Post Process Volumes, Anothology Covers and Turtles, oh my!

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.

Break Time is Work Time

Got a couple days off of school now that term 4 has ended.

Time to catch up on UDK tutorials and work on scholarship stuffs, I want to get my scholarship stuff more or less done this weekend so I can focus on final project stuff.

But this is pretty much me right now:



hmmm... I could say more, but I think I'll save it for later and try to get my stuff done.

In lieu of words, have another video:

Game Design!

Well it looks like I'll get my wish for sketching more often, for my final project I'm teaming up with several classmates to make a game, and I'll be doing a large amount of the concept artwork :D

Farewell sleep, I will miss you during the next few months...

Anyhoo, school is crazy busy right now, besides planning out the final project, I am the production manager for my Freaky 13 group (paperwork, paperwork, paperwork) I have to make a short video with my group for Art and Creativity (which will hopefully be filmed this Friday) I have my life drawing project which keeps getting pushed down on my priority list, I have two 3 page scripts of dialogue due for writing that I need to do (also a group thing BTW) as well as my final script for writing, and I also need to work on my elevator pitch for our Final Project class (way down on my priority list as well....)

I also need to figure things out when it comes to the student loan I'm applying for, and the 2 scholarships I'm applying for.  Meep!  Yet more paperwork >.<

I'm really hoping to get the Women in Games scholarship, it would pay my entire tuition for game design, which would be a load off my mind.  But for the scholarships I need to get 2 letters of reference (I asked 2 of my instructors and they both agreed, which I'm really thankful for) do a synopsis for a game I am passionate about making, and write an open letter explaining why I deserve the scholarship.  I've picked which game idea I'm going with, I just need to flesh it out now, and I have a wordpad document full of brain vomit relating to the letter.  I'm really glad I'm in my Final Project and Career Orientations classes right now, because the things they've taught us about industry expectations and making yourself stand out are really helping, I'm trying to take it all to heart and make my open letter the best it can be.

This past weekend I attended the Game Design Expo with a few friends, it was amazing and I'm so glad I got to go.  I was originally only going to attend the free open house on Sunday, however I wound up getting to go to the Industry Speaker Day of Saturday thanks to a friend :D  I missed the first half because I had to work, but the few talks I got to attend were great, they were very informative and fun.  after the talks there was time to meet and talk with other people attending the event, I just wanted to hide though D:  But we wound up meeting a girl who's going to be in our Game Design class for June.  She fit right into our little group and she wound up hanging out with us for the rest of the weekend and giving input into the game we're making for our final.  Turns out she's my competition for the Women in Games scholarship, but that's okay, I hope one of us wins it :)

On Sunday they announced the Women in Games scholarship, we both picked up the forms and asked our questions.  Then we got to sit in on a few classes, we missed out on the flash gaming class, but the other classes we attended were great.  There were prizes, none of which I won, but my friends won things, including several copies of Halo Reach and some angry birds plushies.  I took a ton of notes and we threw ideas around for our game in between classes, we also met up at a Starbucks afterward and discussed it more.

All in all it was a great weekend.  There were also things scheduled on Friday, however I could not attend as I unfortunately had a class.... :(

Well, I think that's about all for this post, so until later :P