This year has been pretty okay. Not only is it my last year in high school, but it's also my last year of Game Design. In the beginning, I had a pretty basic grasp of the industry and the things that went into it, but I didn't really know much about the various careers associated with it, or the legal aspects tied to said careers. This all changed over the first quarter because of the units associated with both topics, and through those I learned a lot. The lesson that had the biggest impact on me as a game design student was the personal project unit. This is because it was entirely unstructured and left it up to you to utilize your skills and bring them together to create your own game. I liked this unit a lot because I feel it's indicative of working in not only the games industry, but industries such as graphic design and video editing. As much as I learned from the career practices unit, if I had to pick one to be removed from the course as a whole, that's the one I would choose. I feel like getting right into coding, modeling, and Unity would be extremely beneficial, especially for students (like me) who hadn't actually done any over the summer so they could get their muscle memory back on those programs, instead of letting their knowledge of them deteriorate with time. In order to better prepare students for a future in the game industry, the course can be improved in stressing the independent project more, and maybe even making it something that's started much earlier in the year. Having something big like that to work towards does something to a student's motivation, and as mentioned earlier it gives them experience with working with deadlines in the industry. Since I'm not going to be here for Advanced Studies, this year has helped me prepare mostly for college. From my "reliable" sources, I've been told that college is similar to how things work in here, more or less. You're given an assignment, as well as a deadline, and you're basically told to go wild. There's none of the hand-holding that's been so prevalent throughout high school. Instead, everything is left up to you. If you get something done great, and if you don't, oh well. Also, the fact that there's no powerlunch associated with this class helps to drive this point further. You don't really have anyone else to blame but yourself (and Unity) for the grade that you get in the class, which I think goes a long way in preparing students for the real world. Course Map for the Year
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Ok, so I haven't used 3dsmax since god knows when, and coming back to it in the beginning of the third quarter was a nightmare for a few minutes until I started remembering what things actually do. I'm not that good at 3d modeling or modeling in general but rigging and animating is easy enough (when it doesn't crash). I only really needed to look at one tutorial video to get back into the swing of things. After becoming reacquainted with the program, I've really come to appreciate how much of a help the different perspective modes are when trying to apply bones to something, and figuring out that I can activate a layers panel like in Photoshop also made the program a lot easier to use than I remember. Adobe Fuse makes creating characters to model incredibly simple, even if the clothes you can add to your created characters makes it more difficult to properly rig the bones. Things started out pretty easy, but I know that it's pretty much guaranteed to get more difficult with each assignment. That's how it always is when it comes to 3dsmax.
On another note, Adobe Fuse is pretty interesting. It seems that they keep pumping out more and more experimental software, but since this one helps with modeling I can't really complain too much. I'm especially impressed with the level of customization on offer there, and it kind of reminds me of some of the best elements of character creation menus from different video games. You can make something either completely normal or a complete abomination thanks to all of the settings you can change. I tended to stick to something more normal, as trying to rig someone with giant hands, feet, and other odd proportions is a lot more time consuming than it's actually worth. Videos that helped me get back into 3dsmax: Rigging a character Animating Exporting an animaton The 3dsMax tutorials that by far have been the most interesting to learn and experiment with have been the ones where we work with modifiers. Modifiers can help you do really cool things with your 3d models, and not only that, but there is a huge selection of modifiers to experiment with, each with different effects and that do different things to your models. Modifiers also help streamline the 3d modeling process a great deal because they take things that were originally difficult and time consuming and shorten those processes sometimes to being only a few clicks of some buttons.
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