This week in Game Design II, we have been creating three different types of houses and different other things to create our own neighborhood. We had to create our own lamp posts, fire hydrant, mailbox, trashcan, a sidewalk, a road, and a grass material. This whole process for me took about a week and the hard part was just putting everything together and making the neighborhood look good. Making the houses were pretty fun because we had our own creativity in the designs of our houses and my first house was following a tutorial, my second had giant windows on three of the four sides, and my third one was more of a normal one with some better looking things. Making the lamp post and things were easy to do while using splines and cylinders. The lamp post I made by just using two cylinders, one with a bend modifier, and half an oval as the actual light. I made the trash can with a spline and a lathe modifier. The mailbox I made by using a cylinder and extruding a spline for the actual box. The fire hydrant I made by making the base with a spline and lathe, then the parts on the sides are two cylinders duplicated for both sides.
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This week for our blog post we were assigned to watch a movie that originated from a video game. Most movies that fit that category were from video games I had never played before like Resident Evil and Mortal Kombat, so one of the only ones I could find was The Angry Birds Movie. The Angry Birds Movie overall wasn't really the worst thing ever to watch but I'm still just confused on why they decided to make it in the first place and why they're deciding to make a second one. Since Angry Birds, the game, is such a simple concept, making a movie about it will definitely have to sway from the original material a little bit. The movie is basically all about the pigs coming to Bird Island and stealing the bird's eggs from the birds and how they have to go save them. In the game you have to save the eggs from the pigs by using a slingshot to hurl yourself at them and basically kamikaze piloting them. In the movie they use a slingshot in one scene to go over the walls of the pig's base and into the building to save the eggs and at the end of the day the good guys win. All in all this movie is just like pointless to me because when this movie came out, the whole Angry Birds phase was already over and gone for like a year and now there's a second one coming out in 2019 and I really don't know what they can even expand on with that one. Excellent Movie: 10/10.
This weekend I was tasked with finding a professional 3D modeler who specializes in 3DS Max, which is surprisingly difficult since most professionals use Maya instead of 3DS Max. But eventually I came across Wagner de Souza, who lives and works in Brazil. Here's one of his works and his portfolio below: I think the thing I like most about his work is that it isn't super realistic and it looks like he has to have fun with most of his work and I like that level of artistic expression and it's something I would like to replicate. A plan for how I can improve my modeling is first I can try to find a modeling style that I like and that makes modeling more fun for me instead of just following tutorials the whole time. The second step is to start modeling things outside of class and just experimenting more and challenging myself to make things I couldn't before. I can use the tools we start to learn in class in my out of class work to further my learning and skills. Since, you know I'm not the best at modeling, this nervous looking dude is my model. I tried to go for a silly lookin' thing and not go for a human character and more of a cartoonish character. I could go more in depth for the design and make it look a lot better if I had more time and a little guidance, but by myself, this is the best I got.
In summary:
The first quarter of the year is soon to be over and it's a good time to reflect on everything I've been doing in game design over the past nine weeks. In the beginning we mostly just reviewed on the production cycle with pre-production, production, and post-production. After that we shifted into 3DS Max and started working and learning many new techniques. We learned new tools like boolean, proboolean, lofting, blobmesh, array, scatter, and lathe. Using all those new techniques we made different objects and designs. For lathing, we made an entire romantic dinner using only lathes. We made a cactus to practice scatter, and a rubix cube to practice array. Right now we are working on our first quarter project that is due next week, and what we have to do for it is we have to create a chess board, and all the chess pieces. For most of the chess pieces it is very simple to make. I used lathe to make the pawn, rook, bishop, queen, and most of the king with the exception of the cross on top. The knight though is the real challenge of this project. First thing you have to do is put a reference image of a knight piece into 3DS Max and trace over half of it with a spline. Then you drag the inner vertices out and mirror it and connect the two sides. Make a base for it to sit on and put a material modifier on it and you're done right? Wrong. You have to add details like the mouth, nose, ears, hair, and any other small details you can think of and it is much much harder to do than you might think. I've been working on the chess piece for about four days so far and I think it's actually coming along pretty well and I'm glad to see how it's turning out and I hope I get a good grade to close out the quarter.
Call of Duty Black Ops 4 is the newest Call of Duty game, as it released on October 12 of 2018. The game has three main game modes, which are: Multiplayer, Zombies, and the newest game mode, Blackout. Multiplayer and Zombies are nothing new, but Blackout is a new battle royale game mode. When you get into the game, you will be in a helicopter with all the other players in the game and you will fly over the map on a random path. Whenever you jump you can glide to where ever on the map you want to. The aim of the game is to be the last one standing and kill everyone else in the game. Enough with explaining, the actual game play of this mode is super super fun. Part of what makes it so fun is the speed of which the games go. Lots of battle royale games take a long time to get through, even if you don't even make it that far, but most games will take like 10 or 15 minutes, which makes the game much less annoying and less of a time commitment. One of the complaints many people have had is the damage of assault rifles (which should be one of the more powerful classes of guns in the game), because it takes about 6 or 7 shots to kill someone, when sub-machine guns only seem to take about 5 shots to kill someone. Most people have a very positive feeling about Blackout so far and they are planning to add a lot more things to it. The other two game modes I have played a lot more than Blackout and my favorite by far is Zombies. Multiplayer is the same old thing from every single Call of Duty, except whenever you get into a game you get to choose between 12 different classes with different special abilities which adds a bit of variety to every game, but it still gets dull. My favorite game mode in Call of Duty since I was a little tiny 10 year old, was zombies, and in this game the zombies mode is super super fun, and the changes they made are alriiiiiiight. They changed the perk system, the health system, and added classes to choose from, which has its ups and downs. They got rid of most of the old perks like jugger-nog, speed cola, and double tap, but added a ton of other perks to choose from. You get to choose the four perks that are on the map, and you can make different classes for different perk loud outs. Instead of increasing your health with jugger-nog, you have a finite amount of health for the whole game which was 150 before it was buffed, and now it is 200, so you can survive about four hits. Overall Black Ops 4 has been super fun over the past two weeks, and I've had a ton of fun playing it with friends and I'm looking forward to the DLC that should be coming out soon. Ima give this one a 8/10.
For our first assignment in Digital Design and Animation II we had to find a job application in the gaming industry and create a cover letter, resume, and a portfolio that showed off our skills and Mr. B would present it to the class and evaluate it. It is very important that your portfolio has a lot to do with the job and is really good because the employer needs to see good work with multiple styles so that you can easily fit in with the environment there and if your style doesn't match with theirs it might not be a good fit. In this year I am going to need to make many different types of models for my portfolio if I want a chance to make it in the gaming industry. When I was looking to revamp my portfolio for the project I wanted some of it to be 3D Modeling since that was what we were going to be doing for a lot of the rest of the year in this class.
This week in class we have been working with lights and cameras in 3ds max, and to be honest this has been one of the most tedious tasks in 3ds max so far. Without the help of tutorials and with vague information on the subject, we are expected to use lights to light up a street scene with headlights, street lights and window lights using only our basic information on two types of lights. In total we needed to make one scene of a flashlight which we had a tutorial for, and then one street scene with daylight and one in the night time. The night time one took a long time to finish but after using around 60-70 some odd lights I did it only for it to be way easier if I had just used a different type of light. Then the day time one was confusing because I mean it's the daytime what are you supposed to do for street lights and headlights. Then when I got to the camera assignment it was much more fun and less tedious than the lights activity. We were supplied with the initial file of a city and our task was to use a camera and go through the streets and make a cool looking animation. My friend Pavel, who finished before me, used his old spaceship model in his animation so that the camera could track that around the city as it's flying around and that seemed like a fun idea so I tried it out. As it turns out working with cameras (especially target cameras) are also very tedious but I think it was fun to imagine that it's like a movie and you're kind of chasing the spaceship around.
In Summary:
knowledge.autodesk.com/support/3ds-max/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2017/ENU/3DSMax/files/GUID-8C723BC5-98BC-4721-A590-DF7F86273A15-htm.html For the last couple of days in 3ds max, I have been working on learning how to animate. We got an assignment to animate three things to just learn the basics of what to do and how to do it. The first thing we had to animate was a race. When you open the file and play the animation all the cars finish at the same time going to same speed. So our assignment was to learn how to get them to go different speeds and make it look like an interesting race. We learned how to do this using the curve editor which can let you effect the speed and how far the cars could go forward or backward before eventually finishing at the same point on the same frame. In the end it only took about five minutes to mess around and make the race look relatively interesting. The next thing we had to do was make five boxes and get them all to do a flip but make it look different for each one. We did this by using different pivot points for each box and making them rotate 360 degrees. Then the last assignment was a little harder. We had to use things from past assignment and animate those. We used the spaceship we made from when we started 3ds max, then we used a moon and a globe from the last assignment before this one. All the rules were was that we had to have the moon orbit the globe and that the spaceship had to fly from the globe towards the camera. I tried to make the orbit of the moon look semi-realistic and for the spaceship to fly in kind of realistic way and I think it went alright. What I learned:
This week we had a project in 3ds max to make five primitives with modifiers on them to explore what each of them does and to be more independent since we have just been following tutorials for the past couple of weeks on 3ds max. Then after that we had to create either a robot, lamp, or a 19th century gas lamp. For the first part of the project I made a box, sphere, cone, torus (basically a donut), and a cylinder into cool different things using edit poly and different modifiers. It was fun to explore what each of them does and I think it will help me when I try and make more of my own stuff on my own. The next assignment, I decided to make a lamp using the least amount of primitives I could manage and I ended up only using two. For the base of the lamp I used a cylinder with a squeeze modifier to make the top of it get smaller as it goes up. Then I used an edit poly modifier to inset the top face and create a pole going up to hold the shade. For the shade I used a torus as the top of the shade. First I scaled it to be thinner than usual. Then I added an edit poly modifier to select all of the faces on the bottom to extrude them and create the actual shade. Then I selected the faces on the inside of the shade to extrude those to connect to the pole from the base. Finally I added a squeeze modifier to make the shade expand at the bottom and look more realistic.
With most people in my class, basically everyone likes Photoshop more than Illustrator even after getting used to it for a couple weeks, but why is that? When we first started Photoshop it was around the beginning of the year and no one really knew anything about Photoshop so Mr. B had to slowly teach us all the tools and let us master them, but when we started Illustrator he kind of just threw us in there with like two days of preparation instead of like two or three weeks like we had for Photoshop. So when we started doing projects in Photoshop everyone was a lot more used to the tools, but when we started projects in Illustrator everyone needed lots of help and it just took way too long to finish anything. So it's hard to say which one is better, it completely matters on personal preferences and what kind of graphics you are looking to make.
Link: www.pluralsight.com/blog/creative-professional/whats-difference-photoshop-illustrator |
AuthorMy name is Jonathan Eller, and I am 15 years old and I go to Durham School of the Arts as a 10th grader. The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Durham School of the Arts or Durham Public Schools. Archives
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