Animation Final Reflection

A Valuable Take Away from Each e-Comm Guarantee:

Technology:

I have learned a lot from e-Comm but it has definitely allowed me to get some experience with industry standard programs for technology such as Maya and all of the Adobe Products. Throughout this year I have also learned much more about Macs and their specialties compared to PC's. Most of my learning of these things comes from personal experience in class rather then being lectured to which is a nice change compared to almost every class. 

Collaboration:

Collaboration is a vital concept that is hard to learn and even harder to master. Being able to take 5 ideas and mold them into one is a very challenging task. I have had one major group project in this class and it was the final. We had to adapt to each others ideas and situations and come up with the best solution for each problem we encountered. Like technology, most of our experience with Collaboration was just throwing yourself into a collaborative environment and getting to work. This skill is especially important for me considering I am wanting to go into animation myself, specifically in game design. If I had to nail down one thing that I learned this whole year for Collaboration is that often team work can be independent. Sometimes the best way for someone to do what they need to is too leave them alone so they can do the best they can.

Communication:

Communication ties into collaboration quite well. To describe my visions/issues/ideas for a project I needed to find the best way to communicate them. This is still quite difficult for me considering that I am almost always in my head and can rarely describe how I want something to be. This is definitely something I am still working on and this year has really helped in that regard. The main learning environment was both away and in the action if that makes sense. I would have to work it out in my head how I would want to say something, and then attempt how I would. 

Project Management:

Project management is horribly difficult for me. I can plan something down to the finest details just fine, anyone can. Problems arise, however, when I get side tracked. Side tracking is one of the most difficult things for me to control when working on a project of any type because I am somewhat of a perfectionist. I can't just run through a project and THEN fix it. Each segment I do HAS to be perfect after I work on it. That being said: This year really tested me in that regard. One of the most valuable things I learned this year has been that in animation you must go through the entire project first. Then you refine. A problem that I was encountering with the 2d story project is that I would be working on a segment and I would get it to look good for that part, but it didn't line up at all with anything else. This made it so that I had to redo that section all the way through and refine it. Flow is one of the main parts of animation and I really learned that through error this year. 

Leadership:

Leadership has always been a natural thing for me, ever since I was a child. I have always wanted to take lead and see my vision through but their are a couple problems with this. 1: I am not the only person with a view or vision. One of the harder things for people to realize is that everyone is creative. Everyone has their own unique imagination and concepts for something but the main thing that sets artists away from normal people is the ability to realize their imagination and make it reality. Having this in mind I tried to "lead" my groups and take in every view point and go with the best option. Leaders have to be realize their own strengths and weaknesses as well as the people around them, take them into account, and form a plan based off them. 2: Natural does not mean born amazing. I have always been working on how to communicate to a team or group, and as I said earlier, I'm defiantly not the best at it. The great thing about e-Comm is that it throws me straight into an environment where I can decide what skills need to be refined and work towards it. One of the main skills I have been working on as a whole is leadership. Wether it be leading a project in school or managing my own gaming groups and organizations outside of class. 

Strengths and Weaknesses

To better yourself its important to take into account what you are good at and what your are needing to improve upon. Lets start with strengths:

Like I said in my Guarantees segment, I am quite good at taking initiative as a leader. I am very objective based and very goal oriented. I like to be able to have something to work too in projects so that I can have a clear mindset when it comes to working on something. I am also very capable at being able to think of solutions. I have a very good ability to analyze multiple pieces of a puzzle and put them together. The trouble comes when I try to communicate these solutions.

I often say to myself that my mind is my greatest asset and my voice is my worst. I can't thoroughly communicate ideas to other people yet and I'm needing to work on it more. Another issue I have is that sometimes I get to caught up in my ideas that I can't take in others. I try to be as optimistic as possible since, ya know, I'm not an all knowing god who can't do anything wrong. But sometimes I desperately try to stay with my vision no matter what and it often works against me in the end. 

What Would I Fix?

Oh I have one project that has been in the back of my head ever since we did it. One project that I thought was so awful that every time I messed something up I would say to myself "At least it wasn't the 2d story project". The 2d story project. This is what made me realize why I don't want to go into 2d animation. This project pushed my to the end of my sanity. Their was a time where half of my progress on the project got corrupted and I was screwed over. Very rarely do I hate one of my projects so vividly as this one. If I had to fix ANY project it would be this one. This project was awful. I would fix it just to get it out of my head. Their are things that you can learn from failure. But this one is a little too much.

Conclusion

Sophomore year. I hated it. I did not like it at all. Lots of things outside of school, marching band stressed me out, friend issues and many more factors come into my disliking of this year. Thankfully e-Comm made my year a little better. I have a feeling senior year I will look back on my journey and remember this year fondly but I don't know how. Leave it to melancholy I guess. Anyway this year of e-Comm has been a lot of fun for me and was a great experience. I can't wait to start next year, considering 2 of my hours will be dedicated to animation alone. 

Responsive Design

Making a Responsive Web Site

Its been a while since I blogged about web design but unfortunately everyday I am held captive in my web design room and forced to work and now I have to blog on top of that. Anyway our latest project was a photo composition website and it focused on reducing photo size to increase load speed. Now after this we had to make that website responsive so that all platforms can load the site.

Percentages

Too make a website responsive their is one crucial step. Almost all measurements must be in percentage. This makes it adjust to whatever system it is opened on. So say I set the body width style to 70%. No matter what system it is opened on it will open it at 70%. 

Media tags

At the very end of the CSS we had to add tags that are media tags for specific systems. Tablets, monitors, ect. This is used so that the people viewing the website can actual operate it on their level. Say my sidebar is 20%. This might be small for mobile users but big for PC/MAC users. This is solved with the media tag. It makes certain specifications for certain systems so all users can operate your site.

Balls falling

Animated Falling Balls

No suprises here. Just falling balls. Pretty self explanatory isn't it? This was a very simple project but it was pretty fun non the less. In this project we were given the task of recording 3 different balls falling and then we had to animate them in Maya based off the videos we took. 

Spread Sheet 

The first thing we did for this project was record 3 balls fall onto the ground and bounce all over the place. These three balls were a golf ball, bowling ball, and tennis ball. After we recorded the balls falling we then went on to possibly the most tedious thing we have done in this class beside fixing the 2d story animations (I still have flashbacks). We had to take these videos into photoshop and mark the frames where the ball hit the ground and where the ball was at its highest for each jump. After we did this we had to enter it into a spread sheet along side the heights of the balls and their jumps. This took FOREVER because of issues with the server. 

Maya

Maya was very simple. All we had to do was create all 3 balls (including bump maps and textures) and animate them. The animation part worked like this: We took the balls and set each key frame equivalent to the frames we marked in Maya. After that we took the height of the balls AT those keyframes and set them so equal. After we did this for each ball we got a picture of a warehouse and set it to the background. 

Conclusion

That was about it for this project. Defiantly more self explanatory then anything else but still good practice. I thought that it came out great for what I have done but I did have to adjust a couple key frames to make it more seamless. 

Snow!

The next animation project was based off of something that we are all very familiar with recently, snow! It was a fun project since everyones end product looked very different. 

Special Snowflakes

The first objective for this project was to create the snowflakes themselves. We did this using a special creation tool with a curve tool. We created a one sided shape with this tool and then mirrored the shape against itself. This then created a segment of the snowflake. After we have the one segment we used a "special rotation" tool that rotated the segment in a circle and thus a snowflake was born. We repeated this 5 more times resulting in 6 individual, different flakes. 

Snowfall!

After we created and grouped the snowflakes we created a basic window model to add some context to the scene. We then had to duplicate the snowflakes to create 18 so the animation could go on for longer. After all of this it was time to animate! We set the frame rate to 24FPS and put the max frames to 240. This, obviously, is 10 seconds long. The next part was very easy. All we had to do was create a key frame where the snowflakes were at the top and at the bottom. I rotated the bottom one to make the snowflakes seem to be randomly spinning.

Conclusion

This was a very fun project because of everyones different snowflakes and personal twist on the project. It was also a lot of fun just creating the snowflakes.

Magic Potions

Magic Potions!

For this project we were given the task to create a bottle of our own brand and create a wrapper with logo, description, and barcode. This project was one of the easiest we have done thus far and I really didn't find anything about it challenging.

Sketching

The first thing we needed to do was create a mock up sketch of both our bottle and the wrapper. This was simple so it didnt take much time. Everyone else was doing things like soda and juice but I was feeling a little creative and decided to make a "Magic Potion". It was titled "Gunter's Elixir". The name is based off my online name and I just thought elixir sounded cool.

Modeling

This model was very simple to create. I just created an outline with the bevel tool, created the surface with revolve, and converted surface to polygon. After this I created a duplicate to serve as the liquid inside the bottle, with the original being used for the glass with a bit of transparency. After this it was to photoshop! In PS I created a canvas of the dimensions required and drew the logo, got a barcode off the internet, and my wrapper was created. All I had to do was save for web (bc I'm not a fool who uses low quality images) and import it as a texture in Maya. 

Really bad web design

Dodge these design habits/stupid ideas.

So at the moment our websites are really bad. I mean really bad. But compared to these we honestly look like web design veterans that created the internet. 

STOP USING IMAGES FOR SIDE BAR BUTTONS

WHY. Like seriously WHY DO PEOPLE DO THIS. It looks awful. I have seen next to NONE that use images to an advantage with the side bar buttons.

Color scheme, or ya know, just don't have one. That works to.

Just make a color scheme. Like don't have every color as a color scheme because thats not actually a color scheme. Fine I'll just give you one. Blue Orange and white. Go have fun.

Sound on websites....

I hope water falls on your keyboard.

Make images look nice.

Like ok if your going to add images at LEAST make it seem like they fit.

Other Ideas:

buttons...EVERYWHERE

not aligning anything

having a front page that has a link to the actual front page

white text on yellow background

autoplaying anything

Why do people do this?

Well to put it simple, they are to self centered. The designers of these websites are too scared to look objectively at there work so they cant improve themselves. Another problem is that these people lack simple understanding of design fundamentals such as color schemes and alignment. Sites such as these have been completely abandoned do to the introduction of sites such as wix and other automatic formats available.  

Credit to crappy web designers

http://www.roverp6cars.com/

http://www.arrestling.com/index.html

https://nwokillers.weebly.com/our-beliefs.html

http://www.libertyvan.com/

First 3d animation

3D Animation

So for our first animation project we went back to the good old ice cream models. The animation was incredibly simple but it just got us a little more comfortable with the animation workspace in Maya. This project was probably the easiest that we will ever be given in this class and I say that with the utmost certainty.

So All we had to do for this project was create a "lazy Susan" and make it rotate the ice cream models. And surprisingly its as easy as it sounds. All we had to do for this project is create a couple of groups and rotate those groups. I did it within like 30 minutes, fastest e-Comm project ever. There was nothing really complex but again, this was just an intro to the topic so we really didn't have many complicated tasks to complete.