Sound Unit (Cont)

Today in the sound unit, we were introduced to the different types of sound, which are analogue and digital. We were only showed analogue this week though. I learn't that Analogue is more physical than compared to digital, it is also unlimited bandwidth. Analogue uses vibrations to create sound, and are things such as LP's and cassette tapes. LP's work by tiny scribes in the vinyl which store the information, they are then read by a special needle, which picks up the vibrations, and then transfers the sound so you can hear it. Analogue is arguably a better sound quality than digital, although it can sometimes be a bad quality due to scratches on the record or the magnetic tape.

In this video link below, it shows you how a vinyl record works:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUjbIC93mb0

Sound Unit

Today in lesson, we learn't further about sound, things such as the foley effect and sound in films and games. We learnt that the foley effect is where you take various samples of real life sound, this sound is then used in parts of the film, for example in star wars they used over 5000 samples, one of these sounds was a hovercar drving down, and so they used an old air raid alarm, and edited the pitch and tempo to make it seem like the car was plummeting towards the ground

Music and Feelings

Today in lesson, we listened to a short clip of six songs, each of these songs, were unique to each other; One being a sort-of thrash metal song, another being orchestral, and the other two being a remembrance song by Johnny Cash, and a chilled out Bob Marley track.The final song was a techno based song about a box. Each of these songs made me feel a different emotion. The first song which was the thrash metal song, made me feel happy but at the same time angry, the second song made me feel depressed as it was a weird genre of music. The third song made me feel happy as it was very chilled out, whereas the fourth song made me sad and depressed, and gave a feeling of revenge. The fifth song was very much a horror song as it seemed like if there was a scene playing: it would be a person being brutally murdered. The final song was the remembrance song by Johhny Cash. This song made me feel sad and depressed because of the way he was singing, it also gave a sense of regret of demise.

Questionnaire

Last week , we were asked to create a questionnaire, and then go out and survey 30 people in public, this is for our year project which is to make a 3D walkthrough/trailer of Saltaire and its surroundings. We put basic questions on the survey for example : Age, Gender, Whether you live in saltaire, also if you go to Shipley College.

So we went out and surveyed 30 people and here are our results, from looking at our survey results in an excel document, we have concluded that our target audience are girls aged 16-18, they study at Shipley college, are not a resident of Saltaire, the would also view these kind of videos on Youtube, they would like it to be a modern/futuristic trailer of Saltaire, and the area that is most popular is the Roberts Park, situated down the road from College.

How Media Producers Define Audiences for Their Products Done

Music Studio

On thursday we had an introduction to the music studio, we all learnt how to connect microphones into a mixer and also how to wrap thw wire back up, when we had a go with the mixer i spoke into the microphone and my friend started twisting various dials that affected the high, mid, and low parts of my voice to change the way i sounded, he also used the digital effects and made my voice have a bassy echo, i thought that this lesson was good because it will help us produce music for if we eventually make a game trailer.

The Mixing Dial:

High: This made my voice sound alot higher than it was.

Mid: This changed my voice to a dull monotone voice

Low: This made my voice much lower and increased the bass in my voice.

Digital Effects: Various effects such as echoes, reverbs etc.

Team Logo

This is also the winning idea, this logo is being combined with Joe's ideas to make a sort of metal designed Hawk

These four pictures are Lewis's ideas, his team idea was "Affliction". He went with a tribal idea for his concepts as it looked interesting and suited his chosen name.

These are Rob Brigg's idea for the team logo, his team idea was Reckless Makers, he has used various ideas such as the two first letters bursting out of a brick wall.

These are the Team Leader Ivo's ideas, his team idea was "This Cant go well", he has included various images that show things going wrong.

This is our team fill chart . We used this to come up with 3 team ideas each. we then voted on the best idea on each persons line and then we started to create our logo's in Photoshop.

These are Joe Connel's original ideas for his team logo : Navigation,  Red Hawk Studios, and  Arcaic Fleet

This is Joe Connell's idea, this is the winning team logo, our team name is going
to be Red Hawk Studios

These are my concept ideas for my idea for the team logo, my idea was Diamond Spear.

This year we were all put into three teams, we were placed in these teams depending on what our skills were and what we needed to improve, i was placed into a team with five of my friends, and i was chosen because of my 3d Max and Adobe Photoshop skills. Then we had to, on an A3 piece of paper, each write down three ideas for a team name. My ideas were: To the Xtreme, Diamond Spear, and Team Snowmobile. After we had come up with team name ideas we had to each vote for the best team name for everyone in the group. My team name that got chosen was "Diamond Spear". So now our team name was chosen we were told to go onto photoshop and create our logo's, then afterwards we would again vote on which team logo was the best and that would then become our team name and logo. Our chosen team name is "Red Hawk Studio". I think this won because it was a good designed logo and it suits the gaming industry because it sounds like a games company name.

Unit l02 Continued

Creating A Report

Silent Video

Unit 13

Game Trailers

Finished Comic Strip

This is my finished comic strip. here also are some of my concept sketches which I imported using a scanner. I then edited them in photoshop and put them into a program called Comic Strip.

3D Animation

This is my finished animation, I decided to use my previous model in this animation as it is one of my best models that i have made so far. I started off by making the houses, i used a box and turned it into an editable mesh, i then duplicated the box and made it smaller to about the size of a door, i used a tool called pro boolean, which cuts a whole in an object, this is a good tool because normally if you deleted the polygon it would have a whole all the way through the model and this would not look good. After i had made the door I made several more "Booleans" for the windows, I then made a pyramid and molded it to the shape of the roof. After i had finished the basic shapes of the house I made a garage using the same techniques used before, i then added textures for the windows and doors, and made several duplicates for the houses on the estate. After that i made two boxes in the shape of a rectangle, this was to be the stands for the "Toll Booth". I then made another slimmer but longer rectangle for the roof, also i made a box in the middle of the road for the actual booth, I added a glass material to the top so it was see-through, and finally made two more rectangles for the barriers that raise up and down. Once i had made all the buildings and the scene was set up i started animating it. The animation is my tank driving through a "Toll Booth"; hitting a dead end,and then turning around in the road to drive back out of the estate. I think that my animation went well because it was quite easy to make the scene but I had some problems with animating it. The problems i faced were that i had lots of different ideas of animations that didn't work out. The first idea was to have a camera zoomed in onto a baseball bat in a practice cage, there would then be a baseball that fired out of the machine and the baseball bat would then hit the ball out of the cage. This idea didn't work because i had problems animating the acutal bat and the camera wasn't working. My second idea was to have my Tank driving down a foggy road and shooting at a building, the building would then explode and the Tank would carry on driving on. This idea didn't work because the exploding part went wrong and the building didn't crumble but instead fell off of the scene. So my last idea was the current finished animation of the Tank driving through the estate.I think that my animation went well because even though i faced many problems and had to change my idea twice, my animation still turned out how I wanted it to. If I could make my animation again I would add more frames so it didn't run so fast, also i would add more parts to the animation like research how to make glass smash, and have it driving through a building window.

My 3d Max Animation - Textures

For Our next assignment we have to create an animation using 3d max and i have decided to use my previous tank model that i created and involve it in a scene where there will be houses being blown up. These are some of the textures i will be using for my animation, the textures will be : a road, a house texture, a garage texture, and a new and improved texture for my tank.

My Finished 3D Max Model

 These are some renders of my finished 3D max model. my model is some sort of alien type tank. to make my model i started off with a basic box shape for the body, I then converted the box to an editable mesh and pointed the front edge down slightly, i started off by looking at a picture of a real tank to get the basic shape, but then to make it my own model i changed aspects of it to make my model "alien-like". to make the cockpit i started off with a sphere, i then changed the hemisphere to 0.5 to make it half size. I then converted it to an editable mesh and played with the vertices to make a flat base for the top part of the cockpit to sit on. For the top part of the cockpit, i used another hemisphere, and deleted one half of it. I then highlighted the outer edges and kept extruding them untill it was a sort of dome shape, after that i extruded a couple more times but i then decreased the size untill the shape close in on itself. For the big gun on the front of the tank i started off with a cylinder, after that i converted it to an editable mesh. I then highlighted various polygons on the front and extruded them to make the decoration on the end of the gun. for the plasma cannons on the back i also started off with a cylinder, i then added a pro boolean which took out part of the inside making it partly hollow. i then extruded the end of it slightly and changed the size smaller to make it point more inwards. For the tank tracks i started off with a tube. I then turned it into an editable mesh and highlighted then end polygons. After that i extruded it several times equal distances to get more polygons in the middle. I then extruded each second polygon on the top and the bottom to make them stick out, then i moved them slightly to the side, to make it a weird sci-fi look. For the material on the tank i used a sub material called "dent". I then changed the first colour to a dark blue, and left the second colour as a dark grey, i changed the size to 200.00, and strength to 20.00, then i changed the iterations to 2. Finally to add the fog I clicked on render, then on environment. Then I added a volume fog, and changed various aspects such as: i changed the density to 6.5, the step size to 4.0 and the max steps to 100. When i was making my tank i came across some problems: As i was making the hemisphere into the stand for the cockpit i had trouble in editing the heimsphere into the shape i wanted. There was alot of vertices and i ended up with vertices under each other and it looked like a big mess, so i started again with the hemipshere, this time only editing the bottom vertices i came out with the result that i expected, and it was much better than the failed attempt before. Also when i was making my model it took me a while to get my volume fog correct. I did not really know what aspects to change to make it correct, at first the fog was too thick and so i toned the size of the fog down and my tank became visible. I really enjoyed making my model as it was a good challenge and I think I did really well with acheiving my original concept, also i did really well with overcoming the challenges i faced and even though i started some parts of the model again, It was good because i learnt what more things in 3d max do and my model came out looking really good.

Motivational Workshop - Action Jackson

Yesterday we had a workshop from a company called Fix Up UK. we had this guy talk to us about life and how your brain tells you that you can't do something, when in reality you can. He showed us this by putting up a big collage of pictures and images, he then read a story that related to the images, afterwards we all remembered all 24 of the images and it showed me that i can do it even if my brain says i can't. I think that Action Jackson was brilliant because he encoouraged us all to work much harder and that if we work hard enough we can acheive our dreams

The bottom four icons are the finished ones i have made by myself

our task was to create five icons based on the four themes- Horror, Fantasy, War, and Sci-fi and another one using a model we had made in 3d max. For my first icon i drew a rocket with smoke behind it, i edited it on photoshop and added a lichtenstein effect to the colour, for my second icon i drew a charatcer in manga and gave him a sword i also edited it in photoshop and added a gradient background of green and blue because these are colours that are used in fantasy. For my horror icon i drew a picture of a skull and a knife, i then added a blood effect to the knife and coloured the skull a bright white. For my sci-fi icon i drew a picture of a droid and changed it to avoid plagiarism,i then added a gradient effect to the background. For my last icon i simply imported a render of my robot i had made in 3d max i then cropped out the background and added a gradient background.

 This is a professional example of an iphone app icon. This icon is for the game angry birds, it was designed by rovio mobile, this icon is much better than mine because it is a much better quality and is professionally designed to suit the product, this porduct also relates to the game because in the game you start off using this red bird.

Today in 3d max we  learnt how to use textures and also how to use the UVW mapping on 3d max, which is a  process called unwrap UVW by highlighting the faces one by one we made an area for putting the photo onto and print screened it on to photoshop. we then made the textures we wanted to make on the house using images from the internet

My Boat

Corridor Using Lighting

Today in Class we made a corridor using lights. To make the corridor first we got a box and converted it into an editable mesh, then we deleted the top and side polygons to make it look like a drainpipe shape. We then clicked on a button that said "show normals" which made the outside polygons visible in the render but not the inside polygons, but we needed it to be the other way round so we clicked flip this then made it so the inside polygons were visible and not the outside polygons. After that we created a cone which was going to be a lampshade we then placed it on the top of the roof and created a spotlight coming from it, then to create more lights we simply cloned the lights untill we had enough lights , some of us then changed the colour of the lights to make them our own.

Spot Lights

 Today In 3D Max we made some spot lights, we first made a simple plane in the top view port and then we clicked the tab that said "lights", we then clicked the button that said "Spotlight" and made one in the Front viewport, after we hade made the light we played around with aspects of the light such as, decay, fall-off, and colour of the light. We also experimented with shapes to see how the light affected the shape.

My Swimming Pool

I made a swimming pool using a cylinder and some boxes i edited them to make the pool and also a ladder.