Back From The Dead? Progress So Far 6/11/09

Well my 2nd blog is out, much, much later than it should be.
To tell the truth, I've been ill with a nasty viral infection for about sweet sixteen days and it's been a killer. It conveniently happened at the end of my first week at uni which isnt too suspicious at all >_>.

I've made a nearly complete recovery now, still have a chesty cough which tends to pick up once a day but be dead for the rest of the day. I came back to uni this past Monday completely stressed as hell because of how much time I had off and the impact it was going to have on my work especially seeing as my deadlines for the 3 main projects are all 15th December...Just over a month away and Im crapping myself in all honesty.

With my first day back on Monday, it actually went really smoothly. I had my Animation seminar and it went really well, much to my surprise and delight! We had begun building the robot for the project and they had already made the legs and arms. This week was moving onto the spine and head, thus completing the modelling of the robot in 2 sessions including personal time if necessary. I actually sailed through the seminar, even stopping occasionally to help my friend out. I built the robots spine and head easily with no major problems, I was working from a pre-set file where the arms and legs had been already built.
I actually stayed behind at the end of the seminar to finish the final part of the work where we rigged the robot for animation. We had to build gyros which were pretty simple to do, albeit a little fiddly as they involved some rotation but it was doable. Pleased with my results, I had to connect the top and bottom of the spine as well as the head to their respective gyros. Andy already had left so what happened next was quite a problem, the body twisted a fair bit in a corkscrew fashion when I connected the spine gyros and it looked pretty weird. I got confused and frustrated to what had happened and left due to it as I had been working for 3 hours straight. Although, I spoke to a friend later this week and he said that does happen and it is fixable, so it's all good now I know how to sort it. I'll tweak it in next weeks seminar before we do the work and also later in the week if I get the opportunity, to look at and work through the Orrery and Arms and Legs worksheets.

The Visualisation seminar went well too, had some problems but I managed to sort them out throughout the seminar and I also was able to understand the seminar well and also what I missed. I hadn't missed that much I dont think, it was all about working with splines really which is important for the rollercoaster. We looked at light and colour, and my prior knowledge of them from A-Level Physics made understanding it a doddle tbh, although it was the simple version of what we needed to know. Apparently we need to know about Photography too, so I'm going to have to look into that at some point as we need to know about shutter speed, aperture etc.

Games Design was the one I'm most worried about and had the right to be after the seminar. We continued designing our card games or in my case, begun D:. After struggling a hell of a lot, I came up with 3 ideas but there are major flaws with all of them and it's making my life a nightmare, although Brad is speaking to me next week about them which is what I need now. The briefs says we need to make the card game playable for 2 people, simple, fun and strategic plus also be targeted towards the 16+ age range which is where the strategic element is vital too.
Only one of my ideas has any strategy to it and it isn't that strategic either, although it's currently the best one I have as flawed as it is. This card game project is pretty difficult tbh but I do have to try and do well with it as this is what I'm going into, which is Games Design and I'm sure to face scenarios like this even though I'll be working with video games.

I also actually managed to go to my tutorial yesterday with Deborah and Jools' lecture today after missing 3 weeks worth thanks to my illness. The tutorial was pretty helpful for me and it's helping me to get organised within the chaos I am in at the moment. The lecture was done by a guest lecturer who is a Careers expert for Art And Design who works at NTU. She gave us a pretty detailed insight into getting a job including building up your CV, how to compete with hundreds of other applicants and bucketloads of resources for us to look at too. We also had guest speaker from a recruitment company who is a former NTU student and also gave us a informative lowdown on getting a career and the current state of the industry as well as other things.