March of the Tennis Balls

As promised here is my final animation for CMPT 466 Computer Animation I took this summer at my university. You may notice some of the shots don’t have shadows or vector blur enabled due to rendering time constraints but overall I’m proud of it. I worked with 4 friends on this project. My part of the animation can be seen starting with the smoke coming out of the bottom of the machine until the ball bounces and stops at the tennis machine. I also worked on the lighting and post-processing.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I69BRu3gFnQ

Xbox 360 Tech support woes

My Xbox 360 I received as a gift back in 2006 which I’ve hardly played decided to red ring just under two months ago. Thankfully Microsoft covers such a problem for up to three years. I called July 6th and they said they would send me a shipping label because only Americans can print them out so I waited and waited. July 28th I called again and they said they would cancel my current repair and issue me a new one. Fast forward to today, August 14th, I still have not received my shipping label so I called again. Turns out that second repair was never actually placed. Then I was informed that actually Canadians can print out their shipping label which… would have been so much easier to do! Great let’s do that! Or wait their computers were updating so I have to call back tomorrow so they can place the order. It’s unlikely I’ll receive my repaired Xbox 360 before I start my next school semester.

Blender progress

I’m working on an animation in Blender due in a week. I thought I’d post some of the animation my group has done so far. My animation can be seen starting with the tennis machine shooting balls till the end of the clip. We’re focusing on animating right now and will adjust the textures and lighting next.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr7yX4gIF9s

Classes this semester

This summer I am taking IAT 102 Graphics, IAT 202 New Media Images, and CMPT 466 Computer Animation. This is my first semester at the Surrey campus taking courses. I spent some time looking over all the resources available in the library. It certainly reminds me of the Information Resource Centre at EA when I worked there. I don’t think many people really appreciate the resources available for students which includes hardware, software, training DVDs, books, journals, sound effect libraries etc. With that said — I need to start taking advantage of them more.

The first week of class was a nightmare because the Surrey computer labs did not have any of the software we needed for studio labs installed. All we could do is sit there and watch our TA fiddle with it for over an hour. I’m slowly getting used to Adobe InDesign now and have a magazine two page spread redesign due in a few days. Time for my perfectionist skills to kick in!

Game Career Seminar

In just a couple hours I will be attending the Game Career Seminar (GCS) at the first ever GDC in Canada. I was planning to buy the main conference pass but I decided not to because sessions were mostly directed at upper management. The GCS has some interesting sessions directed at someone like myself trying to get in the gaming industry. I am particularly interested in Jamie Cheng’s talk titled Go Indie or Go Home.

Starting again

I think it’s about time I registered my own domain name and got a proper host. I have had several blogs and websites in the past, usually hosted on my own machine. Recently my ISP’s upload rates have been terrible so I figured it was time. I plan to use this website to share my thoughts on game design, programming, and anything else that comes to mind.