So lately I've been thinking a lot about college. I have the better part of a year before I have to actually begin applying to schools, but I definitely want to start thinking about this now so that I can get everything in order for college applications. This feels sort of difficult for me, as I'm sure it is for pretty much everyone, mostly because I'm not sure what I want to do with my life yet, but feel like I have to make a very polarized decision; do I want to go into science of some sort, or pursue a career in art?
Right now, I feel much more inclined to go for the art career, but I am so scared of doing so that I can't commit to that idea. I would love to just go for it and work on cartoons, but the starving artist story, self-doubt, price of art schools, and other general fears make that hard for me. I don't think I'd mind a science career. I'm pretty good at science and math and enjoy logical things. In fact, chemistry is my favorite class this year, and I was considering taking two sciences next year. However, I have trouble seeing myself in a STEM career for my whole life, and I feel like at some point I would regret not following my real dream of going into animation. However, this would allow me to go to a college close to home probably, and I feel like I would have more financial security in the future. Plus, this option would give me more freedom in switching major since I wouldn't be going to a specifically arts school. I really would love to go to CalArts since I feel it would be the best school to go to in order to get started in animation. However, the prices there are pretty high, so I'd probably have loans for a while, especially if I do become that starving artist. However, I feel - and I know this isn't really true but my friends keep saying it too - that if I don't go to CalArts I have a significantly lower chance of ever really making it big in the cartoon industry. I am also not sure if I'm good enough to even make cartoons or even get into an art school. I feel like I might be too impatient to make high quality animations, or just overall lack the skill for it. Though I don't usually get art block or anything, I do sometimes lack motivation to do things, and I'm afraid being stuck on one project for as long as you have to be in animation. My parents seem supportive of either way that I go, but most of my friends are very vocal about their opinions that I should go into science instead. As I said in the beginning though, choosing colleges and majors is hard for everyone, and I still have some time anyway. I just wish that I could just take the risk and put everything I have into art school and hopefully not regret it. I really do want to go into animation, and though it may not be the safest or most traditional route, I think I'm going to try to do it. Ultimately, it will probably be up to what colleges accept me, but as of now, I'm definitely leaning towards a more artistic school.
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For my Spanish class, I was assigned to design La Casa De Mi Sueños, or "the house of my dreams," and label certain items within the house to learn Spanish vocabulary. I decided that I wanted to model my house in 3DS Max. This may have been a mistake as it took so long to render everything that it was barely ready in time, but I had fun doing it, and though I haven't presented yet, I think it turned out all right. I continued trying to use the mental ray when rendering as we had learned to do in Game Design, which may have slowed me down a bit, but did make my images and videos look pretty nice. There was some problems with the lighting though. There were random dots of light sort of like lens flares splayed across the rooms, and while the effect was kind of cool, it was not what I had in mind. I believe it had to do with one of the windows that I modeled distorting the light a lot, but I don't know exactly why that is. Now that I'm not hurrying to finish a project, I hope I'll have time to go experiment with it and figure it out. I reused some elements from an earlier living room I had designed in 3DS Max, but re-textured them to fit in the new rooms. However, I did create a lot of new models as well. I think I have improved a lot in 3DS Max just from the things that we've learned this year. The cloth modifier was especially helpful for making clothes to go in the closet and the blanket on the bed. Mostly though, this assignment was just really fun for me because I got to test out a lot of new materials and it was challenging to figure out how to design all of these different things in a house with the shapes inside 3DS Max. I think it gave me a chance to really experiment since the assignment wasn't based in the quality of my modeling, but instead in just labeling things correctly. This allowed me to take more risks, and I'm very glad for that. Plus now I have a pretty cool house model! If I did it again, I would budget my time better. Rendering took a long time on my little computer, so I wish I could have had more time to render out longer animations. Many small details that would be in a real house are missing, and while it wasn't supposed to be an incredibly intricate model, I do wish that I had at least put some more books on the bookshelves and added a towel rack in the bathroom. I may go back and make those changes in the future, but for now I think I'm going to let this project rest for a bit and work on 2D animation. I'll probably add some of my work on this project to my portfolio, but I think I may need to render a couple things again in a way that better presents my skills rather than in a way that's just good enough for Spanish class. Hopefully I'll be able to share some more pictures of it soon.
In my last post, I mentioned that we would be starting working with Unity soon. Well, now we've been working in Unity for about two weeks. It's been pretty slow going learning to code in c#, but for me it has been pretty enjoyable, but I haven't encountered as many errors as many of my classmates have. Errors or bugs are pretty common in coding, so of course I've had some, but not any that are program breaking.
As for finding and fixing the errors that I do have, I currently don't really have a system. I check for common mistakes, like missed brackets or semicolons and spelling errors, but after than I don't really have much of a plan set in place. For now, this works for me because I can then compare my work to the tutorials to find errors, and since it's very simple code, it usually isn't that hard to end up with pretty good, at least mostly non-buggy code. However, as we get into more complicated coding, I will need to have system to find errors in the hundreds of lines of code that create more complex problems. Mr. B assigned us to read an article on Debugging by Herman Tulleken, and the article made some great points, focusing on how to narrow down potential causes to find the source of any bug. It sounds like fixing bugs is often very time consuming, and as much as I'd like to hope that I'll never have to deal with any major bugs, I know at some point I'll need to employ the skills talked about in the article to fix a major roadblock. The article also said though that debugging is a skill best learned through practice, so while hitting those bugs is going to be frustrating, it will make fixing other even bigger bugs easier in the future. Basically, taking a systematic and logical approach to finding errors, and taking the time to make your code bug- free seem like the best things to do to have clean and smooth-running code. |
AuthorHi, I'm Abi, a DSA student who likes games, drawing, writing, and acting. Archives
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