NURBs

Ok so I love NURBs. At first I just made random objects and shapes and stuff. I then looked over and saw my roommate's chess set and thought"I wonder if I can make a chess piece?" So after a few false starts, program crashes, and trying to figure out what I was doing, I created a few cool chess pieces. I then made a camera and made it look like the pawn was in a bit of a predicament. I rendered ambient occlusion and then with a polished stone effect thing. I overlapped them and got my final rendering

TED Talk

I just watch a few TED Talks and the one with Cameron Sinclair was pretty much amazing. It was inspiring and made me really want to make a difference. I've debated for a while on if I want to go into Viz or Arch for grad school. The TED Talks bring up the same problem I have been dealing with. Though I can make decent money in Viz if I try, I don't feel I can really change the world with it. Cameron Sinclair really made me want to pursue Arch because of ow much it can change the world. I might be slightly delusional in thinking I can, but it seems it would be a waste to pursue a career purely for money. I also watched the Hans Rosling and Jeff Han talks. They were both really interesting. Hans Rosling was interesting because its a little crazy how much the world has changed and how statistics and information can be displayed. Jeff Han was interesting but it also made me think how useless the equipment is when people don't have homes and food and water. I think I need to watch the others at a different time. Overall they were all really good and I will watch more as soon as I have a free moment

TED Talks

Maya Tutorials

After countless hours setting up Maya and watching the videos, I was frustrated beyond belief. Then I found the example files and it all started falling into place. Stephanie and I sat down at about 1 o’clock and started working. It was a lot easier with another person because it helped to talk about what was going on and usually one person got it. So the first thing we wanted to learn was depth of field. The tutorials used a cool robot to explain it. First we learned what it was, which is to make an image look more realistic by adjusting the focal distance of the camera. After that we learned how to connect a camera to an object and find its distance to put into the depth of field. Then we rendered it and saw that it was really grainy. To fix it we adjusted the contrast threshold. I adjusted a section from the buttons on the robots chest to the eye. I did not change the whole image because of the time it would have taken to render it all would have been substantial.

Global illumination

On to Global Illumination! We spent a while learning about how to use the global illumination settings and they were fun! GI is when light photons bounce around the image. This makes the image more realistic because it picks up color from other objects and carries it to slightly color the surrounding objects. The things with GI is that it took a lot of tweaking numbers to get it to look right but in the end it really looked cool.

Overall

Ok so overall that took a while. For me and those disk and maya and everything, it just never all worked at the same time. It finally did all work and I did some cool looking renderings and learned a lot more interesting things than I thought I would starting out. My favorite would have to be depth of field. Even though this is a fairly easy item to add to an image, I have some strange love of it. Maybe its the really cool robot, maybe it was my first major thing to learn from the tutorial(after spending hours learning things I didn't use and didn't really need to watch at the moment), maybe it is because I love the contrast between blurry and sharp. Who knows? The thing I do know is that I learned some really cool techniques from this tutorial and I can learn more from it(when I have the free time, which is rare).

Final Project

For my final project, I think I am going to do something in processing. It seemed fairly easy to work with and the tutorials were decent. They didnt fully explain everything but I would go back and change numbers to see what it was controlling. I think I could do something very interesting in it. I want to create a program thing that is controlled by mouse movement. I saw a really cool one done in flash that had spheres moving around whenever the mouse came close to them. I dont know if I can do something that complex but that is the general idea that I am going for.

processing

I just downloaded and started working with processing. I have not done much programing before so it was really interesting. I went through several different tutorials working on building up the complexity of what I could create. I worked through learning some basic commands and ideas. In the end I understood what I was doing when I would type out something. I probably could not create my own very easily because I still do not know all of the commands I have learned by heart and would probably need more complex ideas to make something interesting enough to watch or mess with.

processing.org