I FINISHED THE LIGHTSABER

MY LIFE IS COMPLETE, MY LIGHTSABER IS DONE. I really like it to be honest. I was kind of freaking out about the rendering, but everything turned out to be okay and I figured it out. One reason this took me so long was that I had it all done and was taking my screenshots and realized that something looked really cool and changed a couple things and well, it turned out better than I thought it would be so I'm happy. Here are the pictures:

金曜日

I finished modeling the lightsaber today and am somewhat nervous about coloring it and rendering it. It seems pretty complicated... Anyway, I plan to come in and work on it after school as much as I possibly can just to make sure I finish it. In other news, apparently I am now completely taking over the "Science of Joy" scivis and am kind of freaking out. The good thing is that even if I don't completely finish it, My MYP project criteria can still be met.

Wednesday

I did the grip on the lightsaber today and the two pieces above it. I had some trouble revolving the two pieces above the grip, they came out reversed and wouldn't go back to normal... Also, I talked about the big project with Cornell and Jane and I guess I'm doing the storyboard now.

I honestly don't feel like coming up with a creative title at this point in time... Sorry.

Today I worked on my lightsaber some more. I finished most of the EP curves and revolved them. I just haven't done the grip or the piece just above the grip.

sTaRTiNG ThE LiGHtSabER

We started modeling the Lightsaber today, and I cannot contain my excitement. I was fine up until the EP curve part and I had to remember how those work, but eventually I figured it out so that's nice. Unfortunately, I forgot to periodically save my work (aGAiN GAh WHY DO I ALWAYS DO THAT) and my work was lost, gone, into the void of deletion. I then re-did it at lunch and SAVED IT (finally).

I am very excited about this project and can't wait to finish it.

Finishing the Lighting Assignment

I finished the lighting assignment but I don't have pictures yet. I'll post those in a later post. I just want to make sure I have this post here for the purpose of chronological organization. I saw in the tutorial that the shape was tinted blue and assumed it was because one of the lights was colored. I then attempted creativity and colored my shape black and added green and red lights (I didn't add additional lights, I just colored two of them) for both school and holiday spirit. I'm not a horribly festive person... Oh, I also tried making the shape white because the one in the tutorial was black, but Jaylah said that the black was better. Regardless, after a long and confusing struggle with this lighting assignment, I finally finished it and will upload pictures ASAP.

Restarting the Lighting Assignment

I tried to save my first attempt at the lighting assignment... I ended up having to rage quit and start anew. I forgot exactly where I left off but I think I have the camera part taken care of. Hopefully the rendering problem won't happen again. I think I know what I did wrong so that's good. I'm going to come in after school today and work on it. With any luck, I'll be able to make some decent progress. Wish me luck!

11-20-15

I didn't do much today (11-20-25) because I was at the IB Induction ceremony. I tried to work on the lighting, but something weird happened and I got really confused and wanted to start over. (When I tried to render the object with the light, it wouldn't render it in the perspective of the camera) Also, I didn't like my shape that much...

Lighting

The lighting assignment is a tough one... I don't think I'm doing it right. I'll work on it later and see what I can do.

Working on the Project

Today I revised my MYP Personal Project Criteria. I didn't have to rewrite the whole thing, just revise. I also explored in mMaya a little bit. Sorry, today was uneventful.

Monochrome (Pig) Kiss

I'm not sure about the title of this post, I might change it... This is a model of the swine flu molecule and after playing around with the rendering for a while, I decided to make it monochrome. I might add to this post but class is ending and I have to go.

"Sparkling Juice" Glass

Today we used the EP curve to create a "sparkling juice" (wine) glass. I could have finished a lot earlier and had time to blog this during class had Maya not crashed... I suppose it's been a while since Maya crashed on me and I forgot that I needed to save periodically. That's quite an important lesson to learn I suppose. Anyway, here's the project:

What I Did Last Class (1-6-15)

I didn't get to blog last Friday; I had to leave early to escort some 8th graders to Ms. Wills's class. I got a little bit of work done on my new spaceship, but not as much as I would have liked. for the majority of the class, Jaylah and I let some of the 8th graders play around with Mudbox. I would have liked for one of them to want to explore Maya do that I could answer some of their questions and not feel completely worthless, but both of the kids were more interested in Mudbox... At the very end of class, we made glass sculptures with EP curves, which was really cool. Here's the one I made:

Booleans: The Sequel

Here's the other booleans assignment. I know that this isn't perfect, but I don't have time to fix the geometry and bevel it. Hopefully, I will fix that soon. I have yet to finish yesterday's assignment and finish my new spaceship.

Booleans

I made the structured assignment today. I also made the experimental one, but I don't like it and will redo it at a later time.

What Happened Today

I worked on the Kururugi today. I hope it looks less Battlestar Galactica-y.

Almost done

This is the Kururugi so far. I plan to come in on Tuesday and add some last minute touches, just to make it a little more exciting...

The Kururuginator

I modeled a spaceship today! I call it the Kururugi. It is a mix between an X-Wing, a Viper, and the Lancelot. You can't really see the Lancelot yet because I haven't colored it yet, but the front is like an X-Wing and the wings are like a Viper. I also added a cool thing that I'll explain later but I haven't the time right now.

Today I gathered inspiration for my spaceship. I plan to have somewhat of a mix between a Viper and an X-Wing. The front will have the shape of the front of the Blackbird and the back will have x- wings. I also want to incorporate some of a Code Geass Knightmare such as the Lancelot, but I don't know how I will do that yet... I plan to at least base my colors off of the Lancelot. Anyways, I am excited for this project and hope it turns out nicely.

The Daft Punk Document

10-7-15

This is a report/reflection of my bionic arm scivis thus far. I have put together an outline of exactly what I want in this video. This may not be exact, but I want approximately one minute to be about what happens to your body/brain/nerves post-amputation. I want the second minute to be talking a little bit about the mechanics of a basic bionic arm. ie. what parts are necessary to be controlled by the brain, the basic components of a very basic arm. I want the last minute to bring the body and machine together. How does the arm know what your brain is saying? How are brain signals interpreted by the machine? I have also been toying with the idea of adding a character for flavor and comic relief, but I’m not sure if that’s a good idea. I am now starting the research. I am in the process of gathering sources. I have found web articles, a YouTube video, and some TED Talks. I want to find some books for resource diversity, but I don’t know how many books I can find on a subject so new.

10-9-15

Well then. I have changed my topic. I am now working with Jane on her dopamine / happiness project. This is very good for many reasons. A) There is now less stress on me. B) Jane got a perfect score on her personal project and knows how to beat the system. She’ll be a great mentor.  I am new at this whole 3D graphics thing and to pull of my own scivis is somewhat unrealistic. I like this change. However, I now have to tweak my timeline and criteria. Do I have to get my timeline re-approved? I have already redone it twice… Anyway, I really have to think about this, and I need to figure this out. I am very excited about this project, but I don’t know all of the details. The topics I will now be researching are dopamine pathways, macro and micromolecular modeling, and mMaya modeling. I think that I’ll be able to find diverse sources for this. I hope so anyway. I will help with modeling and rendering. Another cool thing about this project is that I will be able to submit something to TSA this year. Next year, I'll know all about that process and I'll know how to do it. This will be a very nice introduction to TSA and I am very excited about this project.

Here are some cool pictures I found that relate to this new project:

I don't know what these are but they look cool.

つまらない

Today I typed up a small series of questions that I wanted to ask. The reason I like to type up questions before submitting them/asking them is because I really like the idea of revision. I often get disorganized in my speech and I get very stressed out because of this disorganization and become more disorganized, more stressed out, more disorganized, and the cycle continues until I become an embarrassed, panicked mess. This is why I like typing up/writing out complicated questions such as the ones I had today. When I write them out, I can make sure that I am saying exactly what I want to say and how I want to say it without getting interrupted, panicked, then embarrassed. Sure, if I have a small question such as "how to you change the beveling offset" or "what is the answer to life, the universe, and everything" then I won't have to write it out. Today's questions were not only complicated, but kind of weird and a bit embarrassing. I'm not mad or anything, I just wanted to explain this so that you don't think that I don't want to talk to you. 

Anyway, after the letter I started writing my reflort (reflection/report). I titled it "The Daft Punk Document" because I had "Get Lucky" stuck in my head. I may or may not change that title, I haven't decided yet.

Looking Stuff Up and Being Confused.

This week marks the start of my research. I finished my outline of what the video will look like and then I started looking for books, videos, and articles that fir the criteria of what I want to know. I looked at our school library (and did not find anything), and the Aurora Public Library catalog (no dice). However, I did find quite a bit of cool stuff when I just looked on the internet. I found a couple TED talks about how the brain works and quite a few articles. I did not find much about the mechanics of a bionic arm. This is expected. I'll just have to do research on general mechanics and apply it to making an arm. I am pretty excited to learn about this stuff, I find it really cool. I really want to know what happens to your arm when it gets amputated, ripped, or bitten off, but when I consulted Google Sensei, all I got was "How to Cut Your Arm Off"... The confusion is real.

Inspiration

So the inspiration board was kind of hard to make; my project is more science and research based, as opposed to creative and colorful. I decided to get pictures of cool-looking bionic arms, including the 3D-printed Iron Man arm and some pictures of Fullmetal Alchemist character Edward Elric's automail arm. I also looked up pictures of arm muscles and nerves. I thought they'd be useful. Sorry this post and last post are both late... I've been really busy this last week.

Here's the link to the padlet:

http://padlet.com/jediplatypus/4s9b96iiwdf3

Deformers

Today's assignment was cool. It really was. I loved being able to adjust the settings, not knowing what each feature did. Funny story, when I was experimenting with the twist deformer, I was testing the limits of the deformer's numerical values and I typed in 420 for the start angle and suddenly, my project went from bland to rad (almost rhymes...?). Anyway, today was cool.

**I wrote this during English on Tuesday, but we started doing something and I didn't get to post it. Sorry... I'll post twice today to make up for it.

Today was not the most productive day, to be honest. I got here a little bit early, so I started modeling a TARDIS to practice my Maya skills, but I didn't do much than that. I brainstormed for my SciVis a bit. There is a small brainstorming post on my other blog, but that isn't what I did today. I kind of added to that post, and I'll put that up tonight after some more work. By Wednesday, I need to have a list of everything I need to research and a synopsis of exactly what I want in the story. That's almost done and I'll put it up as soon as I finish. JediPlatypus out.

Ketchup has too much sugar in it.

It really does. One tablespoon of ketchup has four grams of sugar. This doesn't seem like much until you realize that the average person should only have 24 grams of sugar a day. One tablespoon of ketchup has 1/6 of your daily sugar intake. That's ridiculous.

This post is really called ketchup because today I had to "ketchup" on my projects. There was a whole other part of the Hole project that I just forgot to do... Same with the beveling project. Anyway. Everything went smoothly, aside from my forgetting about these assignments, and here they are!

Scratching the Surface

Today I scratched the surface of beginning to research for my personal project. I found some websites and saved them in a google doc to that I can find them easily. My deadline for choosing my SciVis topic is Sunday, so I am still open to ideas, but at the moment I think I am going to choose bionic arms. I still want to do some research on designer babies and SCNT  this weekend. I want to see which would have the best story.

Duplicate Special

I found this duplicate special project to be quite fun, it was really cool to see how my group of shapes would duplicate. I also experimented with colors, as you can see. I tried to make different groups different colors, but evidently, that did not work. So... yeah that was cool.

Hole

This is the hole assignment. I think that I did something wrong, but I can't figure out what... Also, when I started the project last week, something was weird with the beveling and I would get some weird inside-out thing. I double checked the options and I was on the absolute setting and everything. Thankfully, I got it right today (I think...?). Time to start the duplicate special assignment.

Spaceship

This is the Blackbird. Not very fancy, but hopefully I can make improvements after learning some new skills. I definitely want to make improvements because I named the ship after the stealth ship from Battlestar Galactica (2003 one) and I want to do the name justice. I tried to add text, but that didn't work so I think I'll experiment with that in the future. Anyways, here is the spaceship assignment!

Beveling Exercise

And here we have the beveling exercise. I am sorry to say that this assignment does not have an interesting story like the others. This assignment was quite normal, which is good for me, because it means that I am getting used to using the Maya software. I followed the instructions and was successful , meaning I knew what I was doing. That's always good and I'm very glad that this project lacks a catastrophe. Let's cross our fingers and hope for good fortune on the next project.

Extrude Curve Along A Path

This is the "extrude curve along a path" assignment. I saved it as "thirdAttemptAtThisFrackingAssignment" for... reasons. This is the story of the assignment:

I started the assignment and felt like I understood what I was doing. All of a sudden, I was trying to close my linear curve shape and was confused. Upon asking for help, I discovered that I had done something quite odd, and unfamiliar even to the local experts. After 5-10 minutes of trying to figure out what I had done, I was told to save the anomaly (another project for another day) and start again on the project. I was fine with this, because the anomaly that I had accidentally created was actually kind of cool and I looked forward to playing with it in the not-too-distant future... Anyways, I had to restart the project. This was my second attempt. I struggled with this project all the way until the actual extrude part, and Maya crashed. Being the inexperienced 3D artist that I am, I had forgotten to save the project and had to start over. Again. This resulted in my having to make a third attempt at the assignment, and thus, the file's name. After saving, Maya continued to crash and by the end I had attempted the project many more times than three. The end.

Ah well, the project is done now so all is well.

Temple

This is the infamous temple, the temple that took me so long to make. The reasons this took so long are as follows:

• It was the first project assigned to the class. I was very confused the first time I made this.
• Yes, you read correctly. I said "the first time". Due to my extreme overall confusion in this class, I did not save this temple correctly, and when the computers crashed, the temple was not saved.
• I had to redo this assignment in between other assignments, and the other assignments took a really long time.

So there you have it. The temple that drove me insane.

Ehhhhhh I guess it looks kinda cool...

Re: Temple and Spaceship

Well this is embarrassing. Regardless of the simplicity of the temple and spaceship assignments, I still do not have them done. I know, I know, It's the third week of school. Time to stop slacking! The good news is that I am pretty sure I am (finally) getting the hang of using Maya and those projects should be done soon. I think that the trick for this class is to not listen to music until you are 100% sure you know what you are doing. I suppose this goes for any class, and am not sure why I thought otherwise for this one... Anyways, I'll finish the temple and spaceship ASAP and have them up here in the not-too-distant future.

The Project In Which Maya Finally Makes Sense.....

Today, I completed the "Extrude Exercise" in Maya. I was very surprised that I could complete this, because prior to today I was completely lost in this class. However, today I think I had an "A-ha!" moment, which was awesome. (As you can probably tell from the title, address, and description of this blog, I am a bit of a nerd/geek/dork/queen-of-the-realm-of-awesomeness, whichever term you prefer.) Anyway, as I was saying, I really felt that I understood the assignment and that I knew what I was doing today. Oddly enough, I am quite proud of this piece, even though it looks kind of like an alien from Parasyte. The point is, it looks like what it's supposed to. I now have confidence that I can succeed in this class.