Dropped off my scholarship applications last week, all I can do now it cross my fingers and hope for the best... and have nightmares about being disqualified for overlooking something and making a tiny mistake on my application. Heh heh...
But let's talk about less stressful things, I've been making my way through UDK tutorials and just finished off the basics of creating a level and got my first taste of Kismet. The idea of visual scripting is very intriguing to me, code is something I've wanted to learn for a long time, however I am definitely a much more visually oriented person. Other, more widespread coding languages are still something I'd like to sink my teeth into however. I am getting a taste of some coding in flash class, but it's not really the main focus of the class and we haven't gone very in depth so far; unless we dive further in down the line, it's only serving to whet my appetite.
One of the things I learned about today was post process volumes. I have to say it's probably rather silly how much I like those things, but man, the possibilities!
This probably isn't the best explanation, but basically a post process volume allows you to change the look of a particular area of your level by adding a volume around it. You can change the settings of that volume to to tweak things like the colour of the area, the depth of field, bloom and more, and you can change how quickly these settings take effect. For example, if you were making a horror level, you could set up a volume around a particular room that would cause everything to suddenly turns red once the player walked into that room, or you could set it up so that as the player explores and spends more time in the room, the colour slowly fades away until everything is black and white.
There's so many ways you could apply this; you could create a desert game where the environment feels boiling out in the open, but stepping into a cave feels instantly cooler. Or you could make an area filled with poison, that causes the player's vision to be slowly more blurred the longer they stay there, as if their character is about to pass out. It makes me want to take what I learned in Cine class about movie lighting and create a level in which the player walks through different movie genres, from Horror, to Western to Noir to Sci-Fi.
Anyhoo, tomorrow I have comic class, which so far looks like it'll be great fun. We're teaming up with students from VFS's writing program, they'll be writing four pages of a comic and we'll be drawing them, in the end it will all be put together as an anthology. Last class the writing students pitched 3 concepts and we got teamed up, and I'm quite happy with the story I'm to illustrate. However, the comic class is for Animation stream students and I'm in the digital design stream, I'm just sitting in on it because I really love comics and I wanted to learn more about creating them. As a result I'm supposed to help with the cover and packaging for the anthology and I'm to make that my primary focus. At work today I was jotting down some ideas for a theme to sort of tie the whole anthology together, something like The Worlds Inside your Head, or Creativity or Bringing your Ideas to Life, to emphasize the joining of different VFS programs in the common goal of learning and creating, or possibly something like Comic vs Graphic as we have a mix or more comedic, newspaper style "comics" versus darker, more mature "graphic novel" type stories.
Well, I have work to do, so I should probably wrap this up for now. I suppose I'll finish this post off with another video, I've been throwing a lot of these up here lately, haven't I?
So cute.... so tiny....
Oh and... um... it-it's a wonderful use of depth of field... and really shows turtle movement and anatomy which could be a helpful reference for anyone wanting to draw a turtle...
Yeah.... That's totally why I linked it.
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