Tuesday, 28 August 2007

Lightwave 5

Still sick but I did some work.

Today’s class was a dedicated city trip especially to go and see the special winter exhibition at ACMI the Pixar show. After being greeted at the door with a massive lamp and ball from some of the group’s early works it was straight to business, purchasing a ticket to go inside.

The show itself was quite nice show a little of everything covering early animations to stills and storyboards from the new film. Perhaps this sample of everything was what let it down instead of focusing strongly on only a few projects.

It was interesting to see the models and drawings around for a group that is largely known for working in 3D computer animation. It makes sense that there is going to be a lot of paper used in the work for drawings, rough sketches and character developments instead of going straight in to the 3D software blindly without any ideas of what is coming up next, or even how it relates to the rest of the project in terms of continuity.

Basically it was about 5 stages in development before they works were fully rendered, ranging from rough drawings, to coloured pastel works and then lastly a 3D object or location. I'd imagine that at any stage that these could be cut form the story too as they no longer fit with the main themes or ideas of the project.

The artist they have working with them were amazing with one of the sculptures being born in the 30's and others in the 60's and 70's. Age doesn't matter only how well you do the job by the look of things, which I think might be a good attitude to have with employees, except that means that you'd also be employing their ego too. I hope egos don’t need a separate pay of their own.

With that I'm off track and out of here

See you in a week.

Tuesday, 21 August 2007

Lightwave 4

Out sick come back next week

Sunday, 19 August 2007

Lightwave 3

What can I say about this week’s class?

I feel it was probably my most successful yet; I managed to do the assigned tasks, eat something and go home all in the one day and with minimal need to swear, threaten or break the computers.

The major focus figures with a low polygon count. Easy enough done following the instructions. The real treat is pushing the Tab key and smoothing out the edges on the figure.

The Boolean and bevel tool were the ones most commonly used, as well as the symmetry function for creating multiple things that look alike, in this case arms and legs.

We used the text tool I had limited success in bending it however but am fairly sure that I'll get the hang of the bending and stretching later, until then I had a word that looked like a tornado.

A few extras that I added to my polygon person I put in butt cheeks and a helmet. I'm not good around childish temptations and the symmetry function made it so easy with the click of a button or two and the dragging of the mouse.

Next week more work.

Tuesday, 7 August 2007

Lightwave 2

Ah Lightwave, what can I say, I think I am starting to get the hang of doing some basic things in the program. I still find a few ways to mess up the work I am doing but most of that comes down to not knowing all of the basics of the program.
This means I know enough to help Brendan out but not enough to completely finish my own work.

Today was frypan day the most holy day in the uni calendar... we celebrate with offerings of fried eggs, bacon pancakes and other assorted foods thrown for varying amounts of time until the food is cooked. This is not true for television chefs they only "cook" the food until it is pinker and bloody on the inside then the outside.

On a more relevant note the class started the kitchens today by making the frypan. It is fairly simple in construction provided that all the computer and program's settings are on zero or neutral (poor Tash had one with some crazy settings) Basically it is a disk that is stretched and bevelled into a bowl shape and a rectangular prism shape stuck on the side and shaped to look more like a handle.

Already I can see a lot of potential for me with this program but that also means a lot of room for some horrendous mistakes. Still I'd like to try and "sculpt" a dragon it may be a little too ambitious at the moment but if I can find a copy of the program and a computer to run it on it'd be nice to give it a whirl.

Well that’s a lot of text I'm off for another week.
Not to be confused with off because of expiry dates as I wasn't born with one unless you are some kind of super natural type person then you can just keep that information to yourself.

Till next time

Monday, 6 August 2007

Work placement 2

Not much has changed since last week.
There is still no where for us to go but we have been placed to the top of the list of people to place which is something good. I spent the morning reading comics then class started we talked about the skills we needed for the jobs we are aiming for a lot of the skills were interchangeable and others were specific to what we were doing. The last group activity was looking at possible job adds in the industry we wanted. After that left to our own devices I made notes for the graduation exhibition. Hopefully next week the writings here will be of more relevance