Updates 3 days in a row? What is this world coming to?
Today's class was rather uneventful. Almost the entire time was spent doing review and Q&A of yesterday's class. As a result we didn't go over too much new stuff. We spent the day just working on our weapon models getting them to look nice. Toward the end the instructor went over UVW mapping so we could texture our models using the reference photos they were modeled from. He first showed us how to do a quick and dirty UVW map to get our texture onto our model. Then he showed us how to do a UVW unwrap to basically fine tune the texture so it fits properly on the model. My texture fit almost perfectly on my model, so I didn't really need to do an unwrap though. UVW mapping and unwrapping is kind of a tricky concept, so most of the kids didn't really get it. Because of that, he didn't really go into much detail about it as I had hoped he would. That pretty much sums up what we did today. I finished my model pretty fast, so I spent the rest of the time chatting on AIM and playing with radiosity. Below is a quick render I did of my RPG model with an area light to get the soft shadows (if you hadn't noticed already, I'm all about soft, subtle shadows).
Look what I made! :DThe instructor and his assistant work for a small game company and are currently making a first-person shooter. It's some kind of hunting game. They really liked my RPG model and asked if I'd like to donate it to their game. So who knows, I may have something in an actual game. If they do end up using my model, they said I'll get a free copy of the game and I'll be credited in it. Pretty cool for only a few hours of work. Seems like an exciting prospect. Maybe they'll let me model some other stuff for it. I kinda want to model a mini-gun. I think they'd like that, but I wouldn't be able to finish it in the next 3 days I don't think. I can't even find a good reference photo for it. Oh well. Tomorrow I believe we are going to delve into modeling more organic things, like people and plants, using skeletons, skins, and IK joints. I think the inverse kinematics part will be fun since that's one thing I've always wanted to learn but never got around to learning it myself. Skins and skeletons sounds kinda cool too, but I bet the kids won't be able to grasp the concepts, so I bet we don't go into it too deep. I can tell you this much though: all this waking up early is really messing me up.
