Blogs - LumenLumen

Hey, Lumen here to give a status update:

I've not been posting as much content as I'd like. Mostly, it's been Research and Development which to be honest, has been incredibly difficult, but fun. From the Rayleigh-Tyndall effect to particle simulation, it's been one hell of a year(2013). However, I haven't really found myself trying for a team which has been bewildering tons of people. Don't get me wrong...I love the idea of working for a team, but there are just somethings that I must overcome so that I might be of use.

This year is all about refining the skills that I've gained, rather than learning a multitude of things so it's going to be practice practice practice for me. No, I'm not some gifted prodigy. I've just been using a lot of the time that I've been given to understand what it is that I really want to do. I've done modeling, lighting, rigging, programming, volumetrics, animation, etc and they're all interesting areas. For now, I'm diving more into Volumetrics with a subset of rigging, animation and modeling so let's see how that goes.

Game Design's been a pretty neat experience for me.I recall at some point not having a clue of what I was doing to be honest.Originally,I started out doing CG and slowly advanced to the area with the introduction of my teacher and best buddy.Anyways,you might feel as though I'm slacking...I totally am.
Procrastination is a strong thing,but life is full of things that will damper your experience.Here are a few
things that I've found to help.

EXPLORATION!!!

I've done tid-bits of a plethora of things.From scripting to music production,I've found myself actually being able to work soundly when in a block.Excavating new applications and learning something new in your spare time always helps with boredom and gives a great amount of clarity.

SOLAR RAYS

I enjoy the cold,but the cold can be somewhat depressing.There's nothing like just taking a walk or sitting on your porch with your MP3 player and soaking in some rays.Vitamin D's great for your health anyways.

CHALLENGE YOURSELF!!!

As an artist,you're going to be expected to work on unexpected things...VERY unexpected things,so don't be too afraid to dive into an area that you're completely ignorant to.You learn more and more and this just allows for you bridge those skills into more personal projects for your portfolio.

INTELLIGENCE!!!

Whether it be the manual of your application,some youtube videos or maybe even a subscription to a site accustomed to training the younger audience who participate in Game Design.Intelligence is always a wonderful thing to have.The more you have,the easier things will be for your to assess the situation.Read a few E-books from 2004 on Game Development.To be honest,those things are really useful for all of you people saying "Get with the times".

GAMING

Don't be so close-minded to the genre that you choose to invest your time in for a lot of them have some fantastic ideas.I tend to play games like Pangya,SimCity,L4D Series,Borderlands Series,etc.They're pretty open and silly.SimCity kind of teaches me how to manage my time and gives me a simulation of
how tough budgeting and decision making becomes while Borderlands and L4D loosens my collar.

I would continue to list more,but I've to get back to work now.I'm deep into learning Mari already and have gotten a lot of things worked out in 24+ hours...Ah yea.Be sure to sleep for your body can't exactly feed on will when it's completely exasperated.Bye guys!

I'm not as big here than most,but I just felt that I'd make this announcement.I have numerous things in life that I must pursue and walking around on a busted leg all of the time isn't exactly what I'd call "Employable".I'm taking this time now to push beyond my limitations and have began working in one
field as a major.The others will just be minors.

Even though things wont seem to go according to plan,I'm happy to know that I learned more.A lot of what was learned was pretty much no use here though.People just kept throwing things into the project and that made things particularly hectic,then Senluc left.A lot of what was done was his and Steven's work,but since the entire team was just topsy-turvy,I had barely an clue of what to do.I went
from Learn Normal Mapping to Retopology of objects.I learned Hard-Surface techniques in Z-brush and even persisted upon making them truly a hard-surface model by separating the specific areas of the UV's as islands.

I learned of Unity's Shuriken Engine,Some C# and Mechanim.I also got to play around with the a lot of different shaders and plugins.The most prominent things that I learned would have to be Morph targeting.I took a week or two to make a female head,cloth hair and animated facial animations.I learned
wire parameters and all of that good stuff too.Oh!The more fun parts included taking two to three weeks of my time to learn to properly animate.Pretty fun adventure,but it's over...

What am I going to do now?Work on my portfolio and workflow.Looking back now,I can see a bunch of issues that were not visible to begin with,vertex normals for one...If you're going to decide to yell your
head off at me,feel free to do so. :D Ta-Ta for now.