs of educating engineering and fine art majors in cross-disciplinary courses. Many of the courses that draw from the disciplines of the engineering sciences and fine arts are neglected in the research of educational best practices and tools for enhancing the learning experiences of the students. The courses are also becoming larger and more unmanageable as presently taught. Digital character production courses can range from predominantly engineering content to one with mostly art content, or a combination in the middle of the two departments depending on curriculum design. Our course at the University of Utah is directly in the center, drawing equally from both disciplines. It gives students an applied experience in 3D graphics and the computer science that helps to produce 3D graphics. It is a prerequisite for our Machinima Class, which extends the blend of art and technology as it immerses students into 3D game engines for creating cinematic short animations. Our particular digital character production curriculum has been taught at many universities and has been refined over the last twelve years. Presented in this paper are two experimental comparisons between traditional visualization tools and digital visualization tools, which are less expensive, easier to distribute, easier to arrange/procure and easier to transport than the traditional tools. Traditional visualization tools include lifelike skeleton reproductions, wooden body mass structures, actual human models and anatomy drawing books. They are used in conjunction with lectures, demonstrations and one-on-one lab instruction. The digital visualization tools that are contrasted in this paper are: a layered anatomically correct, digital human model (skin, muscles, masses and some bones adapted from several sources) and a VisTrails MAYA version of a properly produced human figure (interactive animation). The digital tools are used to replace the traditional visualization tools used in the same educational curriculum, which teaches students to design, model and produce digital characters for games, machinima, and animation. The first experiment assesses if the digital visualization tools are comparable to traditional tools in three areas; for improving a student's understanding of the complex software packages used to produce characters, for improving specific techniques used to model 3D characters, and for improving understanding of 3D form/visual relationships. The second experimental comparison extends the analysis of the third area garnered from the other experiment to determine if the improved understanding of form/visual relationships extends into non-digital medium. Both experiments were designed to measure learning experiences and the ability to adapt modeling processes to a variety of different characters and not to just duplicate the process on similar characters.