This week we have started using the Unity engine and have begun learning how to use the program by familiarizing ourselves with the tools and the UI. Learning the UI and its tools were not hard because of how well laid out the program. We also began learning how to code using C# (c sharp). This has been very hard for me because first of have all no experience coding in any language and I am not good a spelling so making sure everything I am typing in is correct has taken a fair amount of time for me. So far I haven't run into too many problems luckily only having small bumps with miss-spellings or misplacement of brackets. I do enjoy this game engine more than the Game Maker, the one we used last year because there is more I have to know than dragging and dropping little boxes to do the coding for me because of how important knowing how to code is to the world that we will be working in.
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This upcoming week we will be starting Unity which is a 3D physics/game engine where hopefully we can make cool animations with it's physics engine and take those models and put them into it's game engine and make our first 3D games. It's cool to see our 3D skills come full circle because the 2D games we made last year we made little to no sprites for those games. Now with our 3D skills hopefully we will be able to make our own characters and bone, skin, and rig them and take them into unity. Hopefully I will be able to adapt to the new UI of Unity and learn the programming part of Unity because in past years that has been hard for students to learn because of how hard programming is.
Over the past week with our refresher courses in 3Ds Max we have also learned a few new tools like Mental Ray and Particle systems. Mental Ray is a way us to simulate a sun that will have accurate light and shadows. Metal Ray is also a lot simpler than making an Omni-light and editing it until the light appears and casts the shadows you want; with Mental Ray it will cast shadows and will cast more grays and gray-blues for shadows so the color and look of the shadows are as accurate as possible. Particle Systems are some of the coolest things we have learned in 3Ds Max. With Particle Systems you can set up things like rain or snow and edit all of those with all of the modifiers that are built into them, but also you can make ripples and waves for water if you where doing a water animation. You are also able to explode things using Particle Systems to simulate what it would look like if you blow up 2D objects. The coolest thing that Particle Systems can do is you can make your own Particle Systems that is 100% editable with lost of possibilities of what is possible is you learn all of the small edits and modifications you are able to do with Particle Systems.
This past week were given an option to put in an application for a internship where we would work for four days over spring break with CISCO, the EPA, and a local pharmaceutical company. This would be could experience for me that I can put on a resume or college applications for next year. Also I think I could get a lot out of an experience like this allowing me to see inside these fields of work and see if any of them interest me and see possible job opportunities using the skills I have learned in Game Design.
Over the past year, we have done a lot of work and learned lots of cool and new programs and more ways to use programs I already knew how to use. The most important thing I learned so far was when we had a group project where we were tasked with the job of creating a board game with the concept given to us. Our concept was surviving high school but the importance of this project doesn't come from the game its self nor the art we made for the game but rather what my role was. I was the project manager for my group so I had to keep everyone on task and help people where help was needed while also completing additional tasks we had to complete. This was hard for me because this put me out of my comfort zone and was something new for me because I was the person in the group who would pitch a few well though ideas once or twice and for the majority of the time remain quiet and get all of my work done. But for this, I had to lead my group through the project and come up with all the ideas even though that wasn't my job, but it was still a fun and hard challenge for me to try and learn the valuable lesson of how to lead people through a project.
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AuthorIm a student at Durham School of the Arts Highschool in Durham North Carolina . I love playing video games and enjoy useing digital artwork as a platform to display information more efficiently, I also enjoy industrial photography and camping. Archives
May 2018
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