With DDA coming to a close, I just want to reflect on my experiences over this year so far. There have been a lot of units I have enjoyed, loathed, or felt indifferent to. I want this mainly to just be a positive reflection, though, so I’ll keep it to the good stuff. I have had a LOT of fun with working in photoshop, illustrator, and 3DS MAX. I’m really glad that these program were the meat of this class. The skills I have learned in this class for these programs is honestly more than I could have hoped for. I know that I struggled a lot with things in these programs; like animation in both Illustrate and 3DS MAX, blending in Photoshop, and the pen tool in Illustrator. These struggles ended up being more fun things to use at the end of it somehow (except stop motion animation in illustrator, that was awful). I can open any of these three programs and know that whatever I am about to do I am going to enjoy it. I was given a lot of creative liberties throughout the year, and I see that as a good thing. I got to experience a lot of difficulties on my own terms. I got to get my grades on my own terms. This has really pushed me to put more effort into my work, but also enjoy it. I have definitely loved this class pretty much everyday we’ve been in here. The things I have learned were enjoyable and helpful, and I am ready to learn more.
In summary:
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My DDA class has just begun work in 3D modeling. I have never worked in 3D before so this was definitely new to me. I was really excited for this, especially because this will be a large chunk of my next year in this class. The first few projects we've had in this class have been fun and easy, probably because we have video guides to help us out. We have worked with making shapes "editable polys", and modifying them with extrusions, bevels, scaling, duplicating, and intrusions. All of the options you have to work with and make stuff is incredibly fun. I have struggled a little bit with fluency in 3DS Max (the program we are using). 3DS MAX has a lot of features, like special model types, view port modifications, ways to interact with objects, make objects interact with each other, and way more things we probably wont go over. I haven't gotten used to all of the keybindings or what everything does (that we have went over) yet, but that will only take time. This is a tank we had to make using bevels and extrusions. I'm super excited about my future in 3D, but I'm also worried that without videos, I'll care too much about exactness when it's not needed. I will probably spend too much time on things that do not matter instead of doing what I am told to do. I also messed with 3DS MAX outside of class and got stuck on connecting/fusing objects, as well as curving/ manipulating longer ones. Seeing all of these things outside made me realize that this is just the surface of a really deep ocean.
In Summary
In my DDA class, we have began to work with video editing software. this includes Adobe After Effects, Adobe Animate, and Adobe Premiere. All of these programs share similarities, but contrast greatly. Animate and After Effects definitely focus more on the making than the polishing, but you can touch things up in both programs. They all contain similar things like the timeline, basic tools (select, pen, direct select, etc.). This is where similarities start to die down. Premiere is easier to use when you have preexisting material to work with, i.e. still images, prerecorded footage, etc. This means you can easily place things when and where you want them to appear in a video. Animate works best starting from scratch. It's almost like Illustrate on steroids. It lets you conveniently (enough) make objects yourself. It gives you the option to either animate using a traditional, frame-by-frame style or letting the computer move things for you. It will even let you do both at the same time. After Effects is like both of these programs had a child. You CAN make your own objects and you CAN try to use it for video editing, but it's more for meshing clips together. It's not like its impossible to to do the other two, but it acts really indecisive about it. Motion graphics were actually pretty enjoyable in After Effects, traditional animation wasn't impossible, and special effects might be better on it as well (wouldn't know, haven't tried that yet). Otherwise, most video editing should be done in Premiere and animation should be done in Animate.
In Summary:
In video games, building personality for your character is super important, especially outside of the story. A character's Interaction with their environment, items, or characters can really help you understand how your protagonist thinks. Idle animations are a very special and memorable way to put the player in the character's head. Idle animations are the animations that a character performs after a period of inactivity from the player. Great examples of idle animations include Sonic appearing ticked off in Sonic The Hedgehog, Luigi falling asleep in Super Mario Galaxy, and a plethora of unique actions like jump roping and flexing (to name two) from Earthworm Jim are really good examples of building character for your character. |
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