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In order to know what I’m doing when I use Unity, I had to take an online course on LinkedIn to become familiar with the tools and features I had at my disposal. This course helped carry me through the process in which game creators are able to craft their games in the most simple way, so as to not overwhelm me with too much information. Although basic, it provided me with a lot of interesting techniques I could use to my advantage. One feature I grew very fond of was Probuilder, which allowed me to create my own unique geometry, whether to create part of the map, or to make small props around the area. Probuilder was also very similar to 3ds Max’s modeling, which added another layer of familiarity, and, in some places, I actually prefer probuilder’s modeling to 3ds Max’s.
On the Topic of 3ds Max, the interface was extremely familiar and easy to adjust to. For a time I debated if they were created by the same people. The ability to alter the interface was also very appreciated, as I can put floating windows into smaller, organized tabs (like what I do with probuilder) in any sector of the screen, and split the displays of the actual game itself. It’s evident a lot of time was taken to improve the quality of life of the creator when developing this UI. Of course, this new software couldn’t come without problems. Most of the issues I struggled with weren’t mentioned in the course, however they also weren’t significant enough to halt my progress for long. Most issues I had were graphical, and they were all involving the textures which either wouldn’t work or wouldn’t appear at all. I learned that for the Tree9 Pack I downloaded, I had to manually apply the textures to each individual tree, which was a small inconvenience until I realized I could just copy and paste each tree. Another texture issue was it not looping or scaling correctly, evident in the planes I used as pathways in the first part of the game. Poking around in the settings, I changed the tiling value to .2 for it to loop seamlessly on all the planes, and, when the texture I had didn’t seem to work at all, I simply looked for one that did. A stone texture for one of the caves didn’t work, and thanks to the Tree9 pack it came with various natural textures, stone being one of them, that I applied to every in-cave path and worked seamlessly. The biggest issue was involving adding guns to the player character to fight off AI in the cave that would hurt you. I had no knowledge of how to code the guns and enemy behavior, so I simply left that alone. A simple solution could’ve been building the game within the microgame, however I had worked too long on my original project before finding that out, so I stuck on improving my current work.
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I started on the mech project rather late... after its due date. It was definitely difficult to make time for it and try to solve problems while also having to deal with deadlines and other problems in life, but it was honestly an enjoyable experience in the end. I followed along the tutorial but always added my own spins on almost everything, either because I was struggling too much to replicate the process or because I found it more interesting the way I wanted. I loved using help from past tutorials to use on this one, because it felt like everything was finally coming together. There were definitely many struggles to overcome, like for example, instead of the front of the mech going back into the oval to create the illusion of a visor, it pushed the back segment of it down, making the visor stick out a little with a ridge in between. After a few minutes of hopelessly trying to fix it, I noticed it actually looks good if you do it to a certain degree, and I kept it that way. My next problem was something that was actually my fault. I did not add more segments to the face of the shape that made up the base of the leg, so instead I made an extremely basic star shape on the joint, and later when almost finishing the assignment I added a secondary polygon to compliment the joint and added the ring-like shape i was supposed to in the beginning. In the end, it was a pretty good looking joint. After that, I made the full leg with the mid joint and the foot, which was rather difficult considering the foot kept looking like an unappealing dome shape. I dragged a few vertex points up to add more definition to shape and surround the base leg a bit more. I was not extremely satisfied with the end result but it was good enough to the point where I could look at it and have it fit in. Last, I used the same steps from the Dice project to color the main oval shape black on the visor area and a forest green in the surrounding area. I colored it the same color scheme as a character from the Halo Franchise (favorite franchise) and rotated the legs to various positions for its photos.
A few weeks ago we started working on 3ds Max, an app used to create and animate 3d objects. Initially I was wary of the new format of everything but once I started on our assignment, Romantic Evening, I became very accustomed to it and in fact enjoyed working on it. It’s surprisingly simple, for example, to make a table, you: 1. Make half of the table shape with a line tool, 2. Put a modifier on it called “Lathe” and if i remember correctly, set it to center (or side), making your 2d line into a 3d object. It was also fun using the primitives in unique ways. An example of how I made a complex-ish object with a simple sphere is that I deleted the top half and a quarter, and flattened the bottom yet still kept the edges elevated just a tiny bit. This way, it retains the shape of a real plate instead of looking like a 2d circle. I also experimented with lighting, although it wasn't stated to use it, I decided to test it out anyway and it looked great on the table. And then for things like the chairs and candles, I used multiple primitives to create and as easy as it was it was satisfying nevertheless. To see a bundle of rectangles and squares be turned into a comfortable wooden chair truly is fulfilling. I hope I can use more 3ds Max in the future the same way we used it on romantic evenings. I hope to improve on this skill later in the year.
Over the summer break I’ve practiced a few art skills and improved upon them. Here i am going to talk about two of them.
My first skill was realism, if that counts as a skill. I've improved on making drawings seem real and actually possible in real life, although you can’t notice on my digital drawings (i have a lot of trouble drawing digitally) you can see on my one physical drawing all the little details. I plan on tracing that over in digital to give it a cleaner yet still sketchy look. I’m still currently practicing on drawing more plants and scenery but I am happy with my current skill in the area. I hope to be able to draw lifelike drawings soon, which i can only achieve through practice. My second skill was Anatomy. I only recently started drawing full bodies (about a week or two ago) but with the help of certain people I was able to improve on it. Although it’s not exactly easy to draw full bodies I have found it to be much more simple now and I can do it significantly faster than i used to be able to. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to show how I improved in my portfolio since I still am struggling with drawing on digital like I used to. Proportions have become very simple to memorize and draw correctly, and the “skeleton” or basis of the body is a lot more easy to draw meaning I can make the actual body easier to make. I hope that I’m able to improve on this skill throughout the year, despite probably not having to use it for 3D work. What excites me about GAD this year is that I’m finally able to do 3D art, although it’ll be incredibly difficult until I finally get my own powerful PC, I still think it will be fun to learn. I was nervous about online school especially with this class considering both PC’s I’ available to use are a few years old and can’t handle too much (I have yet to acquire a chromebook), I’m still hopeful I will be able to do these arts with a newly built PC soon. I'm happy I stayed in this class and hope for another year of fun with you. (P.S, I know that these were supposed to be 3 different posts, but instead I’ll do one since I was only now able to use this laptop and time isn’t exactly on my side.) Over the summer break I’ve practiced a few art skills and improved upon them. Here i am going to talk about two of them. My first skill was realism, if that counts as a skill. I've improved on making drawings seem real and actually possible in real life, although you can’t notice on my digital drawings (i have a lot of trouble drawing digitally) you can see on my one physical drawing all the little details. I plan on tracing that over in digital to give it a cleaner yet still sketchy look. I’m still currently practicing on drawing more plants and scenery but I am happy with my current skill in the area. I hope to be able to draw lifelike drawings soon, which i can only achieve through practice. My second skill was Anatomy. I only recently started drawing full bodies (about a week or two ago) but with the help of certain people I was able to improve on it. Although it’s not exactly easy to draw full bodies I have found it to be much more simple now and I can do it significantly faster than i used to be able to. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to show how I improved in my portfolio since I still am struggling with drawing on digital like I used to. Proportions have become very simple to memorize and draw correctly, and the “skeleton” or basis of the body is a lot more easy to draw meaning I can make the actual body easier to make. I hope that I’m able to improve on this skill throughout the year, despite probably not having to use it for 3D work. What excites me about GAD this year is that I’m finally able to do 3D art, although it’ll be incredibly difficult until I finally get my own powerful PC, I still think it will be fun to learn. I was nervous about online school especially with this class considering both PC’s I’ available to use are a few years old and can’t handle too much (I have yet to acquire a chromebook), I’m still hopeful I will be able to do these arts with a newly built PC soon. I'm happy I stayed in this class and hope for another year of fun with you. (P.S, I know that these were supposed to be 3 different posts, but instead I’ll do one since I was only now able to use this laptop and time isn’t exactly on my side.) My last completed project before the cancellation of school due to the coronavirus was the idle animation project, where I had to create my original character and animate it doing something. For this project, I chose one of my favorite original characters that I created long ago and drew a lot. The character is a sci-fi style plague doctor, that I got the inspiration from many places (games, media, movies). For the majority of the project, I spent it designing the character in Illustrator (where I may have put too much detail into the character) and created the background for the animation. I put the different moving body parts in different layers then grouped them to make it easier to work with once in Animate. Before I had made all of this, I had made the staff the character would hold and grouped his hand with it so that they would move to the same place and be much simpler to handle. Now was the time for the animation. Originally, I was going to have the character in a fighting game style pose and bob side to side like fighters in those style games would. However, I knew that it would be far too complicated to work with due to all the moving limbs (and including the fact that I put too much time into the character itself). Instead, I had the character stand and “stomp” the staff on the ground as if he were some guard, protecting a door. This animation was very simple luckily and I finished it in only one class, of course before I had even written the one-paragraph reflection that was required for the assignment, which I had to finish the next day and take a -5 point late penalty. This project, as simple as the animation portion was, got me more familiar with Animate and helped me learn how it works a little more, which I’m glad about, and hope to do more projects with it in the future.
In class we needed to create an animated “sketchy” gif in photoshop. This could be done with the Timeline tool, which puts a series of images up for a specific amount of time for it to appear animated. For this project I made a crow with the “sketchy” animation style.
To make this animation, I had to get an image of something of my choosing, which was a crow, and then add a gradient to the back. The gradient I chose was purple to orange, to mimic one of the first photoshop projects we made which was the colorization of images, where I made a lake purple-ish with an orange sunset sky. I then made another gradient above the crow, lowered the opacity, masked the background of the crow image to show the gradient behind it, and that way it showed the crow with the color gradient on it while also being visible above the first one. The next step for this project was to draw over the object in a very sketchy style 10 times, although each frame could be done quickly it did take a while for me to make them all. At last at this point I only had to animate it, this was done by going to ‘window>timeline>create frame animation’, setting the delay between images/ how long the image is up for to 0, and setting it to loop forever. Although most the things done in this project involved lessons I’ve already learned, I still learned a few things, like always checking the second monitor for a pop-up, and always look thoroughly through the video tutorials as little things can mess you up. Even though this project was slightly difficult at times, I still enjoyed it greatly and hope to do more in the future. Today I finished my Cheeseburgers in Paradise assignment, which was that I had to make a burger, add a background, and copy and paste it 3 times so that there would be 3 burgers. This project was one of the more enjoyable ones, because of how simple it is and how easy it was to make and to look good. In this project we were on Illustrator, using the Pen tool, the Shape tools, Gradient tool, Curvature tool, and a new one, the Mesh tool.
First we created a circle that we cut in half, and shaped slightly to resemble the top bun, which we added a mesh to, which could make a sort of "shadow/glare" texture to it. Then we copy and pasted, mirrored, then shaped that bun a little to resemble the bottom bun. Now that we had the buns we needed the patty, which was very easy to make. For the patty we simply got the curved rectangle tool to make a long rectangle that slightly spanned out the bun, colored it brown like cooked beef, and added a few details using little, transparent shapes that we would copy and paste and rotate to add more texture to the meat. After the meat, I made the lettuce which all I did at the time was make a green rectangle, used the curvature tool to bend it around a little, and put it where it belongs. After I was mostly done with the project, however, I shrunk the lettuce and used a few more, new, pieces of lettuce to make it look like it was a bunch of little slices of lettuce. After I was done with the lettuce I had to do the cheese, which wasn't as hard as I expected. We added the Drop Shadow to the cheese to create a sense of depth, and used the Mesh tool to make some "shadows". I created one and copied another right next to it as if there were two slices of cheese (which I now just realized is kind of weird). Once I was done with that I added a few sesame seeds which were just oddly shaped circles with a smaller one inside another. When I completed the burgers I added a background which was a rectangle that covered the back with a gradient that went from the middle out. There I pasted the two other burgers and shaped them to resemble the "allow us to introduce ourselves" meme, which was popular a few months ago but I decided to do anyways. Once I finished I learned a few lessons from my errors, like adding small colored squares around the art board for future use, or googling color codes for specific color that could be difficult to replicate on a color wheel, or even just remembering to arrange things correctly so I don't have things covering things I don't want it to. This was one of my more fun projects with good lessons, and I hope I can do more like this. Recently we have started working on a new Adobe software, Illustrator, to make our projects. So far from my experiences with Illustrator I have enjoyed it and haven't gotten frustrated trying to work the tools (except for the pencil tool which we haven't used yet), and working with illustrator was very simple and easy. My last project was making digital badges for a video game/anything, so what I did was made difficulty symbols for Halo. I had to replace the preexisting difficulty badges/symbols with my own and it had to show an increase in difficulty/accomplishment within the symbols without having to be told what the achievement was for. For that, I used Elite (or Sangheili) helmets to show difficulty, and even if someone who doesn't play halo or take care to enemy's helmets sees the helmets, they can still tell it's a higher difficulty due to the colors:
Normal difficulty- Elite Minor (blue helmet) Heroic difficulty- Elife Zealot (red helmet) Legendary difficulty- Elite General (golden helmet). I made these helmets with a grey shield behind them, like the original badges had, and added a second shield shape to cause a 3D effect on it. In order for me to make these helmets, I couldn't just use normal conventional geometric shapes to make these rounder objects, I had to use the Curvature Tool to bend the shapes around to make what I wanted. Unfortunately we have not found/ there is no way to make shapes symmetrical when you are shaping one side, so that means you have to be pretty good at making both sides the same by hand when you are warping it. I also had to work with multiple layers just to make one shape or object, because if I only work with one shape to make one thing it would usually look very simple, and you don't want a helmet to be extremely simple in a badge (only a little). So set out some shapes in one segment, bent and manipulated them how I wanted, connected them all, and then selected them in bulk to become practically one object. All things considered this project was fun for me, I liked making the shapes into whatever I wanted them to be, I liked merging multiple things together to one whole, and I liked having the satisfaction of finally finishing it. I look forward to working more with Illustrator and making more art with it, and hope to enjoy it. As we progress through the year and get more assignments in our Digital Design and Animation class I've experienced a range of feelings with them, from frustration to enjoyment.
One of my favorite assignments was colorizing black and white images, where we had to use the select tool to select sections of an image that were the same thing yet different colors like say, a lake that is white at the top and dark grey at the bottom where otherwise, the Magic Wand tool would only select the white section. I chose the seaside image because I knew I could do a lot with it and it's colors, so what I did was that I got an image of a sunset over the ocean and put that in a second tab in Photoshop, so that way I could copy some colors from their and move them over without having to make them up with the color wheel. From then on everything was mostly smooth, I mixed two colors for the ocean, a dark purple mixed with a medium-dark orange to make the sea look reflective under the sky, made the sky a dark orange with some vibrant orange to the side which were connected using the Blur tool, and made the pier a darker brown. After all of that I had a few more things to color one of which was the boat, which even though it was super small it was ironically one of the hardest bits to do, as I didn't know what color to make it, I thought about making it blue like a lot of boats are, but that didn't look well in its environment, even if blended with orange. So I concluded with a tan-ish color to make the boat, and even after that is when I realized I made the water around the boat tan too. So once I was finished with fixing the water at last came the dock and some sections surrounding the water, which either were colored brown or had no color at all. Some of those sections couldnt be changed as it was part of the original image, and others were easy to change. Yet after all those struggles and small annoyances, I completed the assignment and was proud of my work, and learned a few things. Those things will help me in future projects. |
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My name is Mario, and am currently studying Digital Design and Game Art in DSA. This is my class blog Archives
January 2023
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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.
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