1st Quarter Reflection

Throughout the quarter, I have worked on a few different Adobe and Maya projects, some to develop technical skill within each program, and others to experiment with what I am capable of doing (or putting up with). These projects include the first levitation project, a handful of experiments with PSD networks in Maya, two "emblems" which i made using skills from freshman year, a robot in Adobe Illustrator, and the Illustrator octopus I am currently working on.

The first levitation project was rather easy in my opinion, though I admit that I could have probably done better. The shirt of the guy in the image could have been brought down more so that it looks like the shirt is hanging rather than it looking like it's being stopped by an invisible wall. I'm not too sure how difficult the second levitation project will be (if we get back to it), but I don't think it will be too much harder.

The PSD network projects I think I learned the most from, learning how to manipulate the layers of the network to produce different effects. I still need to try out other functions of the PSD networks, and will likely be doing that in the near future.

The emblems were... interesting. Since I'm not particularly skilled with a drawing tablet, I had to draw the images on a sheet of paper, scan them, put them into another layer in Photoshop, and then scale them down until they could fit on the 128x128 pixel border. After that I had to use several layers to do the outlines, colors, shading, any effects I wanted, and any text I wanted. Shading was probably the hardest part, since the emblems were incredibly small and adding any sort of color had a much more harsh effect than on a larger image.

The robot I'm struggling with, as I can't get the merge tool to function properly. Every time I use it on the part of the bot I'm on, I somehow manage to lose my bot's legs. Rather annoying. Aside from that, the bot is rather easy. That said, there are some valuable skills that can be learned by doing this project.

The octopus is another particularly easy project, and I feel like it should be doable in one or two classes. I think there are one or two things I learned during this project, but overall it was more of a side project than an actual one for me.

Overall I feel like I learned a bit more this year than in previous years, and I have learned how to run through projects while keeping the "value" (for lack of a betetr word) of each project the same. That said, I may want to work a little faster, as I still have to do my big project, and I don't want it to end up being last minute.