Week 5 Vocab and Terminology

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

• Antagonist – opponent. “The antagonist to Luke Skywalker was Darth Vader.”
• Arid – extremely dry. “The arid conditions of the desert provide great conditions to grow cactus.”
• Assiduous – hard-working. “The assiduous student had their goal of Honor Society in mind.”

Latin Root of the week

• Bene – good, well. “Many vitamin supplements are beneficial to the body.”

General Design

• Constructive criticism is the process of offering valid and well-reasoned opinions about the work of others, usually involving both positive and negative comments, in a friendly manner rather than an oppositional one.
• It is always important when giving constructive criticism to separate the design from the designer. You can have a professional conversation with someone you may not like. You aren’t going to “like” everyone you work with, but you will need to work with them.
• The most useful constructive criticism gives specific, direct, and actionable recommendations.
  • Good example: “The scale of your television compared to the size of your walls is off, the TV must be much smaller for realism.”
  • Bad example: “The TV … I just don’t like it, it doesn’t look good. Can you make it better?”

• There are college scholarships and grants available for all types of people, from minorities, to people that are left handed, to people who are going into certain lines of work. Applying for these scholarships can take time and effort, but motivated students can chip away at total cost of higher education.
• A college major is a group of courses required by a college in order to receive a degree –– an area you specialize in such as “Computer Science”, or “Interactive Design”.
• A college minor is a set of courses that a student takes to complement or somehow enhance the value of his or her major. Generally, students who wish to earn a minor have to take about five courses that pertain to the subject field.

Blender

• In rendering, “noise” is the grain which can appear on a render. It can take away from the reality of the piece.
• One way to reduce noise is to increase the number of samples used when rendering. The greater the number of samples, the lower the noise will be. Some examples of sample settings:
  • 1 – proof of concept, see if “things” work, lowest possible render time, likely unacceptable result beyond testing.
  • 128 – default. Somewhere between unacceptable and production – a “draft”. Renders take a couple minutes.
  • 1000-3000 – better. Renders take often between 10-20 minutes, but are steps above in quality.
  • 20,000+. Pixar. Disney. Renders where photo-realism is of utmost importance.
• Another way to reduce noise is by using a denoiser. A denoisers purpose is to remove grain from a render – without taking as much time as a 20,000+ sample render. Using Blender we have (at this time) two different denoisers to use:
  • Default Blender denoiser. Better than nothing, works very well in certain situations – can lead to a finger-print, patchy appearance in others.
  • Nvidia OptiX denoiser. Created by Nvidia (big graphics card company) – this denoiser uses “AI denoising technology” to remove noise. This works really well…sometimes. It gives interesting effects with emissive materials, as we saw.
  • Depending on your specific situation, one will work better than the other. There is no silver bullet answer…but at least you have 3 bullets to test out in your situation. You can:
    1. Crank the samples up as high as you have time for, or
    2. Use the default Blender denoiser, or
    3. Use the OptiX denoiser.

Unreal Engine

• Unreal Engine 4 is a suite of integrated tools for game developers to design and build games, simulations, and visualizations. It is free (to a point) and you can download it today at home.
• Unreal Engine was first used in 1998’s “Unreal“.
• Unreal Engine was created by Epic Games.
• Unreal Engine can be part of a professional Game Designers workflow:
  • Asset creation: Blender, Maya, Cinema 4D, 3D Studio, etc
  • Texture creation: Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects
  • Game Design: Unreal Engine, Maya, Gamemaker Studio, etc