(no subject)
Well, I intended to post something Friday, but today turned out to be better anyway!
Started my first real week of graduate school here. Last year was mostly trying to find work and a couple of classes/internships as material to teach myself stuff and look for work, but that hasn't worked out. So I've started a Comp. Sci. Masters, and I get a big discount because my father works at this college (pretty much the only reason why I can afford to do this).
The workload is looking pretty crazy. Particularly from Distributed Systems, where our teacher wants us to have an initial design for a P2P Chat Program by Friday. Networks looks like a lot of work, especially with our teacher being not so great. Virtual Worlds looks to be interesting... we are going to be doing somewhere between 6-8 games over four months. Yipes. It's going to be fun; we'll be working in Slag (via Plasmacore), and I hope it'll be informative.
The NAU Aikido class should be fun. I'm not taking it through NAU, but showing up to the NAU class just for fun. Lots of people, some martial artists and some not, and I'm hoping it'll be an experience. It'll also make me get my ass to it at least once a week, and work on my basics.
In outside of school things...
Working on a drawing for a friend, but it's coming along slowly. I got a basic peanut person done for the pose (including a large version), and a sketch of the hair/face; I need to fix the arms (the perspective makes them hard to draw), and then establish some details, and redraw the picture on a fresh paper with even more details.
In the meantime, I did some screen tracings just for fun; I basically bring up a picture on the screen, do a light trace of the outline, then over it again better, and then take it off-screen, darken the lines and fix it up. I have trouble making a picture have the right 'impression' (facial style, expression) that I've wanted to create, and so far with this I've been consistent with that. It also gets me to get used to drawing solid lines without feathering and just putting pencil to paper without being daunted about what I want to draw.
In terms of working on my drawing I need to draw more full bodies and poses (I haven't drawn a full picture in over a decade) and design more characters (face-drawings, which I've been doing a while, but none that have been an actual character I've wanted to draw); I've been drawing a few tiny 'peanut people' to practice poses and composition, but at the advice of a friend I've been trying a new 'peanut design' with blocks instead of ovals... and without reference material, it's very hard to get. As for faces... I've been doing a lot, but only 'free designs'... I haven't been able to draw a character I've set out to. I need to change that.
Things this week have gone insane, but I might be lucky enough to reduce or eliminate an item for my course-load. Would be nice... if not, I decided to make an easier-to-make game for it.
Basically I decided not to make my platformer project my term project, since it'll require far too much infrastructure and effort to do. Even if I cut out a lot of components, it'll lack the polish and development of a good game. So I came up with another 3d game I can make instead... it'll be very tricky to represent graphically, but it shouldn't be hard to do the base infrastructure and physics for it.
Started my first real week of graduate school here. Last year was mostly trying to find work and a couple of classes/internships as material to teach myself stuff and look for work, but that hasn't worked out. So I've started a Comp. Sci. Masters, and I get a big discount because my father works at this college (pretty much the only reason why I can afford to do this).
The workload is looking pretty crazy. Particularly from Distributed Systems, where our teacher wants us to have an initial design for a P2P Chat Program by Friday. Networks looks like a lot of work, especially with our teacher being not so great. Virtual Worlds looks to be interesting... we are going to be doing somewhere between 6-8 games over four months. Yipes. It's going to be fun; we'll be working in Slag (via Plasmacore), and I hope it'll be informative.
The NAU Aikido class should be fun. I'm not taking it through NAU, but showing up to the NAU class just for fun. Lots of people, some martial artists and some not, and I'm hoping it'll be an experience. It'll also make me get my ass to it at least once a week, and work on my basics.
In outside of school things...
Working on a drawing for a friend, but it's coming along slowly. I got a basic peanut person done for the pose (including a large version), and a sketch of the hair/face; I need to fix the arms (the perspective makes them hard to draw), and then establish some details, and redraw the picture on a fresh paper with even more details.
In the meantime, I did some screen tracings just for fun; I basically bring up a picture on the screen, do a light trace of the outline, then over it again better, and then take it off-screen, darken the lines and fix it up. I have trouble making a picture have the right 'impression' (facial style, expression) that I've wanted to create, and so far with this I've been consistent with that. It also gets me to get used to drawing solid lines without feathering and just putting pencil to paper without being daunted about what I want to draw.
In terms of working on my drawing I need to draw more full bodies and poses (I haven't drawn a full picture in over a decade) and design more characters (face-drawings, which I've been doing a while, but none that have been an actual character I've wanted to draw); I've been drawing a few tiny 'peanut people' to practice poses and composition, but at the advice of a friend I've been trying a new 'peanut design' with blocks instead of ovals... and without reference material, it's very hard to get. As for faces... I've been doing a lot, but only 'free designs'... I haven't been able to draw a character I've set out to. I need to change that.
Things this week have gone insane, but I might be lucky enough to reduce or eliminate an item for my course-load. Would be nice... if not, I decided to make an easier-to-make game for it.
Basically I decided not to make my platformer project my term project, since it'll require far too much infrastructure and effort to do. Even if I cut out a lot of components, it'll lack the polish and development of a good game. So I came up with another 3d game I can make instead... it'll be very tricky to represent graphically, but it shouldn't be hard to do the base infrastructure and physics for it.