Ramblings of a Game Artist

Well, here I am in my new Apartment at the beginning of my new life. I've been wanting to put together a video blog of the whole thing month-by-month showing the ins-and-outs of Creative Design as well as the whole Full Sail experience (because it really is something else here... I have to pay bills now!! D=). Problem is, I don't have my Digital Camera nor do I own a Video Camera so I can't do this yet, so for now this is how I'll be doing stuff. I'll try to stay on top of this as much as possible because I personally want to see/show how this progresses as a story.

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Chapter 00: Moving In.

No real problems as of now. Met Mario, my new roommate/brother, as well as three other interesting people: Rob, a lean guy with a black-belt in Tae Kwon Do and a record of car accidents. Deets, his chubby roommate. Cool to talk with, nice chef, and very laid back guy with a bit of messiness about him. Last but no where near least interesting is Albert. He's the "That Guy" of this group. Loud, lewd, and bi-polar. Definitely a stand-out person if you get to know him. We were all just getting ready for everything before class started. The only thing important to note was the laptop delay. Apparently, the Game Dev guys didn't get their laptops until today. So for about a week and a half, Mario has been going without internet. You could see the withdrawal on his face sometimes.
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Month 01: English Composition / Ethics and Psychology
+ Week 1.
- It's only been two days and I already feel on edge. I have an assignment in both Psych and English that are due at 12:00 and 1:15 respectively. One is a creative writing assignment that I'm about to upload to dA. The other is a character-creation thing where we have to make a character from scratch detailing their views on justice and ethics in the terms of what they taught us today.
(People Known by Name: Nicole, Taylor, Matthew, Tom)
Assignments this week:

http://Skylink.deviantart.com/art/Cleanup-on-Aisle-10-Lab-1-97082638Cleanup in Aisle 10:</a> Your run of the mill "Finish this story' assignment. This one took a turn for the awesome towards the end.

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Sadly no. That was a little project done at my other school that never truly went far. But, believe me. None of that is discarded. I actually want to get a really good drawing/sculpture of Maru finished during my time here.

 

Well, I already have quite the list of characters to put in. Most of them are like "Cool, that would be neat." So yeah. They also gave us Final Cut Studio so I want to have that doing something rather than just occupy 51 GB on my new laptop

 

WEll, Final Cut Pro is actually only about 500mb, but the rest of the studio is huge @_@ Sound was 30GB..

 

I haven't posted anything here in a while. Mainly because most of the stuff I've been doing was blah and suck and fail.
I"ve been through a few Traditional Art courses (I didn't like most of my pieces) and some basic prop modeling, lighting, and shading classes. So, in general I know how to use Maya, but what do I do with it now?

Well, I have some actual sightings of me doing things.
Current Courses: Character Design and Creation / Geometry and Measurement
http://skylink.deviantart.com/art/CDC-D ... -116498455

CDC asks us to put together an entire character from Concept to Creation in one month. Here's the guy's head. It's coming out pretty awesome. The body parts need work but it's all good. I'll post the other things later.

 

Well, we did plane modeling. They had us make something called a base head first which is pretty simple. It's gives you all the edge flow with the front and side references. After that, you import it into the main character file and adjust it to the actual head reference. As for time spent, creating the base head and then shaping around the actual head took two full labs, so eight hours. I made a number of mistakes and wasted around an hour because I tried to get proportions right. But that's only the first time. I'm pretty sure I can do it faster now. Especially since after you make your base head, you can use it to readjust to form any other head you'd have to make. So yeah, heads take less time to make now. Our school has a number of tutorials and stuff on it, so things are pretty easy. I've got a number of things to fix up on it though. Shoulder, Elbow, Knee, Foot, Hand, Ear, and Neck. Then I'm pretty much done. I've got until the end of this week to finish it though.

 

Final Cut Studio is Video Editing Software, much like Adobe Premiere Pro or, to name a more familiar program, Windows movie maker. It's used by people to edit videos and video clips with sounds, transitions, audio-overs, etc. It's how people make AMVs as well.

ANyway, in terms of progress: I made my hand. Hands are much easier to do in 3D than on paper. (Still takes god awful long though).

Rendered version of the hand: http://skylink.deviantart.com/art/CDC-H ... -117278264
Wireframe after smooth: http://skylink.deviantart.com/art/CDC-D ... -117277106<br /><br />-- Sun Mar 29, 2009 10:04 am --<br /><br />WEll, with my deadline approaching within 22 hours, I'm going into Hyper Drive mode to get all the unmodeled things finished in my project. I find that I focus a lot more when people are watching me so I'm going to put a stream up of myself working. You're welcome to watch for today :)

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nilix-qbox-stream

 

Well, Final Cut isn't all that necessary for 'modeling'. It's more along the lines of animating. Because when you animate, you get a number of generated frames. You just have to take all those frames and make them into a video.<br /><br />-- Wed Aug 05, 2009 10:07 pm --<br /><br />So, I've been gone for a heaven's length. But Dave is back with some memories. A bit of happiness, a bit of sadness. But you know life goes on.

World Updates:

Well, life has had quite the course of up and down on me. Financial Aid has been chewing at my rear end for quite the while. Things are 'for the most part' cleared up, however, I'm still staring down bills towards the end of my tunnel.

Also, I made a step up to finally nominate someone in my life as a Best Friend, because David has yet to meet anyone so awesome that he would actually feel like getting up and going to anything solely because someone was there. She is Sarah. Sarah is pretty awesome. We've been hanging around since November or so and she's become quite integral to our group staying as a group. She became my best friend in June. However, due to circumstances with her boyfriend and his family, they both left to Connecticut. Yes, it hurts. I don't get attached to people like this very often for this very reason. I think I'll get over it, but for now I've gotta deal with my favorite pair of people not being here anymore.

Other news... I had a birthday, hurray. The Skylink is 19. Feels good to be odd again. My talents of 2D waver between good and bad as always, however, my 3D skills are climbing. It's easier than certain things.
Also, the hell schedule is back! Mon-Fri: Character Rigging - 5am -9am Lab/ 9am - 1pm Lecture

Art Updates:

If anyone has seen the images on devArt or my Facebook, you will have noticed my bust and my Guitar Hero Controller. The Controller lacked some of the important details in the back, so the grade on it wasn't so high, but I did pretty nicely on my bust. Hopefully, Tim will think the same way when he grades it.

Bust:
http://fc05.deviantart.com/fs49/f/2009/ ... kylink.jpg

Guitar Hero Controller:
http://fc02.deviantart.com/fs46/f/2009/ ... elnori.jpg

Also Animation!:
http://www.facebook.com/posted.php?id=7 ... 7604486009

Mental Updates:
Had a small soul-searching session and realized that I'm not much of an interesting person. I mean, in class, I say things. I can hold a conversation and I don't believe I'm physically or mentally unattractive. ...I just don't find myself very interesting. I've lost my hobbies, I haven't played games in a while, and I haven't committed myself to anything other than the assignments I get and that's only after the PSI kicks in. And so, I've started to work on a little personal project of my own. I'll reveal some stuff in the future, maybe get some kind of critique and opinions on it, but it's just to keep my mind entertained and active so I don't fall below my own personal standards of humanity.