Tighten up the graphics on level three

A lot of people are skeptical of a game design major.  Many people who haven’t been exposed to video games as an entertainment business rivaling Hollywood wonder just how productive a degree program about time-wasting diversions could be.  And within the industry, there’s a different kind of skepticism.  It’s still a fairly young business, and game design programs are still a new concept.  Only a small portion of the people in games hold game design degrees, and all of the respected veterans got where they are with a combination of computer science and liberal arts degrees and plain gusto.  But there’s definitely another reason for the stigma attached to specialized game design programs: they produce a lot of terribly bad work.

Maybe I’m speaking prematurely, having taken only one introductory course for three weeks, and I certainly risk being exposed as an uninformed jackass myself.  To SCAD’s credit, it has an ITGM major that’s well regarded in many circles, good professors, and a pretty robust offering of useful and relevant courses in multiple disciplines.  It certainly doesn’t seem as shaky as degree mills like UAT, Collins College, or DeVryPowerUp47.com with free game demos.  But no matter where you are, a game design major tends to attract people who are very, very bad at group discussion.  Every lecture is filled with uninvited interruptions that spark a charlie foxtrot of separate, irrelevant, uninteresting, and uninformed anecdotes, opinions, and tirades.  There’s no discussion, just the same five to ten people shouting what they have to say, even if it’s completely unrelated to the lecture, the thread of the conversation, or the previous comments.

For some reason, 19 year-old kids majoring in game design think there’s something inherently special about them, and about video games as a hobby.  When you put 20 of them together in a room, they get giddy and jump at the chance to share their inside jokes and demonstrate to everyone else what a “hardcore gamer” they are, since they don’t usually get the chance — because everyday people don’t care how good you are at Gears of War 2 or what a hilarious game Conker’s Bad Fur Day was.  It doesn’t matter to them that video games are a massive mainstream hobby that the vast majority of their age group enjoys.  Those people are just casual gamers.  How dare they want simpler interfaces?  How dare Nintendo sell out to the man and make games for fad gamers — games that bring sweeping innovation to the medium, introduce millions of new buyers to the video game market, and sell 15 million units?

What irks me the most about all the loud, uninformed comments I hear every Monday and Wednesday are the people who don’t recognize that making video games is a business, and that yes, video games are time-wasting diversions.  If you spend all your time playing games, you’re never going to learn how to make them.  If every time you open your mouth you act like you’re writing a post on an internet message board, completely without forethought, you’re not allowing yourself to see other points of view.  Basically, if you think you’re enlightened and presume to know everything, you’re never going to learn everything.  And so you’ll never get a job in the games industry.  Because making games, after all, is a business.

To me, clowns aren’t funny. In fact, they’re kind of scary. I’ve wondered where this started and I think it goes back to the time I went to the circus, and a clown killed my dad.

Our fourth project in Computer Apps was to create a simple character animation, between 1 and 20 seconds, in After Effects. This is the first thing that entered my mind, and it’s what I decided to go with:

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

Don’t let anyone tell you that a second monitor isn’t worth the money.

Fallout Shelter

I finished my third Computer Apps project. I started with the cylinder shape posted earlier and was going for game-spec, but I eventually threw that out the window. Since texturing a large, complex cylindrical shape is a fairly difficult and involved process, I covered everything in corrugated steel panels, then made some props to flesh out the particular corner I decided to focus on.

It could look a lot better with much more work, but it was a good learning experience and far beyond what anyone else did (the assignment was just to model an object in Maya, no materials or lighting required). The professor and the rest of the class seemed impressed. In all, it probably took about 15 to 18 hours to finish.

My first crate

Crates are the “hello world” of game modeling. This one’s a prop for the shelter scene.  Total time: 5 minutes unwrapping, 15 minutes texturing, and 45 seconds modeling.

oh hey look it’s a drawing

The shading is far from perfect but I think it’s a marked improvement over what I’ve done before. My professor doesn’t seem to mind that nothing’s blended, and I’m fine with that too.

No refuge could save the hireling and slave

I’m taking three classes this quarter: Drawing 2, Speech, and Advanced Survey of Computer Art Applications.

Drawing classes are something that most non-illustration/painting/animation majors just have to soldier through.  It’s dumb that there’s no real commercial art alternative for career paths that don’t involve finely detailed charcoal renderings, but I got an easy professor and can pass with a B pretty easily.

Speech is a boring lecture class, but I like boring lecture classes since they’re the only thing academic about art school.  I delivered a speech on French involvement in the American Revolution and the proceeding history of Franco-American relations and got a 98.

In Computer Apps, we learn to use Illustrator, Photoshop, Maya, After Effects, Flash, and Dreamweaver.  I already know how to use all of those, so the class is a relaxing 2.5 hours of working on easy projects in a dimly lit room.  Having to use a mac kind of sucks though.

Our first project was to design a personal logo in Illustrator:

 
Second was to make something in Photoshop:

(Alternate version – The professor actually liked it with Mormon Jesus in the corner)

Now we’re working with Maya, and I’m modeling a bomb shelter similar to this:

It’s coming along alright:

Maya sucks for polygonal modeling.

We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.

poop