Internets still being a pain, its been on and off and hour at a time for the past week, dont think you really realize how much you use it until you dont have access to it :/
However, being unplugged kind of allowed me to get on with my motion graphics edit, i kind of just threw it together to see how i want to lay the shots out and so far I have come up with this >>
I know its not an award winning edit but it was just put together to experiment with colour grades and the overall sequence layout. Will be posting the actual motion graphics when I've finished creating them some time this week, but that's all for now :)
So the internet cut out a day or two ago for some absurd reason, just because your one of the richest people on the planet does not mean you can flick the internet on and off light a light bulb Branson (virgin for thoes struggling to understand my rant) :/
Therefore thought it would be a good idea to make a start on the essay due to being unplugged. Though I've been attending the lectures i think after six or so weeks of going it has only just dawned on me how big the topic of conversation is. However, i really seem to be enjoying it :) in all fairness i cant really understand this myself as i am the last person in the wrld that could write an essay. yet it seems to be all going well, i think my biggest problem will be cutting down on how much i end up writing! The question im working on is..
'In 2001, Jesper Juul posed the question “Do
games tell stories?” Examine this question in relation to games as narrative
structures and how this might differ to other media forms.'
Literally reaping info, though this module is a games related topic the discussions far exceed the boundaries of just games, rules and theories can be applied to many area's of media its self. Defiantly worth a look as its only a short text and its pretty light reading, which is a pretty solid statement coming from me as i think its the first time ive ever really enjoyed reading!
VFX pt2 started last week and it consists of comping. YAY! and kind of neigh.. simply because i haven't quite got my head around nuke yet but all in good time :) after buying a subscription to digital tutors i think I'll have a broader knowledge of nuke in no time.
But the gist of this assignment is to pretty much show off as much skill in comping as possible, making this project good practice for the live projects we get in our second semester. We've been given the back plates to work from and have pretty much free reign of creation. I think I've set my eye on a few ideas but i think I'm looking more towards a kind of crash site/zombie esc abandoned area. So far I've created a basic scene layout and and a downloaded asset to use as some kind of burnt out/crashed car maybe.
with that in mind ive been checking out a few good reel in this area on sites like vimeo and youtube to try and get an understanding of what we're being asked to create. these are pretty good examples i think and with practice hope to create something similar :)
I think its fair to say that rigging is slowly draining all of the fun and enjoyment i get from the course :( well, its not that bad, its just taking me a while to get my head around it. In fact its not even that, it was all going pretty smoothly up until this point but oh well! i posted pretty much all the details on..
Again this was one of the pieces of work that had to be handed in this week and its been coming along nicely since my last post. I'm currently working on the facial texture maps which is looking extremely strange, seeing an image of pretty much what my skin would look like had it been peeled off of my face :/
However the maps not quite finished so I'l save that post for another day! the assignment for the module was to submit a grey scale model of what we have created so far. Now as always I've been having problems with my arch enemy displacement maps, i know its ridiculous and i shouldn't be having these problems but the majority of what i manage to go wrong, and all of what does go right looks awful. (more experimenting to be done there i think) so i posted the base mesh with clothing, which in all fairness is what was required but i want to try and get as far ahead as possible. but to date, this is what I've come up with. Soon as i get a bit more done I'll have an update!
Pretty much just a post on how good and worth while it is to sign up to one of the many tutoring sites!
I've.. used a tutorials from a range of sites and cant explain how indepth and helpful they are. I recently was subscribed to lynda for when i was trying to learn about creating web pages and a little of aftereffects and it was extremely resourceful. As good as they are the sites pretty much lean to certain practices, although they have tutorials for the majority of tasks they are pretty brief in some areas. My personal favorite at the moment is digital tutors, they cover almost all aspects of the modern day digital artist and the majority of some subjects to great extent. This is my current choice as it covers everything i need to know for the time being, As mentioned, all of the sites differ and appeal to different professions. for example im pretty sure eat 3d and gnomon are fairly game base compared to something like tuts+ that is a more graphical based tutorial web site. Long story short, SUBSCRIBE!!!!
so the last few days have been pretty busy ones as i had the first load of deadlines crop up, leading to a few all nighters :/
However now that dreadful weeks over ive just had the past 2days relaxing before i crack on with the next few assignments. That aside i think that the past week was the hardest ive worked since ive been back at uni and its not really good enough in my own personal opinion, from now on i look to put as much time and just as many long hours into my work.
Anyway, the self discipline aside il pick up from where i left off, begining with my hard surface scene. all finished for the assignment it was all handed in on time and with easy however i look to develop it more as its not quite at the level i want it to be at. i never really managed to get the volumetrics working so i didnt include them in the final render but i look to work on it for the mudbox competition that was part of the assignment. but heres what i have so far and will update when ive progressed further
Success, so today was my first real kind of arranged film shoot, and to be honest I'm pretty pleased with how it all went. This was essentially the part 2 of the motion graphics shoot plan. I had been in contact with a few friends from home that I used to go out and ride bmx with and arranged to meet up and get some footage for the mini documentary. I originally planned on meeting up at the skate park baysixty6, HOWEVER due to the park for some reason being skateboard lovers the bmxers only get a few hours a week to ride the park, which didn't really fit the times that people were available. SO I had to look else where to get some shots and looked to they're local spot where they ride often that happened to be Hastings skate park and the source bmx bowl.
After riding about an hour of the outdoor park and one bike having a snapped chain we headed to the indoor park that is part of the source bmx shop where we could some new parts too! What an amazing park, it was built within a church hall with 2 bowls and a huge vert ramp at on end with the walls covered in ply for huge wall rides. (link of clips to be uploaded soon) Overall we got some pretty good shots considering I had a couple street riders in a park environment but at the end of the day we had some spare time to nip to my local outdoor park in Ashford where they came into they're own, it was where I got some shots of a completely different mood due to the light having disappeared and that's to be posted soon too, but until then that's all I have for today :)
Fail. possibly the only way i can put it, I totally passed off class today to have some made course work stint, that was far from progressive. This post is simply down to how much I hate maya and photoshop due to the syntax errors and just pure crashing due to large files. HATE.
Here comes a book plug. Now to be honest I'm not one for reading. At all. Especially when it comes being advised to take out a book on a subject that I found most boring when having lectures on it.
HOWEVER, this my fellow blogger's, is a gooden :) I was totally dreading it, but I though I've got a test on it next week and I've literally taken nothing in from the lectures, so it became pretty clear that the time to read was ni. But all silliness aside, it was probably the quickest 1hour 35mins ever whilst reading it! (well, for me anyway) I never really knew how key it is, and to be fair I think I picked up more then than I have done in the past few weeks in class. I think I this may only be relevant to the people who actually have to sit through those god awful classes and to everyone else its going to sound like an unclarified rant about a book as if they're some new kind of discovery to man, Sorry :/ Good book though :)
Just thought I have a cheeky blog while I'm waiting for updates and the pc tune up to complete. General progress report then.. its all gone to hell :)
The first of the deadlines arrive next week and it appears I'm not particularly close to completing any of them! which some how doesn't seem surprising :/ So with the 5 or so assignments looming next week I decided to take the week off of class to try and go on a mad work spree. Day one :/ wasn't so good. I created a little piece to explain that but I'll upload it later maybe. Day 2? Slow as mentioned I'm clearing up and doing a few scans on my machine as its all going pretty slow, much like the scan its self at the moment (4h 56m 09sec so far) meaning I cant really use the pc for anything other than Facebook. resulting in what looks like a fairly unproductive day again. I really do hope to god that i some how manage to do a 56hour stint of non stop work so I can relax and be pressure free, it could defiantly happen whether i like it or not by the looks of things :(
Fail. possibly the only way i can put it, I totally passed off class today to have some made course work stint, that was far from progressive. This post is simply down to how much I hate maya and photoshop due to the syntax errors and just pure crashing due to large files. HATE.
HOWEVER, this my fellow blogger's, is a gooden :) I was totally dreading it, but I though I've got a test on it next week and I've literally taken nothing in from the lectures, so it became pretty clear that the time to read was ni. But all silliness aside, it was probably the quickest 1hour 35mins ever whilst reading it! (well, for me anyway) I never really knew how key it is, and to be fair I think I picked up more then than I have done in the past few weeks in class. I think I this may only be relevant to the people who actually have to sit through those god awful classes and to everyone else its going to sound like an unclarified rant about a book as if they're some new kind of discovery to man, Sorry :/ Good book though :)
