It's hard for me to tell when one school year ends and another begins since this Fall semester is my fifth consecutive semester at UTD. I've got some neat things going on, though. At least three out of my five classes this time around will have me producing something worth posting here. My five classes are: Computer Science, Mixed Media, 2D Traditional Animation, Interaction Design, and Storyboard and Pre-production. I am always amazed at how, in college, you hit the ground running. Though I suppose there really isn't any time to waste because fifteen or so weeks goes by extremely quickly. In any event, I am producing an animation a week, short ones, but still should make for an interesting video when they're all strung together at the end of the semester. I am also working on a story for my pre-pro class that will eventually have me create an animatic of some part of the story, complete with storyboards, sounds, animations. My mixed media class should prove to be constructive, there is a lot of idea exchange going on in that class, and we work with physical, tangible materials. As far as the interaction design class goes, probably some neat design ideas will come out of what we are going to do, but probably not a whole lot of art, but we'll see what happens. Looking forward to being a senior after this semester.

The end of the Summer semester is rapidly approaching. (that syllabus always looks so long at the beginning of the semester!) In 3D class, we are on our final project. The first and last of our projects that we don't have a tutorial for, we are on our own for this one. The assignment is for us to create a "lab". Any kind of lab, except for the dog. After about 20 minutes of thinking about it, the best I could come up with was a dentist's office. In my defense, I've got dentist's offices on the brain since I just visited one in the past couple of days. [link] Also, I knew that a dentist's office was likely not high on the list of labs other people had in mind, so I would be doing something original, in that respect at least. And hey, a dentist's office has some neat stuff in it that looks like it will be fun to model, like the chair with all its appendages sticking out of it. So this is what I will be working on in the coming weeks. It's due on the 29th of July. Should be interesting.

I finally have something to show for my endeavors in 3D. It's been a long time in coming, and now I have some evidence I have been doing what I said I've been doing. Nothing too polished, mostly just tutorial projects not fitting for a proper portfolio, but I'm well on my way to creating such works. You'll find some compilation pictures of my models in the scraps section (which on a side note is horribly placed in DA now, not liking the navigation so much), so here's a link!

[link]

I have little to write in a proper "art journal", such as this one. It's Summer time, and for those of us who are cool enough to go to school during this time know that it's not always the most enthusiastic of times to be in a school setting. Never the less, it is where I find myself on my journey to graduate. The Summer has annotated everything, schedules, hours, class offerings. I am only taking three classes this time around (I took four last Summer), and only one of those could be called an art class. Intro to 3D is that class, and in just three classes we should have finished two projects already. Anyone who has used Maya probably know it isn't the easiest thing to just pick up and use. But that is what we all had to do. Despite this though, I could see a marked improvement in my knowledge of the program in such little time, even if all we're modeling is fairly simple geometry. There are going to be something like five projects in the class, and we've already done two of them. Hopefully I'll have some renders of the completed models so I can upload them here for everyone to see, but other than that, Summer looks to be mostly dry, like the weather, as far as art goes.

NT