Bring your lunch and feed your brain at an Art at Lunch lecture with Chair of Animation & Game Arts, Fine Arts and Photography Stephen Wood. Join us on Tuesday, October 26 from 11:30 - 12:30 pm in Fox Commons.
Wood will discuss work created during a recent sabbatical, in which he set out to explore the use of the Unreal 4 game engine as a tool to create 3D animated short films. Wood utilized Physical Based Rendering systems—allowing for high quality rendering in real time and increased high resolution rendering speeds—as well as Maya LT, Photoshop, Zbrush, Quixel Mixer and Corel Painter to create a teaser that expands the world of his tabletop role-playing game, Wild Lands. The short tells the history of the moles of Dew Drop Mountains and gives the viewer a glimpse into the Mole Kingdom of Stone Burrow—one of many locations in the Underways, a new setting for players and readers to explore in the Wild Lands universe.
When Stephen Wood is not drawing little fantasy critters and dragons, or making 3D models, he is an assistant professor of Animation & Game Arts at Moore College of Art & Design. He has lived all over the United States, from the wintery Midwest to the balmy South, but he has found a home in Philadelphia. Outside of academia, he runs an indie tabletop roleplaying game studio, Stephen Wood Games, with a mission to create games that he wishes he'd had when he was a kid. His first release was the Wild Lands Fantasy Critter RPG. He has found roleplaying games to be a rich media in which he can use all of his skills—including 3D animation, game design, graphic design, illustration, motion graphics and more—to provide a world for others to tell their own stories.
Image: Stephen Wood, The Underways, 2021, animated short film. Courtesy of the artist.
