Smithi

Dialogue from Love Actually

Course: Graduate Typography
2008 Fall
Carnegie Mellon

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Designing my portfolio has so far been the toughest to decide on a design. I don’t want it to overpower my work, but I don’t want it to look too simple either. I love simplicity though, maybe I will just end up leaving it extremely simple. Here is my first comp:

Here is a garden with lots of flowers and gazebo’s and ladybirds and a snail as the navigator/avatar.
Press ‘w’ to change camera angle to an overhead view.

Ladybirds – NPC’s
Gazebos – Obstacles
Flowers – Aesthetic purpose and obstacles
Fence – BoundarySo for my Programming for digital media class, we designed and programmed a 3D world which had an avatar to navigate it and some other npc’s (non-playable characters). These non-playable characters were used to demonstrate “behaviors” such as flocking. This behavior comprised of three important segments – alignment, avoidance, and cohesion.Alignment – the characters move in the same direction,
Avoidance – the characters that flock together don’t bump into each other, and finally
Cohesion – they travel as a group

Now moving on to talking about ‘my’ project, I designed a little garden (which I plan to improve and add functions to and make pretty as well) with a little snail as my avatar, which is probably a bit fast for itself. My npc’s are little ladybird bugs. I also decided to have a fence around my world as a boundary and to make the world interesting, I added some gazebo’s and flowers. It looks really bright right now and I hope to be able to add some more features later to make the exploring a little more fun. Any suggestions are absolutely welcome.

It was a bit of a pain to program in director in spite of receiving an immense amount of guidance from our professor. It was a challenge that ultimately helped me feel satisfied with the outcome. This is probably the best web-deployable 3D program available now.

We did a whole bunch of programming with vectors and having three dimensions only made it complicated but somehow extremely interesting to solve problems based on directions and axes.

Modeling 3d objects in Director wasn’t so great at all. We did have some functions for basic shapes but was tough to make something truly creative. We sure could have imported something from other programs but the whole process didn’t seem enticing enough.

I would like to see what Adobe puts out in the near future and I truly, sincerely hope they implement something for the undo option which goes back only ONCE! I made it a habit with director now to save my file every 10 seconds and save about 10 different versions. The undo button is a savior for many of us who work on projects such as these. I suppose it forces a better practice on us, but it would be helpful if the undo button was a bit more useful.

The IEEE student chapter here at RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology) held a Poster Design contest for the 8th Annual IEEE Student Design Contest and here are the two comps I designed.

I generally go with a simplistic and minimal style which made one of the poster look like this:

Though I didn’t get selected as a winner or anything, it was fun to experiment with something that is different from my usual style. I tend to be very simplistic and symmetric most of the time, but here I decided to play around with a slightly asymmetrical focus.