The quarter thus far.

The quarter thus far, such an ominous title. I am just starting week 4, and I thought I would write down whats been going on. Gotta learn to blog sometime.

I have a total of 3 classes, plus one I am technically not in. Concept Development, the starter course on my trek down senior classes, compositing, the bread and butter of VSFX, Lighting and Rendering, one of the more interesting classes I have ever taken, and Houdini. While I am not technically IN houdini I am sitting in it and learning from Ken. I took Houdini the last quarter Ron Bernard was teaching it, and I gotta say I am enjoying each for what I got/am getting out of it. Each of them has an almost entirely different way of teaching houdini and both are just as interesting. Example, Ron had a very progressive curriculum: you started with modeling, went onto procedural modeling and animation, and ended on the basics of POP networks. The brunt of the quarter was the second section. Ken however is doing things differently, and while I have not gone to all the classes(I hate getting sick), I know they are entirely different. Ken is teaching it much in the same way he teaches most of his classes. He give you a very basic idea or problem, or shows you something in class, and has you follow through with it. Where you stop with any given assignment is entirely up to you and how much you want to get out of it. This is good and bad, and it entirely depends on you the student.

Let me elaborate: for the first project in the Houdini class, you(from now on you will be the student of said class) were told to find a building, and fully proceduralize it. From the floors to the windows, to general things that can change from building to building, the only thing that has to be a constant is you must keep the style of the reference. To a slacker this is a rather shallow project, make a building, replace some of the controls with sliders, and hand it in. For a student who really wants to learn and understand everything their final product may have hundreds of things to control. Multiple buildings with built in randomness between them, essentially creating thousands of variations with the same base network underneath. Again, it all depends on the student, but that is one reason I love taking his classes. I am that student that wants to get the most out of every single little exercise he assigns. As for the houdini class this quarter I am glad I am sitting in, because I can catch up on how to use houdini and relearn all my problem solving skills and gear them specifically towards houdini. I don’t actually have to turn anything in, but because I have friends(and a roomate) in the class I get to do the assignment through other people(well I don’t do it for them, but I try to give the ‘Ken nudge’ and point them in the right direction). Giving them that nudge in the right direction means I have to figure out how to do it in the first place, and thereby doing the assignment.

Lighting and Rendering: the class I am a part of I enjoy the most. I haven’t ever had Bridget as a teacher, but as I spend most of my time in Monty we knew each other(well she knew me but didn’t know my name). This class is interesting. This, like most of my TECH classes is full of different majors(in fact most of the class are non-VSFX, though considering the total amount of student across all grades that are VSFX it is about right), which is a good and a bad thing. Let me explain, I love meeting other people, and I have a lot of friends in other majors(mostly animation and ITGM), but a VISFX major has a much higher technical background and larger problem solving experience. I am by no means saying non-VSFX majors are stupid or more stupid than VSFX, just sometimes people have to catch up. Which means for certain lessons the VSFX people sit very boredly in the back of the class waiting for everyone to get to the same page. Certain things VSFX majors learn how to do or how to fix before they get to a TECH class. This happened in my MEL class and it is happening again here. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes it is fine to just sit back and learn another way to do something you already knew how to do, but my thirst for knowledge makes me impatient. Though I am learning a lot. I have not had experience lighting and really delving into render settings and this class is taking me right down that rabbit hole.

I don’t have much to say about my other classes, other than they are not challenging in anything other than actually caring for the class.

At this point a good bit of my time is spent goofing off. I can’t help it and my classes aren’t giving me a need to really put in the time I have in the past. Well except for the quarter I had two lectures, one of which was a math. That was by far the most boring quarter of my time here at SCAD. On a slightly related note, should you be like me and enjoy math the hardest math SCAD offers is barely Algebra II. I want SCAD to make a Math specifically for VSFX. VSFX needs a math, because we need to understand a bit of 3d Geometry(in a math sense), lots of geometry and trig. Either way, another day another rant for that.

I have plans for personal projects over this quarter, as well as working on a few friends projects. One of my personal agendas is to make an L-system tool for Maya, possibly in MEL but I would like to start going into python.