The 3D Computer Animation Labs have been designed for a good deal of flexibility in order to be adaptable to artists' needs when developing their work. The artists' 3D workstations are networked to a file server, where students store their projects, and to a video workstation, where analog output, DVD authoring, and web publishing may be accomplished.

The 3D workstations are loaded with Autodesk Maya 2009. The workstations are also loaded with Adobe's Design Premium CS4 suite which includes Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere Pro, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and Flash, among others. Toon Boom Storyboard Pro is also installed on the workstations thus allowing for the integration of the output of all the other software in the creation of story boards and reels. There are 30 workstations in the lab dedicated primarily to classes (A109) and 15 workstations in the lab dedicated primarily for production (F105). The Windows XP Pro workstations (supplied by Bell Computers) located in the teaching and production labs are respectively 2.13 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU with 4GB of RAM and Nvidia GeForce 7800 GTS graphics cards and 2.66MHz Intel Xeon Dual Core CPU with 4GB of RAM and Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS graphics cards. The workstations in both labs are equipped with 20" Dell LCD monitors.

Each artist has a password protected login account and project files are stored on a large Fibre Channel RAID file server via Gigabit Ethernet so that workstation assignment is not required --students may log-on to any available workstation. In addition to the file server, web and mail servers are also maintained, and students may have a personal site hosted at the lab.

A Bluefish444 uncompressed 10 bit video workstation allows for real time analog capture and output to and from the video rack, which contains BetaCam SP, S-VHS, and U-Matic decks. The video station may be used for DVD authoring with Canopus ProCoder and Sonic Reel DVD. ProCoder may also be used for the simultaneous encoding of video for web presentation. In addition, all of the 3D CG workstations in the two labs have Adobe Encore available for simple DVD authoring.

A typical 3D CG animation project may be initiated from a series of sketches generated (or scanned) within Adobe Photoshop. The images may then be loaded into Maya for use as 3D modeling references and/or to create a story reel. Once a 3D model is created and setup for animation it may be texture mapped with images created (or scanned) and edited in Photoshop and/or painted with a 3D paint program. After modeling, texturing, lighting, and animating is completed, the 3D project is rendered into a sequence of image files for output as NTSC video, film, digital movie file formats (such as Quicktime or AVI), or as resources for use in interactive media projects.

Rush (Computer Animation Lab alum Greg Ercolano's network render queue software) is used to distribute rendering processes. Each rendered image file is sent directly from the render farm to the artist's designated directory on the file server. The accumulated image file sequences can then be sent from the file server to the video station for direct study and/or output. Rendered image sequences may be post-processed in Photoshop or After Effects and isolated elements of image sequences may also be layered together through compositing in After Effects (compositing with live action or other animated sequences is also possible).

The lab's network may be used to exchange discrete image and sound files with other facilities at CalArts that support functions not available in the 3D Computer Animation Labs (such as sophisticated sound and image editing or shooting to film). The facility is continually evolving in order to serve the changing needs of 3D computer graphic animation artists and the latest updates may not be fully reflected in this document.