The end of junior year

I made a mechanical locking knofe which i was going to animate but sadly i dident put enough time into it. i do have these screenshots though.

Final

Ryan McDaniel

Ecomm

Hours 6-7

This year in Ecomm

            I have done a lot but yet so little it seems. In Maya you can finish whole project but the time it takes can almost be unbearable. This is the tedious task of an animator thee dimensions or not.

            This year I have completed only five projects but I made these projects to the best of my ability. I created the hut, the haunted house. the haunted hallway, the motherboard and lastly the animation, which I’m working on and cannot be finished within this year. I’ve learned many effects and dynamics including dramatic shadow effects and even basics into smoke. Sprite animations are quite hard to learn though as they like to be very difficult. I have also gotten electricity to work very well as it uses two polygons to conduct power. I also find it entertaining oh how my haunted house project I almost reached 300K vertices and 100K faces.  I find mayas soften tool amusing on how it takes a shape and just makes it collapse upon itself if it is even semi circular. I cannot say I did make a lot of profit in maya this year as I did learn a lot of polygon and texture sculpting skills. Especially the essentials to how a tillable texture is very important as it keeps a repeation without showing the reputation of the lines between the borders of the original texture. This has many struggles on how to create those polygons to create the desire shape. Everything from cutting, dividing, wedging and erasing.

            I will say I think my hardest project this year was the hut. Because I did add to much detail and made it falter by doing a small mistake. The thatched roof would look great if well… thatched. So I added a fur effect to the roof and then It created the perfect matte thatching. Only bad thing is I had a red light on the interior of the hur which was the hearth. This caused the whole polygon to reflect the light. On the outside the thatching gave this awful red orange glow from the red light making the whole roof a massacre of vibrant color. I also took png files of trees and put them on polygons cuaseing a square with the image. I learned this would be a bad descision. The polygon still caused a giant square shadow. So to solve that as best as I could I took the polygon. Add divisions a thousand times and then cut the shape out by removeing the squares one by one. This took a massive amount of time. And I regret it as it took A LOT OF TIME. Maya is only depressing in one sense on how it just takes foever to render anything. Personally the school shouldn’t of invested on a Mac but a pc with a GPU that pushes 4 GB and over 12gb of ram at least. The GPU to render video/maya and the 12gb in RAM to have after effects run super fast. Oh well my techie rage can only go so far, I would love to have all mini Itx builds all around this room, it would be great.

Anyway this has been a great year. I will be sad to have to leave here as this room is full of my friends and a well instructor. Animation this year I also learned how to position a camera properly in maya as that was very profitable to keep my renders well and in check. Also speaking of framework keeping the settings up in maya such as anti aliasing and anotophic filters make the shots look very crisp and clean. The projects this year have been mostly new things to me but sadly I don’t understand smoke, I would love smoke because the smoke would of made the interior of the hut look much better as it added to the hearths burning coals.

I wonder one thing about Ecomm. How will we advance? Such as academic classes slowly advance even in the most basic courses how will Ecomm change? Especially with how freshman will learn as this is very difficult learning. Especially a lot of students complained about the shift from sketch up to Maya. Why not just start with Maya and do very basic tools to do so. Especially learning the importance of a surface to a polygon as a surface just loves to mess up at some points. Oh how lighting effects have a separate shadow option and needed to be pointed out specifically. Maybe real time demonstrations showing key shortcuts could possibly be better then just tutorials via pdf? Oh who knows I may be talking about something I know little about. I only wonder if there is a way to improve the years in Ecomm. I love this class and a way of improving definitely wasn’t the extended subjects having to do with consumerism and consumption, this is Ecomm not economics class but I do see the importance in it. It’s just been already busy so much. Especially animation, which has nothing but constant tedious work. Welp I only hope to have another excelant year in ecom.