Write all the things!

To be completely frank I forgot that this blog even existed for a while because there have been so much things going on in my life, both in school and personal life. Therefor I’ve put together a summary of what I’ve been doing these past months.

To begin with I’ve ended all the courses that I’ve mentioned on the latest post, 3D2-character modelling and animation, conceptual sketching for 2D production 2 and Graphical Design for Web. The course I’ve put most energy into is the 3D, but unfortunately I didn’t get the top grade which I was trying to achieve due to bad effort from another group member. It’s really frustrating when you’re trying to achieve for something great and there are others putting roadblocks along the way, especially when the teacher knows about the issue and the slack-person in question has been told to suck it up and ask for help if needed. But it was still a good experience, I know who NOT to work with in the future and I’ve gained more experience in 3D that I probably would otherwise, so there have come some good parts out of it

The things I ended up doing in the group assignment was rigging, skinning, attack- & idle animation, modeling of the head, correcting some errors on the armor, and all the texture work (Diffuse, Normal & Specular map, for the character and prop).

Because I’ve had such a big focus on the 3D I didn’t feel that I had quite the time that I’ve desired for the 2D course. I learned extremely much from the lessons but I didn’t quite have time to practice the knowledge to the fullest and ask for as much feedback as I wanted from the most awesome teacher so far, Leo Sandberg. I had heard the rumors of his awesomeness but I could never imagine them be so true. He had the ability to turn something that might sound complicated into something everyone could get a grasp on and at least I learned to look at in-game graphics, drawings, etc in another perspectives. Some of the things he went through which also stand in his book ‘’Imagine: creating art for entertainment’’ were the elements and principles of art.

The entire course was theory based and anyone could pass it without even drawing a single line. I’ve had my ears sharp and the knowledge I received from the lessons, as well as the book I made an essay at the end of the course and got a top grade for it, which was a huge surprise for me since I didn’t expect it at all. Of course I tried hard to achieve it but I guess I didn’t believe hard enough in myself, especially after the 3D mess.

The essay is about ‘’Teaching the player through graphics’’ and the games analyzed are Farcry and Farcry3 and I’ve decided to share it with you guys, but in a separate post. Check it out and I absolutely don’t mind critiques of it or any other things that I post on this blog.

The third course which I also had during the same time (Graphical Design for Web) was especially nice because it was so flexible, there were no group assignments or lessons that I needed to attend to so therefor I could divide the time for it more freely which suited perfectly with the other courses. My main mission during the course was to learn how to design a great portfolio for future purposes and for the final assignment I re-designed an already existing web-portfolio. The assignment went well and I didn’t have any specific complications but still I don’t feel comfortable sharing the result on this blog because some of the information used is from a random persons existing webpage (profile pictures etc).

When all the previous courses ended two new started, Level Design and 3D3- realtime 3D. Half of the courses have already passed and I’m going to go through them one by one in upcoming posts, so stay tuned!