My experience in this class has been a mixed bag. There were ups and downs, but it taught me one very important thing that can carry over to any subject, and that is workflow. This class teaches you to manage your time effectively with the many assignments that get thrown at you. From the material, I think that Unit 2 and Unit 6 taught me the most and represent what this class is about. The main takeaway from this class is just learning as much as you can. While it seems like you may never get to game creation and you're just modeling, these tools will be helpful once you start the process of creating a game. The most rewarding experiences for me were the late nights I spent crunching to finish a major project. Each time this happened it was a reminder to me that I did not manage my time well throughout the unit. Time management is the one skill that I will always remember from this class. This is the one class at school where time management is the most important. Personally, my favorite units were Unit 2 and Unit 3. The simulation effects from Unit 2 were cool and were a good stepping stone into Unit 5 and 6 where we actually created these animations with camera shots and angles. Unit 3 was a fun unit because it taught me how to texture anything. Understanding the material editor gives me access to so many options when it comes to modeling and makes your product look more finished. My favorite assignments though were the Simulations Project, the 15-second animation, and the UVW Textured Robot. These were probably the three biggest projects of the year. For these, I had to crunch to finish them, but they were still very fun to work on. Otherwise, getting to learn all of these cool techniques for modeling was amazing and I will definitely do experimenting with them outside of school, even though I'm not taking this class next year.
-John Hempstead
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I've been in this class for over two years and I have covered many subjects from Pen Tool to Rigging, and many different applications from Photoshop to 3ds Max. I can say that my proficiency in these tools has increased a lot since I started the class. Personally, I just think that this class isn't for me. While I do enjoy this class, the workload just became too much for me and I would like to pursue my passion in music even further. Some of my favorite topics throughput the year were video editing in Premiere Pro (yes I know I hated this unit before), sub-object modeling in 3ds Max, and everything that Illustrator had to offer. This class was not what I was expecting to come into at the beginning of the year and that was both a good thing and a bad thing. The workload forced me to manage my time better for working on projects and taught me valuable lessons about planning, multi-tasking, and productivity.
-John Hempstead I don't even know where to begin. The concept of rigging makes sense and makes it seems easy once you've got it down. The purpose of rigging is to get a system set up inside a character's body to make it easier to animate. The problem is that even after the character is rigged, the steps you have to take after that to make sure it works properly. It just doesn't feel worth it to take all the time rigging and testing the structure just because some animations are too simple to take all the time to rig. The main purpose for rigging in my opinion is for setting up a character for animation that you will use in several scenes. Rigging it beforehand makes it easily transferable.
-John Hempstead Overall, this unit was actually pretty easy, but that's only because I haven't gotten to the hard parts yet. The camera movements and the light placement part is actually really simple and you get to express your creative side and experiment with different lighting effects and camera movements to see which expresses the mood better. I have dabbled in animation a little bit in small periods of time over the past 2 years but most of it was autokey movements and it was quite simple. I expect rigging to be quite difficult. I still have to complete my bouncy ball and that also seems pretty complex for an animation so I'm starting to get into the more complex side of it. Lighting in this unit is cool but the 1 thing that I don't like about it is that lights do some stupid things sometimes and I can't fix it. The way light interacts with planes is weird and it shines through my objects a lot of the time. With camera's they are pretty simple but a problem i have with it is when I try to circle around the target. I put the first key frame half of the way through and move the camera onto the opposite side of the target. Then I place the last key frame at the end of the timeline and return it to it's starting point but then the camera movement does this weird zooming effect as it loops around or it loops half of the way and then returns back. I add more key frames to make the camera rotate correctly but it still zooms in a strange way. Overall, this unit is going to be a struglle with the limited amount of time we have.
-John Hempstead Throughout all of this curriculum, I have been struggling with these two topics ever since we started working on them. There are reasons for why I am struggling in both of these. The first topic is video editing in Premiere Pro. Obviously, the drag and drop editing is very simple, but all the technical parts of it are things that I have no idea how to work. I don't understand how to control the transitions fully, or how to properly control the camera angle. Half of the interface of Premiere Pro seems foreign to me. This is probably because I didn't focus on finishing my work on time before we started that unit so while we were going over the unit, I was still working on past work. The next topic I struggle in is animation on 3ds Max. I understand what keyframes are and how they work but I have forgotten how to place them and what to do after that. The reason for this is mainly the same reason. I actually knew how to place keyframes last year but once we got to the refresher this year, I didn't get to finish the assignment.
-John Hempstead A couple of days ago while I was working on one of my assignments, I started getting stuck and couldn't continue on the part. Long story short, I started clicking around on 3ds Max and I eventually solved my problem. Everything in 3ds Max is temporary. You can save before you do something, and you can undo almost any action that you have done. Obviously, once we're done with this class and we go and get jobs in this industry, we won't be able to ask exactly how to do each and every thing and we definitely won't have a tutorial to tell us what to do. We have to experiment and explore. This is part of the learning. We will never learn how to do every single thing on every single tab of 3ds, but we can explore to see what gets the job done.
-John Hempstead So, I just finished my UVW robot mapping activity and what else can I say but "That was easy". It honestly intimidated me at first because I didn't know where to start and I hadn't completed the other assignments for the quarter such as the Gas Can and the Wall. I still pulled through though thanks to some help from my friends in class. It definitely isn't as time consuming as some other projects are either. Definitely my favorite project of this year. Not too time consuming and I get to express my own artistic style on a model I am familiar with since I have used it several times already. The fact that you can still go over the lines when you're coloring the map in Photoshop is a lifesaver and it makes the whole process ten times easier. One thing I wish 3ds Max did when creating the map is, separating the bottom map and the top map more so you can put solid colors or picture on it more easily without having to go out of your way to find loopholes. Overall, great project that I loved.
-John Hempstead For the past few days, my work flow has been absolutely terrible in this class. I've been getting distracted buy music and spacing out when watching tutorials. I might not even be able to finish the 2 major projects I have this quarter. Not having music might help me out more. I often get distracted by work in other classes and I end up just playing around with things in 3ds max. While this is a good thing sometimes, I can't keep doing this. I want to end this year strong and learn as much as possible before I drop out of the class. My work flow for all of my classes has been lacking recently. I just feel like I can get it done at a later time and then it ends up taking longer than I expected. I know everyone has this feeling sometimes. I need to fix it for 4th quarter.
-John Hempstead I have played the Splatoon series nonstop ever since it came out back in 2015. Splatoon is a game created by Nintendo to be played on the Nintendo Wii U. Splatoon is a third-person shooter that revolves around humanoid creatures called inklings that can turn into "kids" or "squids". In kid form, inklings can shoot ink to cover the ground or use it to "splat" (kill) other inklings. In squid form, inklings can hide in their ink and swim faster than they normally would run. I honestly loved this game because I don't really like super violent shooters, but shooters are my favorite type of game. For a lot of kids who were my age at the time, Splatoon was a fun experience without all the blood and gore. Splatoon was very empty when it first came out and there was barely anything to do. Nintendo fixed this problem once they recognized the popularity of the game. From the original version of the game to the most recent version, a whopping 58 weapons have been added on top of the original 30, 11 new stages were added on top of the original 5, and 2 new modes have come out on top of the original 2. If I were to rate Splatoon at the beginning of its lifespan, I would give it a 4/10 for creativity and appeal, but rating Splatoon after all the updates, I would give it a 9/10 for constantly added content and replayability. Overall Splatoon was a great and fun game to play after all or most of the updates had happened.
-John Hempstead Overall, UVW mapping is much easier than I initially expected it to be. I expected that you would have to create the faces of the box attached to each other and literally wrap it around the box in 3ds Max. The hardest parts were taking the pictures at the right angle. Even though the distances don't have to be exactly the same, the angles that you take the pictures at change for every face if you aren't using a cube. Working in the compact material editor was faster at first but it started getting confusing navigating around the interface. Another part that was confusing was getting the correct polygon ID on the right face of the box. This had me confused for a good 20 minutes until I realized how to use it. The cube and sphere preview on the material editor had me a little bit confused and I still don't understand the use for it. A new useful thing I learned is how to apply a multi-sub object material to an object. This makes it a lot easier to make faces for a object instead of creating 6 different materials. I like UVW mapping a lot less than I did when I started, mainly because of the picture taking and because I thought we would be able to make a mesh to actually wrap around a box.
-John Hempstead |
AuthorMy name is John Hempstead and this is my blog that will be showcasing what I have learned throughout my time in Fundamentals of Design and Animation. Archives
June 2019
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