#05particles

Assignment 5: Patterns from Particles The particle system is portraying a reaction where someone is thinking, and suddenly they get a brilliant idea. Particle sprite #1 (5-pointed star): act of thinking Particle sprite #2 (pointy spikes): sudden realization/idea formation, the aha! moment Particle sprite #3 (4-pointed star): the emotional satisfaction of said idea/thought Feedback: For this assignment, the action that I was trying to portray was the emotional process/stages of suddenly thinking of an idea, similarly to the lightbulb idea. I used small stars that kind of float around, going from the motion of spreading out and then moving back in to represent 'thinking'. Then, I used the spikes to represent the sudden idea popping into someone's head, signifying an emotion of excitement. Then lastly, the sparkles is the end result of this process, a sign of satisfaction and the feeling of proudness. I personally enjoyed this assignment, it's fun to mess around with the particle systems in unity. I found it fascinating how the speed and the spread of the particle sprites can embody a different feeling. However, I did struggle a bit on building the system itself, there are just some aspects of the animation that I wasn't able to apply to the degree that I wanted to. This is my first time using the particle system, so I think it comes with the learning curve, and just needing more practice with how each setting in unity works. #05Particles

Tools: Procreate, iPad, Apple Pencil Pro Desc: Visual representation of waking up from a long nap Feedback: (My homework is illegal, sorry!) I think this is a decent representation of the sensation of waking up from a disorienting nap, but it also feels like it can be attributed to many other sensations. I like the scratchy circular floaters, inspired by the ones you get when you look at something bright, because it feels accurate to the distorted vision you have when you wake up. The red spiky shapes represent your (or my) dry eyes and numb limbs when I wake up and the occasional "sparkling" feeling that accompanies it. I feel these could be a bit more dynamic than just growing into another shape to emphasize that rhythmic "shock". If I were to redo it, I'd make it more "spiky" somehow. The dizziness swirls also just feel too expected, so I would want to make something less obvious next time to represent these sensations. I think maybe that's part of why I feel this GIF can still represent other feelings beyond just the one I chose?

For this assignment I wanted to express the happiness that comes from smelling your favorite meal. I also wanted to try and make the gif loopable - the animation starts with 3 waves of air signaling a sort of scent traveling through the room, transitions to a smiling face as a reaction to the scent, and loops back to basically the same position to create this sort of back-and-forth between the person and their meal. The sketchy style is intentional - for one of my Studio 1 games I experimented with redrawing the same shapes between animation frames, and really liked the natural variety between the frames that comes from redrawing everything, and adding the sketchy look really emphasis that variety between all the lines that are changing, so I wanted to bring that style back for this assignment. I actually started with smooth lines and manually added the sketchiness in afterwards. Overall, I was scared to approach this assignment - animation and maintaining cohesion between frames always scared me - but I actually ended up having a lot of fun with this assignment and was really happy with the final product (just because I think the gif itself is satisfying to watch :P).

Feedback: Ginger tastes very interesting. I tried to use triangles to represent the spiciness, lines to represent the fibrous texture of ginger, and other shapes to represent the juice and add richness. I forgot to make it look crunchy.

This turned out about how I wanted, and it gave me a better opportunity to learn the VFX system in Unity than literally any other class I've been in, which I really appreciated. I don't love how the drawings of the effects themselves turned out, I think they look okay in context but on the page I'm not super happy with them (and I messed up something in converting the middle image to a material so it's oddly squished). What I'm most satisfied with for this assignment was my workflow & time spent vs final product, I ended up doing this relatively fast but I think the ratio of the time I spent vs how much got done is better than it's been in the past. I also like the blinking effect I was able to get with the Lingering Pain particle.