Week 7 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

• Censure – to criticize harshly. “The Senator was censured by the his colleagues due to his vulgar language.”
• Circuitous – indirect, roundabout. “Mr. Bisson took a circuitous route to the Cawd classroom by walking by the football field.”
• Clairvoyant – able to see the future. “The Oracle was clairvoyant, and gave cryptic predictions and guidance to both city-states and individuals.”

Latin Root of the week

• Cent – one hundred. “There are 100 cents in a dollar.”

General Design

• Creative Directors are leaders of projects. They tend to both the needs of the client, while at the same time organizing the creative team that works under she/he to ensure the deliverable meets the standard. Creative Directors are often referred to as CD’s.
• Viewpoint of a render or photograph can have a massive impact on how the image is perceived. We don’t have to always take the render or photograph from typical eye level (5-6 feet off the ground). Changing the viewpoint to a lower angle can make an object “feel” larger. Changing the viewpoint to a higher angle can make an object “feel” smaller. In both examples the object hasn’t changed size, but the perception of the object can be manipulated as you see fit as a designer.
• Cropping a render or image (before it is taken) is the way to ensure the intended subject gets the viewers undivided attention. This often means getting closer to the subject, and the result is an image with less distracting backgrounds. Try to crop the render or image the way you want before you take it. Relying on the crop tool after the fact means the image gets:
  1. Smaller than you wanted it to be, or….
  2. If you scale it up to solve the size issue, the resolution goes down as the pixels are getting bigger.

Unreal

• Landscapes in Unreal give us the ability to create terrain, the ground, the “earth” of a game environment.
• There are a number of different landscape editing tools which we can use modify landscapes:
  • Sculpt – push and pull terrain up and down.
  • Noise – add variations, roughness, rockiness to terrain.
  • Smooth – reduce variations, “smooth” out variations in terrain.
  • Flatten – from where first click occurs, bring a consistent height (or flatness) to your terrain to create a road, flatten a mountain for a building site, etc.
  • Ramp – create smooth hills / jumps that would be impossible to create well with just the Smooth tool.
• Landscapes can be painted using different textures or colors. By setting up a Landscape Layer Blend Node, designers can combine as many different materials as they want.
• A Constant is a single value, such as “.5”. We have used constants to set values for Roughness, Metallic, and Specular in the Unreal Material Editor.
• A Constant3Vector is used to create a three-channel vector value, such as “255, 255, 255”. An RGB color can be thought of as a Constant3Vector, where each channel is assigned to a color (red, green, blue). We use these to create colors in Unreal.
• “Building Lighting” in Unreal will remove the preview lighting grid that appears on terrain. Until lighting is “built”, the light isn’t 100% accurate in Unreal. This is because the designer is moving assets, adjusting terrain, etc. Building lighting will calculate final lighting for the assets and terrain as they lay at that time.

Photoshop

• The Ruler Tool allows us to measure, but a great second function of the tool is that it allows us to straighten an image. Line the ruler tool up to a design element that should be perfectly horizontal, and click “straighten” and your image will rotate to accommodate.
• Color Balance is an adjustment allows us to add or reduce the amount of different colors in an image. If an image has too much of a red tint, we can pull red color information from the image. If an image feels too “cold” (blues, purples, grays) we can add red to “warm” the image up.