I got an AR Drone 2.0 a little while ago. My first two flights resulted in some lovely meetings with trees. Third flight went a lot better and I didn’t crash that badly. Below if a video right from the AR Drone. I’ve edited it to have some music.
At my new job, there was a poster contest for all the employee’s. I decided to submit since it be fun to do and a challenge to win. Plus the person who hired me and my manager requested that I do it, and win. The requirements were to make it:
- Must have a “Quality” theme
- Must mention the term “Quality”
- Must be professional in tone and message
- Must include the HP logo (this was provided to me)
- Must be in Adobe format and design must be no larger than 24 X 36
- The poster will give credit to the designer(s) – GO AHEAD AND COLLABORATE WITH YOUR TEAM on the BEST design!
I was later told that they preferred a PDF format of the poster. I will be uploading a JPEG image later of it, but here is the PDF file I have submitted. I have seen it posted around the workplace, but have not been officially told if I won or not. I will hopefully find out in the next week or so.
Edit: I have won the poster contest! I found out by having the 2′x3′ poster sitting on my desk when I came in to work on a Saturday. My hours got changed so this is how I found out. Now I just have to find a place in my room to hang this from.
Felt like challenging myself tonight. I wanted to see how quickly I could model and texture an asset. It took me 20 minutes to get out the base model and texture. Here is the first look.
Then an extra 20 minutes or so cleaning up and adding extra detail. This is the result.
For my time trial, it turned out okay, but not great. I feel like I am coming up with a new project every so often, but never actually see it out to the end. Maybe it’s because I cannot always see the end, or see in my head how it will turn out. My cabin is just one example. I see something, try to draw it out or find references, but always end up with a dead end. My motivation seems to have been zapped out of me.
A thought did occur to me just now. Maybe my projects overwhelm me. Maybe I look at way to big a picture to accomplish with my skill set. An entire environment doesn’t just come together from one person, but many. If I step back and look at every project I did in college, I realize that most of the”games” I created were all on me. Every detail, model, animation, texture, game play, programming, lighting, was all done by me. Lets face it, I am not perfect. The later half of my classes in college were team project oriented. That’s when details came out better and different roles were assigned. My brain is still programmed to just do all of the work still. It is like every idea that gets conjured up inside me needs to have all of these working elements, and I have to do them all.
I picked up my official degree today from my school. After reading it, something clicked inside me. My degree is a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Game Production. Fine Arts. Fine Arts? Fine ARTS! That’s what I went to school for! That’s what I should be focusing on! The art for the games! Not all the other stuff, but the ART!
I am now going to make a junk room. Why? Because all games have a junk room. You’ll see what I mean soon enough. This is something I can finally see being done through and through.
This took me all of twenty minutes to create just using Photoshop’s Adjustments and Filter Gallery.
At some point in time, you may have been editing a picture and probably wondered where some random little specs are coming from. Well if you have, here is a quick trick to really cleaning up the specs of dirt from your image.
(Note: Clicking on the images will make them larger.)
So here is the image I started off with. This is taken from the new Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit game.
Then I added my logo and a good old mean picture of me.
I then used the Magnetic Lasso to make a general selection of my face. (For those who are new to photoshop, The Magnetic Lasso is under the Lasso tool usually found on the left hand side of the screen, third from the top. You will need to click and hold it down to select the Magnetic Lasso tool.)
This is the result of my cut out.
Now I used the eraser tool to get just my face.
Next, I applied an outer glow effect to the layer of my face. Just use the default settings as it will suffice for now. (For those who are new to photoshop, the layers are found near the bottom right hand side of the screen. Double clicking on it will bring of the effects that can be applied to the layer).
Looks like I did a pretty good job of cleaning up there, right?
Well actually I didn’t. Double click on the layer that has the outer glow effect applied to it (unless you are already there), and just change the Spread to about 15. Here is my result.
Doesn’t look like I did a very good job huh?
Accept the changes you have made, and then go back around with the eraser tool and clean up the image some more. Here is my result.
I hope that helps you clean up your images and makes them look top notch! It is a simple, yet effective trick to making your images look a lot better.
This is what I have so far for my Cabin. Just a few textures so far, some still need to be fixed and others I already have in my texture library so it was a simple to place it in.
I did not model this scene at all. That credit goes to Andrew Kin Fun Chan and Dan Konieczka. This is a lighting challenge scene I am using is from 3drender.com
It has been almost a month since I last posted here. No I have not forgotten about anyone here or the fact that my website exist. I work in retail and you know how it goes right around the holidays. Busy and other holiday fun. Being with family and friends. I really enjoyed my holiday. I am no longer in school, so I am doing my best to stay focused on what I want to do and where I want to go with my career. Lately I have been applying for jobs in my field.
To keep myself from being distracted and just playing games, I have started to work a another project. The last two projects I worked on had to be done for school in a short amount of time and around other classes. I also had to make all of the models and textures for everything. This time I am taking the Cabin scene from http://3drender.com/challenges/index.htm and just texture and light it. It will give me the chance to see how another scene is made and the amount of detail in it. So here goes to the next project.
