Class Hours: 9:40 – 2:05
Mr. Cronin
Mr. Bohmann
Quizzes on Friday morning. 15% of your grade are the quizzes, typically 9 new, 1 review, and 1 extra credit question from our articles.
This years Sat / Act prep work comes from “100 Most Common SAT Words” by Quizlet. As we are using their list to pull from you are able to use their free study tools. Make a free account so you add the new words to your Study Bank. As the weeks go by and you are studying from this ever-growing word bank, you will find that your vocabulary (speaking and retention) has improved.
The weekly latin root comes from “42 Most Common Latin Roots”.
Sat / Act prep
- Collaborate – to work together. “The team members collaborated on the Game Design for the state competition.”
- Compassion – sympathy, mercy. “The college admission rep showed compassion for the student who missed the college admission deadline.”
- Compromise – to settle differences. “The kids compromised by agreeing to share the toy.”
Latin Root of the week
- Circum – around. “In geometry, the circumference of a circle is the distance around it.”
General Computing
- Drive File Stream is Google’s Cloud Based storage system. As we are a Google school, we have unlimited storage on the cloud. Storing files on the cloud (the internet) has many benefits including:
- Google has multiple servers for redundancy and speed.
- You can access the work anywhere.
- If Cawd fell into a black hole…you would still have access to your work.
Blender
- A keyframe is a marker in time for an object that stores information on position, location, scale, etc. These are the foundations of animation.
- Animation happens in the transition between at two keyframes. If a ball has a keyframe on frame 1 in the sky, and a keyframe on frame 30 on the ground, animation software will build the inbetween frames for you automatically. The keyframe->inbetweens->keyframes is your animation. In short:
- Animators create the keyframes.
- The computers take the keyframe markers and create the inbetweens – creating your final animation.
- The Dope Sheet gives the animator a birds-eye-view of the keyframes inside the scene. The Dope Sheet is inspired by classical hand-drawn animation process, in which animators will make use of a chart, showing exactly when each drawing, sound and camera move will occur, and for how long.
- After animating some property in Blender using keyframes you can edit their corresponding curves. This curve is shown as something called an F-curve. Basically what an F-curve does is an interpolation between two animated properties.
- The Graph Editor allows users to adjust animation F-curves over time for any animatable property. With the graph editor we can edit the specific behavior of each keyframe – its visual appearance – by adjusting curves.
- In addition to adjusting the keys manually on the graph editor, we can adjust the interpolation modes for keys and change the animations behavior. We can have:
- Bezier – the automatic default setting blender gives us. Blender (and most animation software) tries to smooth out the animation. This isn’t always ideal, but sometimes is.
- Linear – the animated element moves in a straight line from keyframe to keyframe, no slowing down or speeding up. Very robotic, choppy.
- Constant – no animation between the keyframes. The object simply jumps from keyframe position to keyframe position. Great to use when trying to mimic a multi-camera setup in an animation.
- MPEG-4 or MP4 is a digital multimedia container format most commonly used to store video and audio, but it can also be used to store other data such as subtitles and still images. Like most modern container formats, it allows streaming over the Internet. This is the format we will export to when creating animations and films.
- A storyboard is a graphic organizer in the form of illustrations or images displayed in sequence for the purpose of pre-visualizing a motion picture, animation, motion graphic or interactive media sequence. It is part of the pre-production phase of a design.
Photoshop
- When doing restorations – and starting with old faded photos – often we will encounter work that lacks whites / blacks. Using the Histogram view in Photoshop we can see the visual data of the file, and where we need to adjust. This is an objective way to see how a photo looks using data, compared to the subjective “hmm…how does this look…?”
- Once we have looked at the histogram and determined the photos needs, we can use a number of different tools to create both whites and blacks in a photo. Some options we have used include:
- Curve Adjustment
- Exposure Adjustment
Unreal
- Blueprint is the visual scripting system inside Unreal Engine and is a fast way to start prototyping your game. Instead of having to write code line by line, you do everything visually: drag and drop nodes, set their properties in a UI, and drag wires to connect.