Meadow Mouse

All classes leave an impression, even the ones I didn't like. If I learned anything from Game Design last year, it's that game creation is not my thing. I give up too easily when faced with puzzles I don't know how to solve. I am generally a non-aggressive person, and most games are warlike to the point that I'm afraid of playing after a couple of levels. Yes, I am actually afraid of continuing to play Spore because I angered the Grox (and the game practically requires that you do so, what's up with that?) Furthermore, they are a big time-drain. I can't play a video game for less than 2 hours (I know this from experience). Where, between work, school, and communicating with DePaul, and doing housework, and doing more schoolwork, do I have the time to play video games?
The answer is: None. Nada. Zip. I'm cutting into my schoolwork just to write this blog entry.

As I said before though, the class left an impression on me, and thus I've begun coming up with a game. (I must be out of my mind.) Here's the concept:

You play as a young field mouse. You start out in a meadow, but as you explore and collect items three opportunities to win the level will present themselves. Which one to go for is completely up to you, but ultimately you can only successfully complete one.

Your decision leads you to a new area where you explore and acquaint yourself with the local resources and hazards. Two ways to win the level are given. Once again, which way you go is totally your choice.

This format continues to the next level, with three chances to move forward. The last level has three chances to ultimately win the game.

There are, in total, 10 worlds in the game, but the player will only visit four. The method you win each level determines which one you go to next. The general three ways to win are building something, defeating an enemy, or solving a puzzle.

In short, I'm trying to fix what I don't like about Spore.

Preparing

I am preparing to attend DePaul University in Chicago this winter.

Yikes.

Every time I check my e-mail, I realize how much paperwork I still have to do, the orientation I must attend, and the room clean-out that needs doing before I leave. I'm not sure how on earth I'm going to get all of this done. I am considering quitting my cashiering job just to have the time. The thought scares me a bit, mostly because I have never written a letter of resignation before and I'm a little unsure on how to go about it. Also, I have gotten very used to having a paycheck handed to me every 2 weeks. Minimum wage or no, it's a nice thing to not have to hit up your parents for money to fuel up the car and buy art supplies.

Sure, I have a savings account, but I don't like dipping into it much. I guess my hope is that it will grow enough that when I'm in my thirty's and some emergency happens, I will have cash stored away to deal with it and not go bankrupt. Or at least that's my logic for now. Give it a year or two, and I may use some of it to buy a copy of Maya, or a new computer.

I am in the middle of a major transition, but I must take a moment to congratulate a friend for making it through her own . My buddy Maria shipped off to basic training at Fort Jackson on Monday. She now has the rank "Private" officially attached to her name. I'm proud of her. She'll do great things.

Additive Color

Because I work with computers all the time, the concept of additive color has been explained to me before. Subtractive color is what we learn in school. The primary colors are red, yellow, and blue (or magenta, yellow, cyan if you're using a printer). Mixing these colors give you new colors (red + yellow = orange) but as you add more colors, the more the colors turn to black. Additive colors work in reverse. The primary colors are red, green, and blue (as in an RGB computer monitor). As you mix the primary colors of light, the color fades closer to white.

I just came to understand this last night. I was so excited about this, that I made a color-wheel in Photoshop to illustrate the concept.

Then I realized it looks like a beach ball.

But anyway, there are several things that became clear. One, if I intend to make an unusual shader that appears yellow with green undertones, throwing red into the mix might create some interesting colors. Two, what my art teacher was saying the other day about blue and red being complements (rather than red and green) now makes a whole lot more sense. On an additive color wheel, red and cyan are indeed complementary (and will also create a wild vibrating edge when put next to each other).

Catch-Up

So I haven't posted for a while. Journals and logs have never been my forte. I like to keep moving on to the next activity. Nonetheless, I have been asked to return to Penguins with Jet Packs for the sake of my future career. How can I refuse?

First things first. Animation 3 is long over and here are the results:

In other news, I am having loads of fun playing with Maya again. Parkland has recently obtained Maya 2011, and it is slick. Takes some getting used to, yes, but the new graphite color-scheme was a good design choice, and the new button defaults are nice too. I don't remember if there was a "select camera" button on the window before, but it's there now, and I will be using it.

Using this new version of Maya, I have begun to model a tiger-swallowtail butterfly. Yes, a butterfly. They're actually quite fluffy, and I'm excited to learn about the fur tool later in the semester. A classmate also suggested modifying the colors on the butterfly to create The Butterfly Of Doom. I'm thinking red eyes and a black body and wings with white, red, yellow-green, and purples thrown in. I'll need to try a few designs first.

Practice Makes Perfect

The human body is a complicated thing; one of the many reasons why I hesitate about drawing people. Nothing illustrates the amazing functionality of ourselves like trying to make a CG short with a human character, even a cartoony one. For the last half a semester, I've been working on a character named "Banjo Guy". Yes, that's what he's called, so says I. He's a 10-year-old-ish kid with a floppy cowboy hat, red Converse, and a banjo that he's still learning how to play. Through the creation and animation of Banjo Guy, I've learned a few things:

• Thumbs are really hard to re-create.
• The hip joint, likewise hard to animate so that it doesn't collapse on itself.
• Oh, and shoulders, shoulders are hard to make too.
• Arms are a lot longer than you might think. My finger-tips reach to mid-thigh, but Banjo Guy's only make it to his hip joints. This creates problems with posing (he looks like he has his hands on his hips when he shouldn't) and also makes it difficult to perform motions like getting up from the ground (he has to lean waaaayyyy back to lean on his hands).
• A character's just a statue until you rig up the eye controls. When you do, you'll suddenly have a living character on your hands. Possibly the most thrilling moment in the rigging process.
• Eyebrows can only do three or four different things (up, down, or one of each); mouths are a little more mobile, but still limited. It's the pairings between what the mouth's doing and what the eyebrows are doing that give us the fantastic range of facial expressions. Good news for CG characters like Banjo Guy.

At the moment, the best I have to show for my several months of work is this video:

I'm looking forward to summer. It can't come soon enough.

Time Travel: A Problematic Activity

Time travel has been so overdone in animation. But really now, what writer hasn't fantasized about a character being able to tell his younger self that something is a bad idea, or go back in time to meet a character who is dead in their own time, or see their parents when they were their age. The potential for comedy and/or heartwarming moments is almost irresistible.

But time travel always has it's set of risks. The potential for risk changes with author interpretation, and I think that stems from the author's personal tolerance for serious brain cramps. If you change something in the past it will effect the future, this is agreed upon; question is, have the results manifested already or haven't they? Will you return to find that what you thought you were trying to change was directly caused by your meddling in the first place (ex: the scenario in Artemis Fowl: The Time Paradox), or will you return to find Nazi Germany busting down your door? (incredibly unlikely, but this does seem to be a trope)

Though it's sometimes fun to speculate about the time stream, I think a major source of glitches would come from the time-travel hardware itself. My own time-traveling character uses a wrist mounted device called the Crono-Drive Series 3. It is a pretty standard concept of a time machine, able to jump back and forth over several centuries and little more than that, but it has a few issues. Longer jumps through time are inaccurate, with as much as a two year margin of error. Shorter jumps are better on the accuracy, but the corrections drain the battery. The battery takes about ten hours of recharge time (a process needing no electric cords thank goodness).

The character's father has the newest model, series 5, which is able to speed up or slow down time for the user. Useful in combat if you're likely to run into that kind of thing, but it too is a battery drainer. My character counts himself lucky with the Series 3 though. The Series 1 was a backpack with a 50 year jump range, and the Series 2... Well... let's hope you aren't very attached to that hamster shirt...

No Cookies for Me

Have I been putting off posting for three weeks? Oh yes. Yes I have.

To be completely honest, though my life is far from boring right now, I have come to the realization that most people don't understand animation jargon enough to find an account of my day at all interesting.

Just about the only interesting thing I can think of right now is Lent. No, I am not catholic, but my home church decided that every member of the church should fast in some way for the 21 days before Easter Sunday. In comparison to the people who started on Fat Tuesday, we probably have it easy. Relatively.

So, for my fast I gave up facebook and TV Tropes. Oh yes, the internet is suddenly so much more boring without the two. Bright side is, I've had time to do some actual writing. Now If only I'd utilize that time to actually write things down instead of just watching TV... I have had to bend on one detail though. My friends have been arranging to get together using the message feature on facebook. For the sake of keeping up with the conversation, I've had to log on a few times to use that. But that's really more like lazy e-mail. Right?

In addition to this fast-of-the-mind, my parents and I are doing a thing called a Daniel Fast. Referencing a passage in the bible concerning Daniel and his friends, the Daniel Fast is like a vegan diet... only stricter. I'm pretty sure vegans eat leavening (yeast, baking soda, baking powder) and sugar. People on the Daniel fast don't. It's not all that bad because I really like fruit and nuts. I can't keep my hands out of the almond jar. But try working at a grocery store while you're on one of these fasts.

"Hey look! The bakery left all the past-date St. Pattie's day cookies on the break room table for us to eat! Whoo hoo!

"...oh. wait. I can't have any..."

The whole point of this, in case you were wondering, is to remind ourselves that God is more important than food. Really, think about it. How many more times do you think about bread, juice, or chicken nuggets in a day than you think about God? When you be honest with yourself, it's sad. Life is more than just satisfying our physical needs and doing whatever feels good. Life is meant to be an adventure, and God is the guy with the map in is head leading us down the mountain pass. And adventures sometimes require you to skip a few meals so you can get to the next stop sooner. Or at the very least eat a lot of trail mix while your hiking.

Trail mix minus the M&Ms...

Twiggy and the Jackalope

I've been kicking around the idea of putting my long dormant 50Webs account to good use and creating a web comic. Granted, I'd probably need some help and a new graphics tablet. Mine broke recently. Sigh. You can't really do drawing with a mouse. It just doesn't work that way.

So the comic in question would be Twiggy and the Jackalope, a silly adventure story about a Christmas reindeer-in-training (Twiggy) and a tribe of mythical antlered jackrabbits (jackalope) who need some assistance reclaiming their homeland (an inter-dimensional patch of land that fills in the Grand Canyon). The adventure rambles along on a few twists and turns and includes evil Christmas elves, a guy in a hot-air balloon, skeptical white-tailed deer, a female bigfoot, and a tasmanian tiger.

Oh, and did I mention the army of blood thirsty chupacabres?

I need to play with the style a little and see what works. I might do a little mixed-media to save drawing time. I'll have to see how it goes.

Simple as Algorithm, Bird, Calculus

I call it a drip bird. It is made entirely of NURBs shapes for those who know the needed bravery that entails. I don't understand the NURBs fear. Didn't give me any problems.

Well... except for the one thing with the feet, and the seams... and merging the body and neck... and...

Coloring, interestingly enough, is done entirely by ramp shaders. Yup. That's it. Lots and lots of ramp shaders. The feathers are all duplicates. It really was a lot more ctrl + D and scaling than actual modeling with CV points.

Am I talking CG babble? Sorry. I'll stop.

Suffice to say it's still a work-in-progress because, though it's cute, it can certainly be better. Maybe I'll make a family scene with them when I'm done.

In other news, my MEL Scripting teacher is out to get us! No, really. He has a thing for trick questions. It's really annoying. And the Pythagorean theorem? It's everywhere. Maya practically runs off the Pythagorean theorem. So, if you want to be a successful CG artist, start memorizing: a^2 + b^2 = c^2 OR c = sqroot (a^2 + b^2) . Life will be easier if you don't have to relearn this concept once every year.

Game design isn't much better. Game characters move in algorithms. *head-desk*

Grandma Jo

If Heaven has a bookstore (which I'm sure it does because many authors have gone there, and I can't imagine there wouldn't be a use for books), then my Grandma Jo is probably helping an angel find a good read right now. Or maybe she's catching up with Grandpa George and her parents. Maybe she'll even run into Grandma and Grandpa Young (I hear they were always friendly to each other, despite the in-law trope.)

Grandma passed away this Wednesday after a battle with cancer the lasted about a year. I've been living at her house half the week because she's closer to my school, so she has probably become my closest grandparent. She showed me that a lot of my quirks are genetic. Like the love of everything Beanie Baby. Or the dislike of carbonated beverages. Or the need to talk loud when we get excited. Other things I just had to scratch my head at. Like worrying about the dishwasher running properly. Or never having ice in a drink. Or washing her hair in the sink. Grandma was a little odd at times, but in a way that always made you smile.

Grandma was the queen of customer service. She worked at Berean Bookstore for a very long time (I want to say 17 years?). When the store was going to cut her benefits, she relocated to Family Christian Bookstore in Urbana. Her loyal customers followed her. It wasn't the store they liked, it was my Grandma's attention to other's needs. They knew that Grandma would try her best to find exactly what they wanted. Grandma was also a talker. She couldn't always figure out how to use her cellphone, but she maxed out her minutes in maybe the third month after getting it.

I'll miss my grandma, but I know that I will see her again. God did not create us to end at physical death. He created us to live eternally for him.

How to Make Ramen (for computers maybe)

Yes. This is a homework assignment for scripting class.

If anyone is actually reading the blog, sorry for not posting yesterday. I was stuck in a house with no internet connection. My homework for Game Design is to play a video game for 9 hours. Yes, you read that right, nine hours. The game I picked is Viewtiful Joe. Nicely challenging. No, it is frustrating. I've been playing it for maybe 5 hours. I'm on level two.

I'd go on, but it's 9:45 at night, and I'm about ready to drop. More on Monday.

Puppy Board

Have you ever been bored out of your skull with only a cheap, back-flipping wind-up toy for entertainment? Neither have I, but Parkland's Monday Game Design class is now prepared for such a scenario, for we have invented a game and have dubbed it Puppy Board!

Now how do you play Puppy Board? The setup and rules are simple. Find a piece of paper and pencil (standard notebook size) and draw a target that fills the width of the page that looks like so:

The number 1 is always placed in the center, and the number 10 is always outside the target. The placement of 2 through 9 is up for interpretation as long as all numbers are represented in the spaces without repeating.

After drawing the board, find a second piece of paper to keep score on. Find some friends to play with (2-4 players recommended), then wind up the back-flipping wind-up toy, place it in the center, and let it go. When it finally runs out of boing, take note of which space the tail of the critter has landed in (assuming it has a tail), and that is the number of points you get.

If the wind-up's tail lands on a line, the score on the outer part of the line (farthest from center) is given. If the wind-up falls over mid-flip, no points are earned. This happens quite frequently, so don't feel bad if it occurs.

Take turns winding up the toy and add up total scores after each round. If someone has 20 pts after a round is completed, they are the winner. If two people are tied for the 20 pts. They take one last turn for a tie-breaker.

This game was our first group assignment in Game Design, and is named Puppy Board because the original wind-up was... well... a yellow puppy dog.

Lots of Snow

We've got about 6-8 inches of snow accumulation on the ground right now. It is the second snow-day in a row for my brother. I'm glad my own classes haven't started yet. I have a feeling that Parkland wouldn't stop for a snow-day. Parkland doesn't stop for anything.

I want to hope, though, that the UPS truck doesn't stop for much either. This year to save money, I ordered my textbooks online through Barnes & Nobel. That was Tuesday. No books yet, but I'm crossing my fingers that the first might come today, if road conditions don't stop them that is. I just want my books before I have to use them. Maybe I should've ordered them on Monday... Have to say though, used books on the internet are dirt cheap, if you jump quick enough.

I've started reading another series called Warriors by Erin Hunter. It's a little below my reading level (Ok, so I should've picked this book up in 6th grade if I wanted it at reading level) but a good book is a good book. It's about feral cats who live in their own tribes. I won't ramble about the details. If you have any 6th or 7th graders you need to keep occupied (or a really bright 5th grader for that matter) Pick up this series. If the rest of the books are like the first one, then they're going to be good.

I was also poking around on hulu.com the other day and found a clip on the making of Avatar. If you know anything about motion capture and computer animation, or simply get as excited as I do about seeing what raw footage looks like before all the computer stuff is added, then watch this. Warning: it is 10 minutes long. What struck me as really cool... Well, they have these alien beasts-of-burden in the movie that are kind of like horses. People ride them and stuff, but one would assume that the animators completely added them in from scratch. Nope. The actors, decked out in their motion capture suits, were riding real live horses on set. Which is, by the way, inside a warehouse. With lots of expensive camera equipment. It's a wonder the horses didn't break something, but it makes for a believable performance so kudos to them.

One more weekend till school. I don't know whether to be happy or sigh in disappointment.

Post-it's, Dragons, and Tropes

Beth: What's with all the Post-it notes?

B.E.: It's for an experiment. I'm seeing how many ways you can disrupt class.

Beth: Post-it's?

B.E.: You'd be surprised.

Today I finally checked out the second book of the Temeraire series. It's a series that I've recently gotten hooked on (because anything with talking dragons catches my interest frankly). It's an alternate history of the Napoleonic wars where the "what if dragons were real" question is answered with "The air force would've been invented sooner, and it wouldn't have involved airplanes." It's a good read, and I'd recommend it for anyone who likes fantasy or can easily imagine a British accent on all the dialogue. Written by Naomi Novik if your interested. First book's called His Majesty's Dragon.

Another bit of reading that I've found wildly entertaining is the website TVTropes. A trope is something in fiction writing that generally goes unquestioned by an audience, whether or not it applies to the real world. The website utilizes it's own terms such as...

• Fridge Logic: Errors and fallacies that a viewer may never recognize, except for maybe after the show while they're en-route to grab a cold soda.
• Jumping the Shark: The point at which a good movie suddenly turns into a lousy one.
• Chekhov's Gun: If a weapon is briefly mentioned in the beginning of the book, odds are it will be used later by the hero in the final showdown.

Check this website out if you're into fiction writing (not just books, but movies and games too) or if you just want a really good laugh. Warning though, if you read too many of these, you'll be recognizing them in every movie/show/book/videogame that you see.

New Year and the Expected Resolution

I have never been very good at keeping a journal. Unless there's a grade to be had, all diaries, logs, and records usually fall into neglect when they're in my hands.

This has happened with my blog, and though I'm not sure anyone is currently reading Penguins With Jet Packs, I know that no one will read it if I don't update it more regularly. Sort of the "build it, and they will come"? The inverse is "neglect it, and they won't".

Posts on Mondays and Fridays with random doodles posted as much as possible. That sounds reasonable for a blog, right? At least, I know if I were following something online, a weekly update is appreciated. This Blog began as a Graphic Design assignment. I want it to continue as a timeline-portfolio so to speak. Where as in a real portfolio you toss the old and never label the dates on the new, this blog should begin to show continuing improvements in my work. If improvement does not occur, than clearly I have a problem.

Happy New Year to all who read this.

--EY

One vending machine...

Three pennies...

And one very clueless dollar bill.

Hilarity ensues.