Usually the homework is a little crazy by this point in the term but it looks like Term 8 is going to be a bit easier than Term 7... Unless I just jinxed it :p
For Photography this week we are experimenting with focal length and trying to push the contrast between foreground and background. I found a relatively easy bokeh set up you can do with some aluminum foil rather than using actual light sources. I also built a custom aperture filter for my camera that changes the shape of the bokeh into the shapes you cut out. This is a shot of my setup with the aluminium foil taped to the whiteboard in the drawing room :p.It took a lot of playing around with set up, camera settings and a bit of tweaking in post but I kinda like the final result.
Here is the attachment I built for my camera. The heart, batman and music note shapes worked really well. The smiley face and bunny shape however didn't :( I may have made them too big which makes the shape un-discernible when the lights start to bloom. That or my camera's aperture can't go small enough to make the effect work.
Character design wasn't such a leap this week. I mean we blocked out the whole body but I guess it still feels pretty rough so I didn't sculpt on this piece yet. Next week we should be moving onto isolating some of the torso pieces and refining the legs and hands.
I had a lot of fun with prop design this week. Our tri limit this week was 500. I wanted to design a cool wooden mask for my samurai character so I just went ahead and sculpted it and preyed that I could cut it down to 500 tris. I got it to exactly 500 and I think it looks pretty good even with the low rez. I also put this mask into my level design as a purchasable prop.
I kinda ran with the above idea for level design. First off I just wanted to create a system where the player could use the gold they find in the level to buy a couple of items... This escalated into a full trader character with a bunch of props. So far you automatically buy the mask when you walk up to the trader with enough gold. I want to fix this so you have to actually press a key to do this but I need a bit more practice in Unreal first. I really enjoyed working on these props! but I need to find a little time to build up the rest of the scene now :)
I also wove the mask into the narrative of the level. Once the player buys the mask it allows them to see the spirit realm which reveals the magic words they need to speak to open the demon door protecting the library. I had some fun working with the post processing volumes to create the spirit realm vision.
I had a bit of an issue in character animation this week. I have no idea how but I opened the file one day and my character mesh was not rendering to any viewports :( It still existed in the outliner but something was messing with the render. I tried so many things to fix this including trying different computers, different versions of maya, exporting, importing, ritual sacrifice you name it. But ultimately I had to move on and work on other things. I could have redone the animation but it took me a long time and I didn't want to fall behind with other work. You can see the broken animation here if you want Google Drive.
The teacher (Zimmerman) spent the first two classes just talking to the class, no student participation or anything, in my books that's terrible teaching. Within this 6 hours! of talking he made a few points like the fact that it is incredibly important to understand your character's motivation, back story etc when you are coming up with a visual representation of that character.... 6 hours and this was pretty much the only point. Despite that when the first assignment rolled up and I had to choose a character design I didn't like I picked Shen from LOL. I picked him because despite it being a really appealing design his play style is based on him being a tank but he looks too small and dangerous to be a tank. So it matches the same vibe that the story and motivation of the character are not portrayed in his visuals. I thought I was doing a good job conveying this I put together a whole presentation with multiple slides explaining this at its fundamental level because I knew both the teacher and some of the students weren't familiar with LOL. As part of the assignment we had to pick 2 characters we didn't like and Zimmerman was going to pick one for us to redesign for next week. I figured it was obvious what I wanted to work on so I just threw one low rez image of the recent live action Deathnote remake main character. Then he flat out says to me "na I think you should redesign the live action character because Shen looks cool." WTF?!? So apparently games don't have to be held to the same standards as film.. well that's great that's going to make the rest of my career super easy yay! I don't even have to think about story or motivation or play style, awesome. The icing on the cake is that I tried hard to get out of this class and so did a lot of students in my term and Gnomon changed their policy recently stating we can't change classes till the final year. I know I've said this already but I am trying my best to just enjoy this class and try to get something out of it but honestly this is the first time ever in my entire time at Gnomon that I am thinking about skipping a class. OK I hope that is all I will have to say on the matter but based on simple pattern recognition you will probably be hearing more about this next week :p