So back in February I entered in a contest to become a student volunteer for SIGGRAPH. I found out the news yesterday that I had won and I will be able to volunteer this August out in LA for 1 whole week. If no one knows what SIGGRAPH is, here's a good way to get to know about it:
http://www.siggraph.org/s2008/media/Siggraph5.wmv
There were over 2000 applicants and only a couple hundred were chosen. I wanted to say thanks to Sharon for editing my essays for me!! I truly appreciate your help!
I am really excited to have this opportunity to go and see all of the coolest, latest greatest technology, and hang out with the best of the best in the industry. This will hopefully be a good starting point for me to get to meet some great people and make some new friends. I'm excited to see what happens.
Another little update on me. I finished CAN last month (Character Animation) and it was by far the best class and experience so far that I've had here at Full Sail. My teachers and lab instructors are some of the coolest and best people to talk to and gain knowledge from, I am truly indebted to them!
This month is Advanced Game Techniques and what it involves is creating buildings modularly, laying out the UVs, creating Ambient Occlusion maps, Normal Maps, Spec maps, etc etc. and Texturing them in photoshop, all in 1 lab. It is a very quick class. In lab, they give us 2 assets that we have to build and do all of the above that was mentioned in under 3 hrs. It can be stressful and there have only been about 2 times where i've gotten full credit. I have come close by 1 or 2 points the other times though so it's not too bad.
I know that I keep saying this, but I promise that i'll have some of my animation from last month posted on here to show soon. It shouldn't take me too long to get it, but my other classes take priority over anything else right now.
Also, thanks to the people who still comment on my blog and still keep in touch with me. Thanks for being great friends and supporting me!! I don't know what I could do without you guys. It means a lot to hear from you and be able to laugh. I look forward to seeing some of you soon and show the things that i'm working on. I hope everyone is doing good and I love all of you! I still think and care about everyone all of the time even if I don't talk to you on a regular basis.
p.s. I will try to get a picassa album started soon so I can post pictures from my trip to disneyworld etc on here soon. I know my family wants to see what i've been up to so i'll post the link once I get it up. Take care everyone....KEEP MOVING FORWARD!!
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Full Sail University
I just wanted everyone to know that i'm officially going to a University now! It sounds so much cooler to know that I will get my degree from a University rather than real world education, lol. I'm excited about the change for the school. It certainly gives it more prestige than it already has. Check out the full story about the change here:
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/education/orl-bk-fullsail032408,0,3428704.story
I have always thought of going to a University so this is a great addition for me. I get the best of both worlds. Doing what I love to do, what i'm passionate about, and also graduating from a University. I am currently a Junior right now and by the middle of the year, I will be a senior than a graduated student! I am excited for the remaining year. So many cool projects to work on and I'm excited for the challenge.
I hope things are going well for everyone. I obviously made it back to Florida in one piece. The flight wasn't too bad, but it did take awhile for the plane to arrive. It was an hour late and I was already on a 2 hour overlay at the Houston airport. I ran into another one of my full sail friends who will be graduating next month and we were able to talk and kill some time during the delay. It was nice to not have a full plane also and we traveled at about 600 mph. It took about 1.5 hrs to get from Houston to Orlando, normally its about 2.5 hrs, but the captain said that since they were running a little behind, they would fly faster to get us there. Another cool thing about the flight was that I got to sit by someone I know and we watched the Incredibles on my laptop. I wish I would've remembered to take some videos of the flight because while we were up in the air, we were passing a storm and there was lightning flashing all around which was so cool to see from above the clouds. I have never seen that before and I thought it was cool to see it from a different perspective.
I will try to post some of my projects on here soon. Once this month is over, I should be getting some more of my animation on here.
That's it for now. Keep moving forward!
p.s. thanks for coming up on sat mom and dad to hang out with me. I enjoyed my time with you and look forward to talking again in July when I come back to visit.
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/education/orl-bk-fullsail032408,0,3428704.story
I have always thought of going to a University so this is a great addition for me. I get the best of both worlds. Doing what I love to do, what i'm passionate about, and also graduating from a University. I am currently a Junior right now and by the middle of the year, I will be a senior than a graduated student! I am excited for the remaining year. So many cool projects to work on and I'm excited for the challenge.
I hope things are going well for everyone. I obviously made it back to Florida in one piece. The flight wasn't too bad, but it did take awhile for the plane to arrive. It was an hour late and I was already on a 2 hour overlay at the Houston airport. I ran into another one of my full sail friends who will be graduating next month and we were able to talk and kill some time during the delay. It was nice to not have a full plane also and we traveled at about 600 mph. It took about 1.5 hrs to get from Houston to Orlando, normally its about 2.5 hrs, but the captain said that since they were running a little behind, they would fly faster to get us there. Another cool thing about the flight was that I got to sit by someone I know and we watched the Incredibles on my laptop. I wish I would've remembered to take some videos of the flight because while we were up in the air, we were passing a storm and there was lightning flashing all around which was so cool to see from above the clouds. I have never seen that before and I thought it was cool to see it from a different perspective.
I will try to post some of my projects on here soon. Once this month is over, I should be getting some more of my animation on here.
That's it for now. Keep moving forward!
p.s. thanks for coming up on sat mom and dad to hang out with me. I enjoyed my time with you and look forward to talking again in July when I come back to visit.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Rigging, My current class
so this month I am taking Rigging. What rigging consists of is placing joints inside of a skeleton so that you can move the model around. With the picture I am showing, there is a skin layer outside of this skeleton but I have it hidden so that you can see the joints clearer. I am further along in this process so these pics aren't what you would start with but kind of in the middle before the advanced rig that i'm working on right now.
this is the skeleton just relaxed. You're most likely wondering why there are letters and arrows around the skeleton. The S stands for shoulders and it's the icon that an animator can select if he/she wishes to move the clavicle, scapula, arm bones, etc. when you click on the S, it makes all of these moveable at once. Just as the other icons which i will show in a minute to give you a better idea of how things work in rigging.
I just translated this up in the Y axis. if you notice the shoulders move along with the clavicle and scapula. The way that this works is that the rig is built up of an hierarchy chain. first the child, then the parent. so when you want something to drive something else or one to take dominance over the other, you use the hierarchy. Simple example is if you move your shoulder. If you watch it, what is moving along with it? your ulna, radius, hand, and your scapula and clavicle. so it makes sense why we would create a control that drives all of these. the shoulder bone is parented to the left clavicle IK handle. The IK is used for rotation. i'll keep it simple. (still following along?)
so what i did here is move the arrow icon. I parented the eyes to follow the icon, but however there is something else parented to the icon as well, these are called locators.
If you notice the highlighted objects, these are the locators. The eyes would be the child and the locators the parent. Hopefully that makes sense. So the locators are the child to the arrow icon, and the arrow icon the parent. That way I can either select the arrow icon and the locators will tag along due to being the child of the parent, or I can move the locators individually and the eyes will follow because they are the children to the locators....make sense? I hope so. It's really just logic if you think about it. Anatomy plays a role a little bit in helping figure out what should be the parent of what.
This is an example of what an IK does. The purple surface is where I attached the IK handle to.
As you can see it allows me to bend the arm in a certain fashion, but if you look at the V icon in the background, that is there to allow me to translate up or down in the y axis as well as constrain my elbow so my rig doesn't break....an example is that you can only twist your arm so far because it stops, adding a pole vector constraint to the arm keeps is from going crazy.
What I was thinking about doing for anyone who's interested is recording a little bit of me fiddling around with the rig so you can get the idea of what's going on. If you have read this far, please leave a comment letting me know if you would like to see a little youtube video of me moving the parts around and I will record and upload it. I'll record a 30 sec to a min clip just kind of explaining how things move around. Plus its a good refresher for me = )
that's all for now, back to studying.
this is the skeleton just relaxed. You're most likely wondering why there are letters and arrows around the skeleton. The S stands for shoulders and it's the icon that an animator can select if he/she wishes to move the clavicle, scapula, arm bones, etc. when you click on the S, it makes all of these moveable at once. Just as the other icons which i will show in a minute to give you a better idea of how things work in rigging.
I just translated this up in the Y axis. if you notice the shoulders move along with the clavicle and scapula. The way that this works is that the rig is built up of an hierarchy chain. first the child, then the parent. so when you want something to drive something else or one to take dominance over the other, you use the hierarchy. Simple example is if you move your shoulder. If you watch it, what is moving along with it? your ulna, radius, hand, and your scapula and clavicle. so it makes sense why we would create a control that drives all of these. the shoulder bone is parented to the left clavicle IK handle. The IK is used for rotation. i'll keep it simple. (still following along?)
so what i did here is move the arrow icon. I parented the eyes to follow the icon, but however there is something else parented to the icon as well, these are called locators.
If you notice the highlighted objects, these are the locators. The eyes would be the child and the locators the parent. Hopefully that makes sense. So the locators are the child to the arrow icon, and the arrow icon the parent. That way I can either select the arrow icon and the locators will tag along due to being the child of the parent, or I can move the locators individually and the eyes will follow because they are the children to the locators....make sense? I hope so. It's really just logic if you think about it. Anatomy plays a role a little bit in helping figure out what should be the parent of what.
This is an example of what an IK does. The purple surface is where I attached the IK handle to. 
As you can see it allows me to bend the arm in a certain fashion, but if you look at the V icon in the background, that is there to allow me to translate up or down in the y axis as well as constrain my elbow so my rig doesn't break....an example is that you can only twist your arm so far because it stops, adding a pole vector constraint to the arm keeps is from going crazy.
What I was thinking about doing for anyone who's interested is recording a little bit of me fiddling around with the rig so you can get the idea of what's going on. If you have read this far, please leave a comment letting me know if you would like to see a little youtube video of me moving the parts around and I will record and upload it. I'll record a 30 sec to a min clip just kind of explaining how things move around. Plus its a good refresher for me = )
that's all for now, back to studying.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Trip to Palm Beach
Yesterday I was invited by my friend to go to a drifting competition in palm beach. It was a pretty fun drive but the scenery was kind of boring. Nothing really to look at except the same countryside for 2 1/2 hrs. Once we got there it was pretty cool to see all of the different types of cars competing and they had a little section where they could practice drifting on the track. We were hoping for a little more excitement then what we got, but overall, it wasn't too bad. We ran into the owner that had sold my friend his car and since he runs most of the competition, we were able to go "backstage" (if you want to call it that, more on the other side of the fence) and take a look at some of the cars and meet the people driving them. Overall it was a good trip and I wound up driving his car for awhile back home since he was tired. If you didn't know he has a very nice car! well, as far as racing goes. We wanted to put his car into the drag competition, but decided against it because if it broke down, we have no ride home, lol. Here are some pics of the day. I will upload a video from my camera to youtube if anyone wanted to watch. I also wanted to thank lorena for the cool tripod = ) It's very useful. Before I left I came across a raccoon who was watching me, lol. He was scared so I didn't get too close but I setup my camera and got the best pic I could.
Jays Engine. His car is fast!!
A racing car. Mazda Miata used for a racing school.
Here's the raccoon.
A 300zx on the practice track. If I had money, I would like to try it out. These people kill their tires since they're peeling out a lot. The whole place smelled like burned rubber! I think I still get faint smells of it!
Another racing car from the same school. I guess the school is sponsored by mazda.
Jays Engine. His car is fast!!
A racing car. Mazda Miata used for a racing school.
Here's the raccoon.
A 300zx on the practice track. If I had money, I would like to try it out. These people kill their tires since they're peeling out a lot. The whole place smelled like burned rubber! I think I still get faint smells of it!
Another racing car from the same school. I guess the school is sponsored by mazda.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Happy Valentine's Day
so happy valentine's day to everyone. especially lorena = ) I hope everyone is having a good day. I am happy today because I got a 100 on my test so i feel like things are going good in this class.
I can't remember how Valentine's day got started so I decided to look up the history of it and came across this. it's always nice to know how things got started and why we celebrate these days in our lives and history is cool (not the class though, lol).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentine%27s_Day
so anyways, no new stuff to post yet. I have maya 2008 on my mac laptop and am running bootcamp for my pc so ill try to get some screenshots taken then i can post my little duck script that I did for class.
Anyways, I want to take a moment and say thanks to the people who post comments on my blog. It really means a lot to know that people take the time to post, either just to say hi or talk about whatever. I know people are busy and have lots of things to do each day. so when they take the time to comment, I feel special, thanks!!
I hope everyone has a good day.
I can't remember how Valentine's day got started so I decided to look up the history of it and came across this. it's always nice to know how things got started and why we celebrate these days in our lives and history is cool (not the class though, lol).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentine%27s_Day
so anyways, no new stuff to post yet. I have maya 2008 on my mac laptop and am running bootcamp for my pc so ill try to get some screenshots taken then i can post my little duck script that I did for class.
Anyways, I want to take a moment and say thanks to the people who post comments on my blog. It really means a lot to know that people take the time to post, either just to say hi or talk about whatever. I know people are busy and have lots of things to do each day. so when they take the time to comment, I feel special, thanks!!
I hope everyone has a good day.
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