Week 6 — Tuesday, September 29

Project 1 Review · Project 2 kickoff

Focus

Present the finished recreation. Then pick the technique you are going to teach.

Due today — before 9:00 AM

Project 1 — Final Render (10 points)

1. The finished recreation, exported to submission standards
2. Side-by-side comparison with the source
3. Process documentation — 6–10 images or clips
4. Written postmortem, 500–750 words, including which technique you are taking into Project 2

Bring to class

• Everything loaded and ready to present before 9:00. Do not spend your review fumbling with file management.
• Your two candidate techniques for Project 2, with a preference

In class

Formal Project 1 reviews. Both students present, both students attend both reviews.

Present it the way you would to a studio: introduce it in thirty seconds, play it uninterrupted, then discuss. Expect questions about your process and your decisions — that is deliberate practice for the same conversation in an interview.

You receive a written instructor critique in addition to verbal notes.

Project 2 kickoff. The assignment: take one technique from Project 1 and build a tutorial around it, plus a clean demonstration piece.

Technique selection consultation. We settle which technique, based on:

• Was it genuinely new to you in Week 2?
• Do you understand it well enough now to explain why, not just what?
• Does it have enough substance for a real tutorial?
• Does it produce something visible for the demo piece?

Format discussion. Written, video, or AI-assisted. All three are equally valid and graded on the same standard: can a competent stranger reproduce your result? If you are using AI, we discuss what it can and cannot do here, and what disclosure looks like.

Supervised production.

Before next week

1. Plan the demo piece. 10–15 quick explorations of what you will build to demonstrate the technique.
2. Outline the tutorial. Every section, in order, with the key point of each.
3. Identify the hard part — in writing. The step you expect to be most confusing to a reader. This is where the tutorial earns its existence.
4. Reread your Project 1 process log. The confusions you recorded four weeks ago are the raw material for the most valuable section of your tutorial, and you have already half-forgotten them.
5. Thumbnails due next Tuesday.

Note — the demo piece is not the project

A common misread: students build an elaborate demo piece and treat the tutorial as documentation attached to it.

It is the other way around. The tutorial is the deliverable; the demo piece exists to make the technique visible. It should be as simple as it can be while still showing the technique clearly. A clean sphere demonstrating a shader teaches better than a full environment where the shader is one element among forty.

Simple demo, thorough explanation. Not the reverse.