snowflake animation

With the snowflake project, we created snowflakes by duplicating a polygon. We created a window to view the snowflakes and added bump mapping to the wall, then animated the snowflakes falling. This was one of the easier projects and I still struggled with it greatly. Making the snowflakes fall down gracefully was my favorite part of this project. If I were to change one thing about my results it would be rendering my animation in the correct type.

Salt Shaker

The salt Shaker and cup project involved using revolve and lofting. With the saltshaker, Lofting was used to create the  glass container for the salt. This project was difficult with how specific and touchy some of the directions were and a general misunderstanding of Maya. I accidentally turned my shadows purple and have no idea how to fix it. If I could go back I would definelty ask for help with bump maps, the holes, lights, and basically everything. I have difficulty in arranging the lights to look proper and realistic. Its a lot harder than just grabbing 3 lamps, you have to edit the distance, brightness, color, shadows, ect. My favorite part of the project is the glass, it looks really nice.

Final for Graphic Design

What did you do this semester?

What were the projects?

The projects were

• Typography
• Infographic
• Vectoring faces
• Learning about format with the raccoon.

Face vector

The goal of this project was to use organic shapes to make a vectored portrait of ourselves. It did not take me very long since I did not go extremely detailed since I like the minimalism look. I still went as detailed as I could. My biggest challenge was getting the shapes correct and the face. In the original picture of me, my glasses warp part of my face so instead of having a circle for a head I had to use a unique shape and it made it difficult to add the shading correctly. I learned how to use the pen tool which would come in handy in a project I did in my own time. My overall opinion on this project is I like it. It would have been better if I could find out how to make a paint splatter and make it look like a graffiti minimalist portrait. I used my time in class a little too well in this project. I got done around 3 days ahead but it gave me time to work on some personal projects. I would come back to it once in a while and fix the nose and whatnot.

Infographic

This was one of my favorite assignments I loved being able to pick a topic I was interested in Informing people on. The project's goal was to take a topic we liked and inform people about it. Some challenges I faced was to just overall make it look good. My favorite panel is the title panel and I wish I gave my other panels a cool background like on that one. Along the way I learned a tool that I do not know the name of but is selected with shift-M. Some feedback I was given was that It was too wordy and a section I had was all words so I changed the section to decrease the overall wordiness

Raccoon/typography project

The project was to create a raccoon in illustrator and then use typography to make a postcard with the raccoon on it. I love typography but I have terrible handwriting. This project took me the longest and I became a little behind. Some challenges I faced was creating the graphics. I was not accustomed to illustrator at this point and following the written directions was a little confusing since I did not know where anything was. In my opinion this is one of those projects that you think you did bad on but you learned a lot from it.

How did you use your time in class?

I used my time wisely some of the time. Sitting in silence working on the same thing for an hour is a little boring but it was fixed when I decided to listen to a podcast while I worked. I stayed productive in my times of being done, I have 3 side projects that I worked on when I was completed. Outside of class I like to look at fonts and practice typography and even sketch out future projects I'd like to work on like making stickers using adobe illustrator.

Areas of graphic design

My biggest area of strength is my passion. I love to draw digitally and although it's not with an expensive art tablet I still enjoy it. I also want to go into advertising and graphic design as I get older and possibly use these skills to open my own bakery.

Some areas I need improvement on are staying focused for long periods of time. My podcast has helped with that but the podcast won't always be there for me.

Summary

overall I'm 100% certain that I want to choose this class to have for the rest of the year. I loved learning skills and finding my passions in this class. The only thing I would do differently is to redo my raccoon project since it looks very bad. My take away is that I love graphic design and would like to pursue it as a career. Next semester I would like to add personal touches to my in class projects and do some more out of class projects to test my skills.

Final

In this project I actually got to animate the panorama and I learned how to place things so they can be used as a panorama. I picked this project because it was easy yet challenging. I had to do something easier so I could manage my time but I had a lot of issues with it. Iv'e improved with my use of the pin puppet tool and panoramas.



I was given this Ball project after being gone for a while so it's very amateur. I learned how to use after effects with this and it was a real learning experience. Looking back I can see tons and tons of flaws, the whole thing is a bad flaw


I like my worm animation, I think it's funny and the worm is based on Griffin McElroy, a funny cool radical dude. The griffin's goofers is a reference to something he did in one of his videos

Panoramic animation

In this project we created a Scene and animated it as if it was in a 3d space.
I made a lot of mistakes with this project including but not limiting to:
Drawing it wrong
Spending too long on drawing it and having no time to animate
messing up the format

Some things I think I did well with were the overall aesthetic of the plain drawings. My cloudy rock field had a lot of detail not present in the final animation. I learned to not get over-ambitious with these projects or I won't have enough time to finish them. I had a lot of fun designing the clouds and coming up with a theme/ design for this project.

Worm Animation

This was probably my most favorite animation I've done with the introduction of the mesh tool. I decided to make my worm look like Griffin McElroy because why not. The "Griffin's Goobers" is an image made by Griffin making fun of those things. Making my animation was really fun, it allowed me to connect more with my friends who gave me ideas for this outstanding animation
I am very glad I learned to use the mesh tool, it's my most favorite tool ive learned. I will be using the mesh tool in the future hopefully!

Ball Animation

This is my ball bounce animation. I got it done really quickly since I was gone during the making of this animation and I didn't want it to get behind. During this simple animation I learned a lot. It dosent matter how it looks, what matters is what learned from this project. I choose a yellow ball since it would stand out against the sky and grass easily. I gave my grass a nice Birch-Tree color scheme because I thought it looked nice.
what I would do differently is clean up my squash and stretch, add more clouds, and fix some of the grass.

overall I learned a lot with this project and hope to continue