Tag Archives: ETC

Building Virtual Worlds – Round 0

Building Virtual Worlds at Carnegie Mellon University starts with each student being assigned a role in Round 0. Since I have a Computer Science background, my role was that of programmer; this entailed I build a world that employed a number of basic features in Unity, such as:

  • Loads models and textures.
  • Play animations.
  • Use intervals, lighting, collisions, and multiple scenes.

The world can be downloaded here.

Concept

When considering the world, what I noticed was the amazing talent of the artists and musicians around me. It occurred to me what a shame it would be for their work not to be seen. I decided then that my virtual world would be a gallery of other peoples work. My first task was then to coordinate of assets with artists, and sound designers.

Creation

Artists were initially required to create animated lunchboxes, then dragons, and sound designers were required to create music for a clip of game play from a previously made world. I decided to meld the two by attaching audio sources to several of the artists assets that would constantly play music made by our sound designers.

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Visual Story – Space

After completing our first assignment our next involved exploring a different aspect of Visual Story. Space.

Space in visual story can be broken down into four categories:

  • Ambiguous
  • Flat
  • Limited
  • Deep

Ambiguous Space

Ambiguous space creates a feeling of confusion in the viewer. It can be created with the following elements:

  • Lack of movement.
  • Unfamiliar shapes.
  • Confusing tonal and textural patterns (camouflage)
  • Mirrors and reflections.
  • Objects of unknown size
  • Disorienting camera angles.

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Marshmallow Challenge

As part of Building Virtual Worlds we were tasked to complete the marshmallow challenge.

The marshmallow challenge has teams build a tower out of a number of materials:

  • 20 sticks of spaghetti.
  • One yard of tape.
  • One yard of string.
  • One marshmallow.

We completed the challenge with a height of 29 inches, and though our tower may not have been the tallest when measured. At the end of the day it certainly was the tallest left standing.

marshmallow-challenge

Visual Story – Composition

In our Visual Story course we were tasked to take pictures demonstrating various visual concepts. Our first assignment involved composition, namely working with the following concepts in photography:

  • Balance
  • Filling the Frame
  • Frame Withing a Frame.
  • Lines.
  • Patterns.
  • Rule of Thirds.
  • Shapes.

Below are the pictures I took for each category with a little why for each.

Some of the following photos did not successfully capture the category, but I included them anyways because I enjoyed taking them.

Balance

Balance is a tricky concept well explained at photographylife.com. Essentially when I took my photos I focused on creating photos with two points of focus and symmetry.

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