Real-world applications of fifth grade math

I love end-of-quarter spreadsheets.  The fun thing about the F/D/C/B/A system is that if you’re sitting at a low B and it’s impossible for you to get an A, you only need to maintain your low B.  If 40 points out of 100 will maintain that B, anything more than 40 points will, gradewise, be wasted.  In my first year I needed a 42 on my final project in Drawing For Storyboarding to maintain a B (an A was impossible).  Realizing this, I lowered my standard of quality and just focused on getting the project done passably, but I ended up getting a 92, which was my highest grade in that class.  It kind of pissed me off that I got an A.

Of course, now that I’m in classes that are both enjoyable and extremely relevant to professional growth, I still put forth 110% in my major classes even when I can afford to do less.  But for work-intensive liberal arts classes like Psychology, it’s a nice relief to find that you can safely neglect a 9-page writing assignment in order to focus more energy toward those important major classes.

Spreadsheets are fun.

The blood of patriots and tyrants: It’s a natural manure!

Very recently I’ve started keeping a bookmark folder on my favorites bar for random notes.  The idea is that when I find something interesting online, I add it to this folder instead of letting it sit in my short-term memory for three minutes before it decides to leave forever. (I’m not sure why it’s never dawned on me to use bookmarks.)  From the 50 or so sites I’ve collected, here are the few that I think are worth sharing.

Games

Deus Ex – The Nameless Mod (SA) – On the plus side, this mod is based on one of the best games ever made and is apparently pretty good.  On the down side, it has a ridiculous plot based on a Deus Ex fan forum.

Valve Publications – I cited one of these papers for an essay in Survey of Interactive Entertainment.  I love Valve for their in-game developer commentary, and for generally advancing the medium by realizing it’s OK to talk in detail about games that have been released.

Warren Spector Master Class – An absolutely brilliant educational resource.  I’ve only seen a few of these lectures due to lack of time, but I’ve learned a ton from Warren Spector and the professionals he invited to speak at his UT class.

LoZ Parallel Worlds Let’s Play - These massive romhack projects always amaze me because of the amount of work from one or two people that goes into squeezing more content out of beloved childhood classics.  Unfortunately, all that work doesn’t guarantee a fun game.  I haven’t played parallel worlds, but from the LP it looks like one of those masochistic games where you have no idea where to go 90% of the time.

IGDA – GDC Student Scholarships - Attending GDC is the holy grail of the aspiring game industry professional, but it’s expensive as hell.  A free pass is an opportunity that can’t be passed up.  If that fails, I hear volunteer applications open up around November.

SCAD TV – A few of the lectures from GDX were posted here.  I’ve been meaning to get around to watching the ones I missed in person.

Elitist Jerks Forums – Many of the blogs I read cite EJ as an important resource for understanding game design.  I’m afraid that if I keep up with WoW, I won’t be able to resist reactivating my account.

Belan the looter’s episodes – Reading this site briefly made me want to play UO again.  UO was wonderful fun back in the day for the freedom it offered.  Unfortunately, it was fun, just like the radio was a genuine home theater experience.  MMOs having come as far as they have, you just can’t go back.  Even with all the flowery nostalgia that tricks me into thinking that being murdered and looted on Ethics’s doorstep was the most fun I’d ever had, I just can’t find it that fun anymore.

Educational

Academic Earth – This site is basically hulu for online video lectures from various universities.  If I had all the time in the world…

Free Foreign Language Lessons – If you think of life like Metroid, knowing only one language is like getting the charge beam and calling it quits.  You can go to Brinstar, but you won’t get much out of it without the Varia suit.  Learning a living language “unlocks” a huge part of the world to you.  Nota a mi mismo: Retén español.

Environmentoring (ConceptArt.org) – A series of tutorials in a free, forum-based class structure.

Middle English: Languages of the World – These videos are a pretty interesting look at the evolution of the English language.  Watching some of this guy’s videos also provokes mild Alabama rage at his fancy book-learnin academic attitude.  A lot of people write the way they speak, and the result is a mess of unclear writing.  On the flipside, I don’t understand people like this, who speak the way they write.  It makes you come off as stiff and condescending when you have to pause and let the person you’re speaking to look up a word in his pocket dictionary.

cannedmushrooms’s Video Lessons in Zbrush – Some charitable fellow has made a series of free video tutorials for ZBrush.  ZBrush is very important to have a grasp of, and it’s also a complete mystery to me, so I’ll have to check these out over the summer.

Student Illusions About Being a Game Designer – I wish to God that SCAD would hand a hard copy of this article to every entering student who’s considering ITGM as a major.

Random

White movement (Wikipedia) – Everybody loves the Soviets (except those oppressed or executed by the Soviets), but the Tsarist White Army never gets any love.  I guess the Bolsheviks did a good job of taking it to an undisclosed location, shooting it in the back of the head, and shoving it down a well with a hand grenade chaser.  The Russian Civil War is an interesting bit of history, and it’d be cool to see a work of art where Tsarists soldiers do something other than shoot civilian infants on a giant staircase.

Requiem for a Harlequin (Wikipedia) – I’ve always known David Allan Coe as the guy who wrote all those racist country songs, but apparently he’s deeper than that.  This is a rock album about growing up on the streets that he did before he starting playing country music.

A Night on the Town – I heard this show on 90.1 WABE Atlanta heading back from Birmingham to Savannah, and I made a note to look it up online.  It’s nice when public radio offers something other than classical and space music.

Tsar Cannon – The largest and most ridiculous cannon ever built.  Might be a fun ZBrush project.

Living in Three Centuries: The Face of Age – A collection of portraits of people over the age of 100.

Hank Williams III – Ramblin Man – I never knew that there was a grandson of Hank Williams running around and performing music, but here he is.  His act is one of those genre mashups.  They call it cowpunk.

House (Hulu) – The last few episodes of House have been fantastic.  I really enjoyed the Mos Def episodes, and the plot twist federally mandated by Barack Obama was handled very well.  It’s just gotten better from there.  I love the surreal stuff, like the season 2 finale.

You wouldn’t believe how many “I’m on a boat” references I had to endure while making this

Two quarters ago, when I was in CMPA110, I posted my projects on this blog.  I’ve conveniently skipped showing my projects from ITGM130, Digital Design Aesthetics, because they’re boring and not worth writing about.  This quarter I’m taking ITGM240: Modeling, Materials & Lighting.  This class, almost halfway through my four years, is really the beginning for me.  My long-term career goal is doing environments for games.  It’s what I really enjoy, particularly modeling and (oddly) laying out UVs.  So this class is where I’m pouring all my effort this quarter, which is tough since I have two other classes that require as much work, if not more.  The first project was a WWI Springfield rifle.  I’m not bothering to show it because it’s an exercise from a book that hundreds of people have done, it’s not modeled very well, and it doesn’t have a texture because I didn’t know when it was due (luckily, I’m able to resubmit projects in this class).

The second project for MML was a lot more open-ended.  We were to design and model a complex object.  Since I have laying around a folder of whaling reference images that was begging to be used, I decided to make a whaling ship.

Concept rendering is something I’d really like to improve on, but there it is.  There were a lot of detail sketches of different parts and props, but unfortunately most of them didn’t make it into the final product.  In fact, toward the end I realized I couldn’t finish everything, and the focus shifted a bit.  It ended up being a blocky model of a harpoon gun with some pretty elaborate background scenery.

I had two weeks to work on it, but I also had a lot of work to do for other classes.  And besides that, unwrapping that harpoon gun took about six hours, and there was a lot more than that to be UV’ed.  But that took a lot of time mostly because I was unaware of Move and Sew and hadn’t worked out a solid process for UV layout.  Looking back, the whole thing was a huge learning process.  I came into the project knowing how to use Maya pretty well, but the experience of making this ship filled in so many blank spots about proper workflows, practices for efficient modeling, and other things you can’t learn without experience.

Some of the things I learned through failure while working on this project:

1. Proportion is important, starting from the very earliest concepts.  My drawings had no scale reference, and while modeling most of the ship I just cloned simple boxes around the scene to serve as human-sized reference objects.  But a box is very ambiguous, so I ended up adding heads and arms to them later on and having to rescale things, but I still don’t think my boat would be a properly-proportioned whaling vessel in real life.  I’m paying more careful attention to scale in my next project.
2. Consider the scope of your project very carefully.  I ended up wasting a lot of time modeling and laying out UVs for part of the ship that I didn’t have time to texture or properly detail.  It’s good to aim high, but make sure that 80% of your goal will still be presentable.  Luckily I was able to focus on the harpoon gun and leave the rest of the ship out of the final render, but it didn’t feel good to jettison all that work.
3. Consider your model’s context, even if you have to make one up.  This was just a modeling project, but it would have helped to establish from the beginning a game engine, an art style, and a context under which the object would appear in a game.  A boat that the player walks on is far different from a boat that the player sees in the distance.
4. Within reason, don’t undershoot the polycount.  This one may be debatable, but it’s easier to remove edge loops than to add them.  For me, this went hand-in-hand with the previous point: from the beginning I should have considered that the original hull was far, far too low-poly for such a large prop that the player would walk on.
5. When laying out UVs, minimize seams in large, highly visible areas.  For the hull I made planar projections on the port and starboard sides, and then made separate projections for the bow and stern.  The sides looked great by themselves, but there was no way to avoid a giant, ugly seam between the bow and the sides.  This configuration made it very difficult to paint out this seam.  It probably would have been better to put the seams on the sides where they would have been much easier to paint out.
6. Reference is important, and so is making concepts based on that reference.  The shape of the hull was somewhat stylized, but it was based on photos of similar-sized ships.  The harpoon gun was based on reference (though, going along with point #3 and establishing an art style, I wish I had made it more stylized).  The cabin, bridge, and mast are all completely fantastical and almost entirely made up without reference.  It definitely shows in the noticeable disconnect in the scale, detail, and general aesthetic of those different parts.

I’d like to go back and redo most of this, maybe during the break.  For now, though, I’m working on the third project, an interior scene.  I’ve got 11 more days.