As we have been quickly delving deeper into the galaxy of 3Ds Max, we are moving far far away from editing by hand. It’s true! Technology is advancing and so will we! No more painstaking tweaks to individual vertices, trying to get at least a mediocre bend or twist. No more spamming control z to undo hundreds of miniscule mistakes. No longer! Now we have modifiers, the new and improved way to model! Pick from hundreds of unique modifiers all tuned perfectly to your every modeling need. It’s right there in the modify tab. Intimidated by the multitude of possibilities on that scroll-down menu? No need to worry, just press the first letter of the modifier you’re looking for on your keyboard and it’ll jump right down to what you need, it’s that easy!
What’s that you ask? What kind of things do modifiers do? Well well well my friend, that’s no simple question! Modifiers do all kinds of things! Want to spice up your rectangle by giving it a nice curve? Just use the bend modifier, and get that curve 100% perfect, all the way down to the decimal. How about adding a corkscrew to that shape? Try the twist modifier! Wan’t an editable poly without permanently converting? Well there’s a modifier for that too, it’s the edit poly modifier! Oh but don’t feel limited to just one modifier, no no no! There are hundreds of modifiers, why not use them all? Modifiers can be stacked up just like normal layers! Feel free to pile them up as high as your heart desires! So what are you waiting for? Go! The modifiers will be there waiting for you! *taxes not included, individual pieces sold separately*
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Covid-19 has drastically changed all of our everyday lives. I have a feeling the quarantine hasn’t affected me as badly as others. I live in a big household and generally get along with my siblings, my parents work online so that's not an issue, and I have the resources to easily do my schoolwork. I’m lucky that I have these things, but I still miss my friends. Because everything is closed, I’ve been going on a lot of hikes with my family. I really love being out there where you can't hear the cars. I’ve also gotten into more random projects than I would normally. They’re mostly crazy art projects, for example, I’ve started creating a miniature room out of a cardboard box, and drawing little fantasy houses on all of my Jenga blocks. The rest of my family has also found new hobbies like coding, baking, and gardening. I guess one good thing about the lockdown is that it gives people time to find what they like and who they are without having to focus on the rest of the world. COVID has forced us to take the time to focus on ourselves instead of other people's opinions. After the pandemic is over, the world will be more connected. Everyone, at least in the current generations, will have shared this experience, no matter their background. Even though it is terrible and so many people have and will be hurt by it, the pandemic has brought the world closer to a global society. I drew this to represent how quarantine feels to me: overall:
It’s been a while since the stay at home order fist went out, I'm actually not sure how long it’s been, the days are starting to blend together a bit. While we’ve been away, we've started on 3d modeling, yay! The program itself is relatively easy to use as long as I stick to the tutorial and don't accidently close all of my toolbars. We’ve started out working with box modeling and primitives, which are just basic shapes that we combined to make some simple objects like a pencil or a snowman. The tools used for them were pretty self explanatory, move, scale, rotate, and so on. Navigating the 3d space with the mouse was a bit tricky to get the hang of, I'd end up creating something that looks great from one angle but as soon as you move around it becomes misshapen and pulled apart. Luckily we learned lots of neat keyboard shortcuts to help navigate. More recently we’ve looked into ways to further edit our shapes using polygon modeling. Polygon modeling allows you to edit the individual vertices, edges, faces and polys of a shape. To do this we used a variety of different tools including extrude, bevel, bridge, and more. These are what really allow you to get into the detail of your model. Our first assignment was a tutorial on how to make a tank, it was all done using just one box that we edited and molded into an actual object. I’ve seen a lot of artists that work in 3d digital art, and it’s pretty amazing what you can do with these softwares. I hope that maybe after quite a bit of practice I can also create 3d art on my own.
Weeks after school was cancelled and the quarantine began, the grading period has been resurrected. At first this online learning system was hard to get used to because all seven teachers were doing things their own way and yet somehow setting zoom meetings at the exact same time. Now that i’ve settled into my own at-home school schedule it’s a lot easier to manage the work, which isn’t a ton anyway. It’s been strange to see how different some of my teachers are when they're not in person. Teachers who I would have expected to be very active and concerned about their students barely post anything at all, while teachers who I would have expected to be more distant have suddenly become way more sincere and post almost daily. DDA is definitely the easiest (and funnest) class to do from home. While it’s hard to not be able to ask questions just by raising my hand, the class was already almost entirely online. Because we aren't able to do things in person, a lot of classes have cut back or simplified the work they give us. What makes DDA from home exciting is that it's so hands on. We still get to use the programs and make our own things instead of just doing review or reading a passage.(it’s also a bit easier to focus without Hao and Billy - don’t move my seat though!) I can’t wait to start 3D modeling, it’s something i’ve been wanting to do for a long time. Apparently 3ds max only works with a windows pc, turns out I have a windows pc! So yay! I get to use 3ds max! First I just have to figure out how to get it to work…
Overall,
Because of the new Coronavirus, school was canceled in order to prevent large numbers of people in one place. I’m both glad and upset about this. On one hand, Yay! No school! I get to stay home all day with my family and my dog! On the other hand I have no idea if this online school thing will work out at all, I have a strong feeling that I will be incredibly unproductive. I also don’t know how we will continue in this class. I've tried to download Premier Rush but it keeps telling me that I need an update for my computer even though there are no new updates available! If Adobe rejects my laptop all together I could try to download it onto the family computer but i’m not sure I want to because now i’m holding a bit of a grudge. Other teachers have said that these first two weeks are a period of only “supplemental” learning with no actual grades, I'm wondering if that applies to this class as well. I’ve already gotten a sense of which teachers will be giving large amounts of work and which ones are taking this time as a holiday, which I fully appreciate. Even though it’s only been a few days I can already tell that I will miss in-person teaching. My teacher's sound a lot different in writing than they do in person, much more thought out, sincere, full paragraphs that they would never say to the class in real life, I'm starting to doubt whether they were the ones who wrote those words in the first place. All in all this online learning system is a work in progress but I’m sure we’ll get better at it as time goes on.
Overall:
Even though they are for slightly different purposes, Adobe Animate is very similar to Adobe After Effects. Animate feels most like a combination of After Effects and Photoshop. I really like Adobe Animate and feel like it's something that once I get the hang of will be relatively easy to navigate. I found the timeline interesting because instead of having a preset amount of frames already made, like in After Effects, you always start with just one frame and can change the length of your animation just by moving your last keyframe. I prefer this over having a set amount of frames because I feel that it gives me more freedom over my animation. Our first assignment in Adobe Animate was to create a skating apple animation. We followed a series of video tutorials that showed us step by step how to animate this particular apple. Even though these videos were using a different version of Animate, they were simple and easy to follow. They explained how to create animations within animations using symbols. This was how we got our apple to move its arms and legs while skating without having millions of keyframes clutter up the timeline… or at least that’s what was supposed to happen. Once completed, many peoples animations seemed to be broken, the animations simply wouldn’t animate. I don’t know why some people's hard work has seemingly gone to waste, maybe it’s because of the ancient and arcane rivalry between mr.B and Adobe Animate, maybe the computer lords are conspiring against us again, we may never know the real answer but i’m hoping that mr.B gives us all 100’s anyway. All in all,
Adobe After Effects is our first step into the world of animation this year. Our very first assignment using After Effects was to animate a bouncing ball. This included individually saving frames in Adobe Illustrator and then importing them into After Effects. Unfortunately, I accidentally saved all of my frames in the wrong color mode, therefore I couldn’t even get them into After Effects, much less animate them. The next time we used After Effects it was to make a motion graphic. This included our name, 5 description words, a picture of ourselves, and a bit of extra flare. The software was relatively easy to use, even though there were billions of mysterious tools scattered across the screen that didn’t seem to do much. The tools I did recognise were the ones that were the same in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, the pen tool, text tool, eraser, etc.
Overall, the layout of After Effects was a bit intimidating, (I felt like a lighting technician or something with all those sliders and buttons!) There were way more different types of keyframes than I thought, anchor points, position, scale, opacity, and so on. I feel like they could have just had one type of keyframe where you adjust whatever you want, but what they did works too. I also wasn't a big fan of the preset timeline length. This was probably easily adjustable, but I didn’t know how and the assignment needed it to be a certain length anyway. But I would still like it better if I could change it as I work, I kept forgetting how much time i had to work with. In the end, - Adobe Illustrator makes animating simple through the use of keyframes. - The preset timeline length is a bit annoying. - It has a lot of similar tools to Photoshop and Illustrator. In 2020, we’re starting the year off with animation. I’ve tried making short animations before but am excited to try it out for real. Originally we were going to use the drawing tablets to make our animations, something I was very excited about because it meant that I could actually draw things. But no. It turns out we are NOT using the drawing tablets. They have decided that, despite their functionality in the past, they are going on strike and will not be cooperating with the computers this year. Maybe Mr.B will scare some obedience into them, maybe they’ll decide to retire early, I don’t know. Luckily the drawing tablets have not doomed animation forever. We are instead doing animation using the trusty old mouse and keyboard. Prior to the drawing tablet rebelion, we received a long talk on animation, how it works and how hard it is. Even though the computer has lots of fancy shortcuts to make animation easier, it still takes hours for just a short animation. These features save us the time of having to draw out every single frame (like I would’ve done if I hadn't read the instructions) but you still have to go back and tweak each and every frame, along with saving them all individually. I’m surprised that people have the dedication to create whole animated movies, even if they are getting paid.
After learning about the painstaking hours of work that go into only small amounts of actual animation, I'm surprised that there are so many animated movies and clips out there, I didn’t think people had the patience for that. So, animation, what is it? Animation is when a series of pictures are shown one after the other so fast that it tricks your brain into thinking they are moving. This proves that humans aren’t as smart as we think we are. But that’s ok because if it didn’t trick our brain then we would never have animated movies, and that would be terrible. Overall,
Breaking News! The recent discovery of an elusive new tool has astonished graphic designers once again. Hidden behind the Free Transform Tool, the Puppet Tool has an amplitude of potential for graphic artists working in adobe illustrator. News reporters and journalists have been working overtime to try and explore the newfound uses of this tool. Erica spinnet, artist and web developer writes: “...[the Puppet Tool] has many known uses. For example, it can be used to help artists view their creations in different positions and proportions. Or, as currently used by most developers, could be used to depict a highly advanced species of giraffe-dog, perfectly evolved with elongated necks to better steal food off of counters.” This tool works in unique ways not yet fully understood. When a shape is selected with the Puppet Tool, it immediately undergoes what some call “polyinization”. This means that the shape is filled with polygons, specifically triangles. After the polyinization, circles appear in random locations around the shape. These circles are used to manipulate the shape, similar to stretching silly putty or slime, the circles being where your hand holds the material. These circles can be added or deleted to personal preference though having too many can lead to mass distortion and confusion, caution is strongly advised. Even though this tool was first discovered months ago, there is still very little known about it. A question commonly asked is “why is the icon a thumbtack?” This particular question has yet to be answered. Some theorists claim that it’s a signal from aliens, others believe it is evidence of other ancient societies where thumbtacks were used in religious rituals. All of these are highly controversial theories but there is one thing that all news sources seem to agree on :the Puppet Tool is dangerous and should be handled with care. This tool is new and mysterious, the icon is of a sharp object, and it has been known to cause mass destruction several artworks.
Erica Spinnet, artist and web developer. Erica is the lead investigator in the discovery of the Puppet Tool This picture is of an imaginary person who does not actually exist. I got it from https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ wich gives you fake pictures of nonexistent people that you can use. As I now know, the pen tool in Adobe Illustrator has more uses than just drawing scribbles. Though hard to get the hang of at first, the pen tool is one of the most useful things in Illustrator I have used so far. When drawing a curve with the pen tool you can manipulate it using small “handles” that pop out the sides of each node. These handles let you change the shape and size of the curve, allowing for more interesting and complex shapes.
The pen tool is also great for adding onto pre-existing shapes. The pen tool can also connect to other shapes, it automatically snaps to the edges of other shapes if you hover your mouse nearby. This makes it super easy to create a variety of original shapes and pictures without having to mess around with the shape builder tool. I personally love the pen tool and how I can now create amazing cartoons and shapes only using my mouse, something I've never been able to do before. Although the pen tool can draw almost any curve, it is much harder than necessary to draw a circle or half circle. Because of the way that the handles work, it is very hard to get an even curve using just two nodes. I don’t know if this is already possible but I would like it if there were more handles available for each node, making curves more flexible and complex using less nodes. All in all, the pen tool is extremely useful for making original shapes and unique lines, although more flexibility never hurts. Overall:
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AuthorMy name is Xiomara Colopy. I am a student at DSA and am currently taking Digital Design and Animation 1 . Categories
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May 2020
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