An exciting and mildly sleep deprived ending to the first quarter of the Gnomon Digital Production for Entertainment program. I was told over and over again, "Say goodbye to your social life." How true... It's been very difficult to stay in touch with people, sleep, and eat non-vending machine food, but hopefully next quarter I will find a good balance. I do not at all regret applying to this program. Some of this term was review, but I found that all of the classes blend together very well. This first term I had Visual Communications 1, Intro to Maya, Texture Mapping 1, Storyboarding, Overview of Visual Effects and Games, and Intro to Compositing.
Visual Communications
This class was all about drawing things in perspective from a product design point of view. We focused on the primitive shapes for 70% of the term, starting with cubes, moving on to spheres, cones and cylinders, and then gradually learning proper line weights, value, shadows, and composition.
After that we did a primitive sort of character using at least one of each shape. I really am surprised at how much time I had to spend on this class just to get some decent results. It usually took all day Sunday and on many occasions, all of Sunday night.
Our final was a fictional or non-fictional product design. My weird little brain came up with a toy for kids to interact with their goldfish. Goldfish are not the most exciting pets, so I thought, what if you could take it for a walk, or even a swim?
We had go from our rough concept sketches to our line drawings, value studies, and final renders showing a beauty shot, detail shot, and usage shot. I would actually like to see this concept get made, after a few design tweaks. The fish does get the short end of the stick and I'm still thinking of a way to make it a gentler ride.
Intro to Maya
This class was mostly review and I really was disappointed with the amount of time I spent on the homework. I definitely could have tried harder. As seen in this example: "The Love Toilet". Why not share your bathroom time with your loved one?
This class was pretty fast paced. For our final we had 1 week to model a room, 1 week to texture it, 1 week to light and render. Fortunately we got a bit of an extension. I'm still working on this but here's my work in progress. This is from that not so well done TMNT movie, and this is the sewer den.
