ANC220 - Week 08

This last week I decided to prioritize my individual study. I've been thinking a lot lately about how to best to do this in different ways instead of simply sitting down and modelling over and over. In saying that, I did however come up with a bit of a list of things I MAY try and model by the end of the tri. The reason that I say 'may', is because they don't really align with my original conversation with Phil that they'd all be part of the one scene. But, after working on those models that I spoke about last week - I really grew to enjoy certain aspects of them, so much so that I came up witha few models I think I'd have a lot of fun trying to model and paint.

The list is as below:

- Finish off the Ocarina

- Model and tex Master Sword

- Model and tex Buster Sword

- Model and tex Longboard

The ocarina is pretty obvious because most of the topology is already done - although I did run into serious issues trying to smooth out some parts (as I mentioned in last blog (might have been the one before)) and if that's the case, then I'll turf it because it'll porobably take me less time to remodel the entire thing than to try and fix it - I've learned some troubleshooting in Maya.

The next two are assets from game franchises that I love, the first is from the Zelda universe and the other is from the Final Fantasy one - both assets would get me trying to play with light more closely due to the nature of the objects - in my last couple of models, I was concentrating on more matte surfaces, plastics and rubbers, but with these I'll get to experiment a bit more - to this end, I'd have a multitude of different models created with a range of texture techniques.

The last one is leveraging off the skateboard that i created earlier - I loved that particular one so much that while I was working on it, I knew that I wanted to come up with new designs as well - well further to that, i now also wasn't to create new topology and different deck designs as well - because the trucks and wheels are already done, I'll save time there too (although I could always change those too if I'm so inclined).

I feel that all those are achievable over the next 5 weeks too - at least based on how I've been tracking this term already - I'm also very aware that things might and probably will come up to impede my progress, but as long as I don't change my mind about what else to do for my individual study, then I have something to work towards. How will I track this? Well, I've started with this blog and like in my pitch in Week 2, I could set a reasonable goal of knocking one out per week (all things going well). I can then put all these in my portfolio which will be very important for the next thing that I want to talk about...

Internship. So I really wanted to get this done this term (be in an intern position) - because that way I'd have the longest possible time before the ned of the course to get my 80 hours. Although, as you know, that hasn't been the case so far. Not to mention that after meeting with Chris in Week1, I had a lot of work to do to update my resume and consequently my portfolio. We of course did this for CIU something or other last year, but since then my work has become better, and besides, I felt that hte website needs a facelift. And that's where most of my work has gone this past week - www.ryanmittencreative.com.au

I know, it's pretty dope. OK, actually I don't know - I really like it and for a number of reasons.

Firstly, I'm a big believer in good design but I've found that over the years that each persons interpretation of 'good' is of course, subjective and often times not aligned with what I think. Now I'm no professional, but I do have a diploma in Multimedia and for a short while I worked in graphic design - I don't say this because I think I"M very good, but I've been taught and worked alongside people who are. Of course, the obvious thing to do is point to Jacob Nielsen's Useit.net or .com, or wahtever the url extension is (Funnily enough we learned about him when I studied IT and not Multimedia - go figure). Anyway, all that preamble is kinda pointless because i don't have any pictures form the website as it used to look which I'm a little sad about now.

Nevertheless, my original design had a theme where the headers and footers as well as the main body design and layout were all complimentary. I kept that same idea throughout this iteration but drastically overhauled the elements and actualy design of each element.

I customised each page banner to be relevant to that particular pages' content.

And the pista resistance (did I get that right?) is the interactive, downloadable resume, updated as per Chris' suggestions.

You can view my entire resume from within the site, and it's interactive in that all my education and work info, as well as social media hubs are all accessible through the resume from within my website, and if you need to have it on the go, you can download it directly from the page using a link below. Pretty nifty I thought.

Anecdotally, when I studied Multimedia it was 2006-7, and back then Flash websites were a huge deal - so we predominantly created websites for people and projects using Flash - as a back end for more business orientated websites or something that required database functionality, we built things in Dreamweaver utilizing HTML when it was still in version 3. Yet I spent 2 business days playing inside a website builder *shrugs*. Nearly all the skills I picked up during that course are now redundant. Such is technology.

I also updated my portfolio with my latest 3D work and changed the layout as well to make it more appealing. On that page there's a bit more work to do as I want to annotate each piece of work but I'm yet to get around to that. Have a a look for yourself and you can tell me what you think!

Right so back to it - this was all a precursor to my wanting to start applying for internships - now that my resume and website are up to date as well as my portfolio - I feel comfortable approaching businesses and asking them if they will take m on for an internship for this course. I know this isn't EXACTLY personal studying that it's kind of a different thing all together, but I kinda feel that at the same time it is? I mean, I did spend a whole lotta time this week on the website BUT now it's done and I can work on actually making more models and practicing my textures which was the actual focal point of my independent study, and every time I've completed work to that end, it can go straight onto the new website. So it all kinda works together - meaning that I would've had to have updated the website anyway in order ot have an up to date portfolio to better my chances of getting the internship. Big ol' circle.

Other than all that, I spent time with Simon working on our second Pass for the animation for studio - Rob has given me feedback and Simon and I will meet up tomorrow before class to work through the changes - fingers crossed that we'll survive because that camera work is actually quite confusing. Simon and I often found yourself back tracking over the same shot dozens of times because we'd get confused between our 14 cameras and story board. I also know that these numbers are child's play when compared to big budget movies, but i'm not working on a big budget movie, so it's all relative. Then there's been the work for Nigel; another week means he needs another rig built and I go deeper into work induced insanity - I have a very low level of enjoyment when I rig. And finally there's the work I've had to do for CIU but we don't discuss that here.

This week I expect to be working through the 3rd pass with Simon, hopefully putting together a model for my independent study, build yet another rig for nigel and squeeze CIU in there too.

- Ryan