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
- Asylum – sanctuary. “The political dissident requested asylum in Sweeden.”
- Benevolent – friendly, helpful. “The benevolent leader gave her subjects vegetables to get through the winter.”
- Camaraderie – trust among friends. “The college roommates formed a great camaraderie through their 4 years at UVM.”
Latin Root of the week
- Bi – two. “A bicycle has two wheels.”
General Design
- Low poly art in 3D computer graphics is art that has a relatively small number of faces. It is a stylistic choice.
- Observational Drawing is easily defined as drawing from life. In observational drawings the goal is recreating reality exactly as it lays in front of your eyes. Observational drawing is often also referred to as a Still Life.
- Design Competitions are “competitions”, or battles, in which designers compete against one another through their abilities. These events are great ways to practice your skills, and get an objective idea of where you stand amongst your peers. Design Competitions may be judged (or juried) by professionals, colleagues, etc, from the industry. The first Design Competitions we are taking part in is the Sketchfab Mushroom Design Competition.
- A Color Palette is a set of colors in a project. Color Palette’s are often themed for different types of projects, from the pastel palette of an Easter Bunny model to a dark grungy palette for a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
- Drawing Mannequins are commonly used when working on sketching projects. Using a mannequin can help with observational skills, drawing anatomy, etc.
Blender
- A texture map is a 2D image which has visual information for a 3D model. We will both create and download them in Cawd.
- FBX (Filmbox) is a file format (.fbx) developed that provides interoperability between digital content creation applications. We use the FBX format to move assets from Blender -> Unreal.
- Seams are used when unwrapping UV maps to help logically group faces together. Often without the 3D designer creating seems, the computers attempt at unwrapping will place the faces in random locations – this makes your texture map creation more difficult.
Unreal
- Collisions in Unreal (or other game design software) will determine how an object “bumps into” other game elements, models, particles, etc. Collisions can range from a basic 6-sided cube – low detail, runs fast, but we can’t walk under the tree – to actual mesh collisions that DO allow us to walk under the tree…but take more computing power to run. You have to find the sweet spot between accuracy vs. speed.
- “Asset Packs” are often used by Game Developers who don’t have creative skills to build the assets needed for games. Here is an example of a Forest Pack for $19. Here is another example of a Cloud Pack for $33. (Don’t download your Cawd projects.)
Photoshop
- Adjustments are non-destructive ways of adjusting an image in Photoshop. We can increase color saturation as an example through the “Hue / Saturation” Adjustment.
- Non-destructive editing in Photoshop (or design in general) is where we use tools that can be turned on / off. Using non-destructive tools we should be able to get back to the original file by just deleting the Adjustment.
- Masks are used to hide and show content. Typically black on a mask hides the content of a layer and white reveals it.
- The Spot Healing Brush tool fixes blemishes by looking at the pixels around the issue and predicting what should go there based on those surrounding pixels.
- The Clone Stamp Tool copies pixels from one area of a document to another. To use this tool you must first alt+click to define the area of the document you are going to paint from.
- New Guide Layouts allow you to split up a Photoshop document into different squares as needed. We used this when creating our Color Palette’s. A 3 x 3 guild layer allows for 9 specific squares.