So as the end of the year approaches, I have come to the realization that, I'm about to lose access to a lot of my files. I'm talking files from up to 7 years ago, they're all going to disappear in a puff of smoke unless I transfer them. This is because I'm gonna be kicked out of schoology, my school google drive account, and possibly even my laptop because it is getting old and I'll probably get a new one before college. Soooo, this means it's time to transfer files, and part one of that is finding old work from schoology and putting it on my personal google drive or a flash drive, so I decided I'd share some of that work from my first Sci-Vis class with you here. That's really all I have to say about transferring files, here's some of my old work: I think it's pretty nice holding on to old artwork so that you can see how far you've improved. I won't save every single piece of art from schoology, but I'll save a few like these so that I can remember where I started, and how quickly I can grow when I set out to learn new skills. Hopefully I'll have enough storage for all of these files.
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It's AP Exam season, so class has been a bit weird lately. I did get the invitation in gif form, but unfortunately, in the email browser it only displays as a still image. Oh well, if people download it they can see it, and if not, they'll still get the necessary info. Then on Tuesday I helped Sam set up some basic formatting on the paper program for the High School Awards Ceremony at the end of the year. Wednesday I was gone for an AP exam, so no work was done. Thursday I started working on this blog post and helped Ryan test the point system in our game. We have a way to win now! Yay! Friday was more game testing, and I feel like even if it's not perfect, we will have a playable game. Julia is in the process of getting the updated building imported, and in just under 2 weeks we'll be presenting this to faculty, staff, and parents. Goals For Next Week:
This week was pretty relaxed, and only 4 days long as protests split the week in half. I worked on the GAD Showcase invitations, which I reworked to look a little less like a poster and more like an invite. Erin also suggested to me that since these invitations will be sent over email, I should make them animated invites, especially since all of her work for the class is animation. It took me a bit of time to figure out how I wanted to do this, but basically I am going to use each frame of the gif she sent me, import them onto the invite, and create new frames from that which will be turned into its own gif. It sounds like a long process, but it really isn't, in fact, I'm sure that they'll be ready by Tuesday. I also added a really basic 2-frame animation of the chicken to the invites that give me some serious Myst vibes, so I just hope some people show up to see our work (and I hope that our game works by then, it seems like Ryan has been making great progress on salvaging it from where it was the week before). Goals For This Week:
This post actually comes with me asking for some advice. If you want to comment any below, please do!
I recently committed to NC State with the intended major of Art + Design, hopefully so that I can concentrate in animation. Of course I am stoked! It's going to be amazing to be going to college - especially NC State with how nice the Design School is - for something that I love. However, I know a lot of students, and especially students in artistic majors, experience burnout. I'm currently feeling the highschool burnout that people term Senioritis, so burnout has been on my mind a lot lately and I want to do my best to avoid it from here on out. So, I'm going to post some of the plans that I have to attempt to avoid burnout, but if you have any suggestions, again, feel free to comment them below. First, I'm going to try to make lots of friends outside of my major, and maybe take some classes outside of my major too. I think that if I am constantly surrounded only by people talking about art, I will get tired of it. I've always been someone who has enjoyed more interdisciplinary stuff, and luckily NC State is a great place for this. There are so many other majors like ecology and engineering that I'm also really interested in, so taking courses on them, or at least talking to others who do, could keep things fresh and keep me inspired. Secondly, I really am going to try to be way better about time management. I think that's the biggest source of my burnout right now: it feels like I have no time because I am not managing it well. To be fair, I am having 3 hours of rehearsal after school and I am in the throes of AP review, but I could definitely be keeping my schedule a little tighter and that would help me find more free time. I'm not sure if Trello is going to still be my method for this since now I am not time managing for a team, but it might still be helpful for me to just have my own personal boards. I know I will use some sort of planner if I want this to work. Finally, I will try to have some hobbies that help me recharge. It's a little weird to think art may not be my hobby any more, but maybe just drawing silly stuff or fanart still will be. Otherwise I'm thinking singing/playing an instrument and potentially coding simple games. I know a lot of people say having a hobby helps, and though, yeah, it is another activity that you have to make or leave time for, it's worth it to not be low energy and unable to create efficiently later. That's about all I have for today, but I bet I will find better strategies for myself as I actually get to college and see what's manageable. I'm really excited to be pursuing my passion, and I'm going to do everything I can to avoid bust. If you look at my art page on instagram, it's clear that I go through periods of doing a lot of traditional art and then a lot of digital art, but they aren't really interspersed anymore. Lately I've been starting to more towards a lot more digital art for a couple of reasons.
This is sort of just a reflection on my recent art, and a throwback to an old blog post I made a while back, with a slight variance. This week has been extremely busy, mostly because of my involvement with theatre, so I only have a very small amount of time for art, which means I either have to make slow progress, or...
I can make fast art! This simply means focusing on hitting deadlines is a higher priority than quality (though, don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to throw quality out of the window). Doing this wasn't actually planned on my part, instead, I had deadlines approach much faster than I had anticipated and was forced to work this way if I valued my sanity. However, this also meant that I have produced 6 gif animations and another digital art piece in the past 3 days or so, most of them being very busy days as well. Sure, they aren't perfect, but I hit the deadlines I needed to hit, and I actually learned a lot about how I work/ what I need to improve on. For instance, the unanimated piece of art showed me that I'm better at lineart than I thought, but also am still struggling with making distinct shading. The gifs proved to me that animation, while it can be a lengthy and arduous process, can happen even in short bursts of productivity, and thus, even if I don't have much time, having even a little time means that I can work towards larger artistic goals. For the rest of the school year, I want to try to do more fast art, this time with self-imposed deadlines in order to improve faster. As I talked about in the blog post linked above, I strongly believe that not being so meticulous and just getting in a ton of practice definitely helps me improve more quickly. Below are two of the gifs I made. There are lots of aspects of both that could be HUGELY improved, but they provided me practice in animation, and allowed me to see what I need to work on in the future. This week, I got the chairs simplified and textured, made some weird fish art, and then spent some time making textures for posters that would go around the school. I personally think that the chairs look pretty good, even if they aren't so real to life. I decided low poly count was more important than realism in this particular case, so that's what I did. I still need to send them over to Ryan via flash drive though, but since I'm writing this in class, I may still get that done today. The fish art is a model made to resemble an art project that is done at our school a lot. I also made these goofy posters to go around the school, with messages that fall under the category of "ominous positivity." I may remake the dog and chicken one, because both of those images do require attribution and it may be better to use images that do not. However, at the same time, this game is never leaving this room, so if they aren't attributed in a game that was made strictly for our own education, well, I don't think it's as unethical. I will definitely attribute them here though.
My UVW mapping skills have come in handy in texturing the stairs that Julia made!
That pretty much sums up my work this week, texturing stairs. I did also get the two items I made last week put into a unity package so that they can easily be added to the game, but that's a little less fun. This work week was a little shorter because of a guest speaker, and because I took some of the time to help Ryan with testing new player movement techniques so that we could find one that was less likely to make players sick than what we originally had. Overall, it felt like a pretty productive week though! I don't know when this happened (or it may have just always been there but I never noticed) but Weebly now has an Alt Text feature that allows you to easily write image descriptions on any images on your website! This is very cool, for a couple of reasons.
The first, less important reason, is that if your alt text contains keywords, your image may be found by these keywords, but the normal description doesn't have to include them. It could help images or entire websites get a little bit more exposure. However, what's even better is the second reason: accessibility. Alt text will be read by screen readers, so people who are blind or have any sight problems who use screen readers (programs that will read online text to them) can also understand what is going on in the image. This is something that a lot of people never even think about when creating content, so I am very glad that weebly has brought this technology to an easy to edit place on images (the same place you would click in order to write a regular caption). I learned a lot about this as I've been doing fan art for a podcast, because as a completely auditory medium, there's more hard of seeing people in the audience since it is a media form that is more accessible to them, and so many people in the community have been encouraging more image descriptions. There are people who aren't completely blind who can definitely enjoy visual art, but may just need a little bit of extra description in order to figure out what they're looking at. For instance, telling someone who sees a blob in the middle of the screen, "hey, that's a face!" might clarify it enough for them to be able to see the face you drew, much like how when we look at clouds, if someone suggests what the cloud looks like, it becomes much easier to see. If you include an important image or diagram that is crucial to understanding a blog post, an image description means that there is a better chance that people who have trouble seeing can still follow. It's also helpful if you took a screenshot of some text to transcribe it to alt text, because a screen reader wouldn't be able to read that. Personally, I think, from both a business and humanitarian standpoint, the more people who can enjoy your content, the better, so even if this feature would only help a few people, it's still very worth it to use. Of course, it is a bit more work, but image descriptions should be less than 125 words (this is so that people with screen readers don't have to sit there for a long time as each image is being described) so it shouldn't actually take that long, and it's a really great thing to do. This week was more UVW editing! I didn't get too much done, but I started modeling some "Beats by Broke" headphones as a little inside joke for the game. I started off by doing traditional UVW mapping since it's not terrible, but I ended up having a lot of problems lining up the letters. I downloaded the Lazy UVW mapper that Mr. B suggested, but when I gave it a first try, I just gave me the same issue that photoshop does when you don't unwrap at all. I don't know if this error was because of the complexity of the object or what, but I'm going to figure it out on Monday, and if I can't I'll go back to the old method of UVW mapping. Goals for Next Week:
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AuthorHi, I'm Abi, a DSA student who likes games, drawing, writing, and acting. Archives
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