Faculty: TBD
Unique Number: 21655
Advanced topics in Arts and Entertainment Technologies.
Faculty: MJ Johns
Unique Number: 21740
This is a required course for AET Honors students in their junior year and is a prerequisite for the Honors Thesis. Students will learn approaches to research, organizing ideas, and writing for the field of Arts and Entertainment Technologies. We will also discuss options for graduate studies in this field. Prerequisite: permission of instructor.
Faculty: Kyle Evans
Unique Number: 21550
Learn the basic concepts behind digital audio and recording! This course will cover foundational material for dealing with audio recording, editing, sequencing, and mixing inside a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). The primary objective of this course is to provide a functional understanding of digital audio systems and recording techniques that can be utilized in various fields including, but not limited to: audio production, film scoring, game music, and sound design.
Faculty: Neal Daugherty
Unique Number: 21555
By utilizing contemporary computer graphic software, digital capture and imaging devices, and a digital vocabulary of the artistic use of technology within our culture, this course’s objective is to enable the student to make educated technological and conceptual decisions on how to explore and utilize the computer and digital technology within their own creative and technical career all focused by conceptual aesthetic development. This course will develop concepts and skills by addressing assigned conceptual problems. These problems or “project modules” will help the student creatively consider the interaction of media, imagery, composition, content, and digital manipulation methods.
Faculty: Tyler Coleman
Unique Number: 21560
Learn how to make beautiful art using only code and a sprinkle of imagination. Algorithmic art, screensavers, games, music visualizers, and more!
Faculty: Honoria Starbuck
Unique Number: 21565
An introduction to design process, user experience, and formal design principles. Students will learn about design thinking, including problem solving, working within constraints, User Centered Design, Usability Testing, and User Experience for apps and interactive systems. Additionally, the course will cover the formal aspects of design such as composition, spatial arrangement, ergonomics, affordance, and the relationship between form and function through hands-on projects.
Faculty: Matt Smith
Unique Number: 21570
Hybrid lecture/lab course designed to introduce students to the basic concepts, methods, and systems utilized in the field of Live Entertainment. Primary focus is to explore technologies and illuminate how each area of work within Projection, Lighting and Interactivity (PLAI) relates and is connected to others. Students will be introduced to projection, conventional and automated lighting, 3D previsualization and interactive and generative imagery. Topics include historical landmarks of interactive performance, projection system design, media servers, common signal and data formats, imagery creation for live performance, and current trends in live event technology.
Faculty: David (D.S.) Cohen
Unique Number: 21575
An introduction to the process of creating games from concept through publishing. Professional industry standard techniques will be used to design, develop, produce, and publish playable games. Topics covered include game design and development, prototyping, art direction, aesthetics, technology, production planning, development pipelines, project management, product publishing, community management, and documentation.
Faculty: David Tolin
Unique Number: 21594
This course enables the student to understand both the aesthetic and practical elements of arts and entertainment.
Faculty: Paula Rogers
Unique Number: 21590
This introductory-level class explores the basis of good storytelling across multiple mediums, including film, short stories, and games. Students will learn the fundamentals of story structure to gain an understanding of the craft and terminology to apply in future creative work. Focus will be on internalizing storytelling principles through study, essays, and analysis.
Faculty: Isaac Oster
Unique Number: 21585
Students will learn fundamental art principles including, scale, proportion, and composition, in order to develop an understanding of how to create visual media and narratives.
Faculty: James Gelb, Ph.D.
Unique Number: 21595
Explores the science of sound and how musical instruments work as well as principles of musical scales, hearing, architectural acoustics, and electronic music.
Faculty: Sam Lipman
Unique Number: 21600
Practical sound and music applications exploring techniques specific to developing game audio.
Faculty: Lucas Dimick
Unique Number: 21605
Animation can bring characters, objects, and graphics to life. It’s the backbone of the computer graphics industry and plays an important role in film, visual effects, games, and motion graphics. This course is an introduction to the principles of animation for 2D and 3D systems. Students will use various techniques to convey a sense of weight, emotion, and story for simple and complex objects in both 2D and 3D.
Faculty: Neal Daugherty
Unique Number: 21610
Intro to 2D animation is designed to provide basic animation foundations and targeted instruction for artists wanting to expand their research into advanced or specific types of 2D Digital Art techniques and process. This course is designed as an introduction to intermediate course offering. Utilizing the student’s existing digital and traditional skill sets, the course will examine the technical and conceptual aspects of 2D digital art, animation with 2D pen and pencil drawings, video/film documentation and presentation. Advanced topics include the use Photoshop, Painter, Audition, and After Effects for animation, sound editing, and scripting of storyboards.This course will expand the student’s existing digital skills and further develop them to produce a clear and well-conceived understanding of digital production processes and a learned vocabulary of animation and its respective nomenclature.
Faculty: Isaac Oster
Unique Number: 21615
An introduction to 3D modeling and texturing techniques used in game development and visualization.
Faculty: Kyle Chittenden
Unique Number: 21620
In this course, students will learn the process of creating gameplay animations, techniques to improve their animation workflow, and how to implement their animations into Unreal Engine. Animation is a very important step in the art pipeline, and the class will focus on creating a multitude of game ready animations, along with how to work with blendspaces, state machines, and other systems used by animators in the industry today.
Faculty: Jai Dandekar
Unique Number: 21625
Portfolio Development will focus on creating projects and case studies for your portfolio. Whether you want to redesign an existing project, refine and create a case study for a project nearing completion, or even create a project from scratch, this semester long course will help you accomplish that. Crosslisted with DES 330T and ITD 330T.
Faculty: MJ Johns
Unique Number: 21630
Video Game Prototyping is an exploration of rapid prototyping techniques for game development using ideation, storyboarding, pitching, prototyping, testing, and documentation. This course is repeatable and may be taken more than once for credit. Throughout this course, students will work on project teams to create quick game prototypes in 2-3 week cycles and will have a chance to practice the skills they have learned in previous courses while also exploring and developing new skills. Prerequisites: Foundations of Game Development (AET 318) and Foundations of Creative Coding (AET 310)
Faculty: MJ Johns
Unique Number: 21635
In this course, students create a functional and aesthetically pleasing level using an industry standard game engine (Unity or Unreal). Students create an individual level to practice all skills, and also a team level to practice working in a small group. Topics covered include sketching/planning, white boxing, integrating art and sound assets, scripting simple interactions, adding particles and animation for juice, and playtesting and recording feedback. Prerequisite: AET 310 Creative Coding (or equivalent) and AET 318 Foundations of Games
Faculty: Bill Byrne
Unique Number: 21640
An introduction to creating and working with game ready assets in 2D and 3D.
Faculty: Tyler Coleman
Unique Number: 21645
Discover how games do the things they do through this intro to game scripting. Learn how to program games using C# with Unity 3D, one of the game industry standards. Topics include character movement, environmental systems, AI, procedural generation, UI, and more.
Faculty: David (D.S.) Cohen
Unique Number: 21650
Video games have grown into a powerful force - from humble beginnings in computer labs, to defining influences in popular culture, conflicts that altered laws controversies in gender politics and minority representation, and establishing new forms of artistic expression. This course will have you evaluating significant historical and influential ways video games have shaped art, industry, culture, science, and society.
Faculty: Jose Kozan
Unique Number: 21710
Explore augmented reality and its role in providing interactive layers of content to support storytelling and branded marketing. The studio will focus on short individual and group projects, creating AR experiences for multiple platforms such as web pages, mobile apps, and social media. Students will review the terminology, limitations, current uses, potential markets, and anticipated game-changing breakthroughs in AR technologies.
Faculty: Jessie Contour
Unique Number: 21675
In this collaborative class with the Dell Experience Innovation Group, students will design and prototype ideas for the future of immersive gaming technology. Projects involve AI, emotive inputs, new I/O, and physical movement detection.
Faculty: Jessie Contour
Unique Number: 21700
Enhance your favorite cosplay with the addition of wearable accessories built with Arduino. Animated LED matrix masks, sound reactive glowing arm bands, and environment scanning Tricorders are all possible in this class.
Faculty: Paula Rogers
Unique Number: 21695
Students will create an original narrative interactive experience over the course of the semester, applying lessons in plot, character, pacing, and narrative design as they develop the project. Class structure will mimic a working creative studio, with a focus on iteration. As they create an original adventure story, students will learn common practices for pitching new ideas in a creative workplace, as well as how to give and receive creative feedback, and meet milestones towards completing a final iteration.
Faculty: Chris Ozley
Unique Number: 21685
Students will acquire audio skills using SuperCollider as a tool for real-time, generative audio production. Additionally, students will learn how to integrate such generative processes with other types of media such as video while exploring methods for soundscape design.
Faculty: Kyle Evans
Unique Number: 21680
This course is a deep-dive into audiovisual creation and boundary-pushing video aesthetics. Topics include creating music-reactive visuals in Touchdesigner, realtime video performance and projection mapping in Resolume Arena, programming audio analysis systems in Max/MSP, and designing generative video systems for installations and performance.
Faculty: Matt Smith & Paula Rogers
Unique Number: 21705
This course replicates the experience of a client/studio relationship by assigning a team-based, narrative-driven interactive project on a given theme, with professional expectations. All students will iterate on a single brief from an imagined client, i.e. a museum or intellectual property. Students will learn common practices for pitching new ideas in a creative workplace, as well as how to give and receive creative feedback, and meet milestones. Projects will allow students to collaborate with their peers and assign roles within a creative team as they develop new and exciting methods of interactive storytelling.
Faculty: TBD
Unique Number: 21715
Examine the best practices behind the design of themed entertainment experiences through a variety of lectures, group projects, and individual study.
Faculty: Karen Maness
Unique Number: 21670
Focuses on fabric rendering, materiality, and fabric representation for entertainment design. Practices painting and rendering fabrics to drape convincingly from the human body for the live performance or virtual character design. Develops an understanding of the form, structure, weight, and texture of fabrics, and how to render them for effective storytelling, through a variety of media.
Faculty: Yuliya Lanina
Unique Number: 21690
Create real content for a real client! This experience is meant to build on your acquired knowledge and skills to facilitate the creation of a collaborative visual project for the large-scale LED Media Wall within the Gensler Austin lobby. The content must connect to Gensler’s brand and culture and be suitable for their office environment. Students will work in small teams on a project that uses the skills they have acquired in previous years, working closely with Gensler’s Digital Experience Design (DXD) studio, to create compelling visual content suitable for their lobby.
Faculty: Jessie Contour
Unique Number: 21714
An applied course focused on the technical aspects of game content creation.
Faculty: Sam Lipman
Unique Number: 21725
An exploration of the concepts and current trends of virtual instruments as used in today's studio workplace.
Faculty: Matt Smith
Unique Number: 21730
Instructs students on how to bring an idea from concept to fully rendered pitch-ready environment by utilizing 2D and 3D technical drafting tools in Vectorworks and a lighting visualizer.
Faculty: Neal Daugherty
Unique Number: 21665
Design Studio: "Gravitivity" blends creative conceptual development with a collaborative studio environment. Students will work in various digital mediums and innovative, imaginative processes to address the thematic topic of the laws and physics of Gravity. All elements and areas of AET are encouraged to enroll. Creative explorations include Game Development, PLAI, Narrative and Visual Storytelling, Creative Coding, Technical Art, Music and Sound, Visualization, and other study areas.
This course cumulates with a large virtual final presentation and gallery with a virtual opening.
Faculty: J.E. Johnson & Honoria Starbuck
Unique Number: 21720
Students apply skills in drawing, digital prototyping, and model making to create original toys to engage children in imaginative play and shape developmental skills, decision-making, socialization, and creativity. Students learn to conduct research and analysis to insure toy designs are appropriate for the children for whom they are designing. Using various hands-on and digital fabrication techniques, students translate their ideas into 3D models, and present the final products to faculty, and toy industry or museum professionals. Materials and 3D prints will be made available to support student projects. This course has no prerequisites and would benefit students seeking careers in product design, teaching, museum education, immersive entertainment, and related fields.
Faculty: Deepak Chetty
Unique Number: 21660
This course will prepare students for real-time workflows and creative best practices for still image and moving picture creation and renders using Unreal Engine.
Faculty: Jason Buchanan
Unique Number: 21669
An introduction to the drawing techniques used for creating storyboards.
Faculty: Jason Buchanan
Unique Number: 21668
An introduction to the drawing techniques and methods used in the field of design.
Faculty: Sven Ortel
Unique Number: 21735
Investigate design challenges in-depth in the field of Media and Projection Design.
Faculty: Yuliya Lanina & Chris Ozley
Unique Number: 21745
Continuation of a project within a team with the guidance and advice of faculty members. Industry and faculty members can sponsor these projects.
Faculty: Paul Toprac
Unique Number: 21755
Participation in interdisciplinary teams to gain a thorough understanding of the three-dimensional game development process through modeling of the environment and practices that are used in game studios.