#saemelbourne

The Concept design (blueprints)

The concept vehicle is a flight variation of Lamborghini Murcielago and a Fighter jet/sport combination with two Lockheed aircrafts: F22 Raptor (Thrust) and LockHeed NightHawk (wings).

One of the concerns of this combination was to maintain an aerodynamic design. If the car was made out of carbon fiber rather than metal, it would take the weight issue into consideration and improve the possibility of flight.

 Image shown below is a photoshopped Concept art of the vehicle :

This is a top down view of the car design

And side view of the concept art.

As you can see here I have kept the car’s original basic design and added in the aerodynamic wings and rudder from the Night Hawk. Within the engine bay I had placed the F22 raptor twin engines for maximum cruising speed.

In overall, I think the concept design looks a bit sleek.

The process of converting 2D concept image to a 3D model

Firstly,  I scaled the cube to the proportions as indicated by the concept blueprint.

Then I began to place some edge loops on the cube itself to move the edges to position such that I sculpted up the basic shell around the concept outline.

Here is the image of the car before I modelled the details in:

After that, I slowly added some details to the 3D shell by extruding and placing edge loops in some places specified by the blueprints.

Here is an image of the completed model untextured:

With the body done, I moved on to sculpt the wings and rudders and the jet engines out of individual cubes which didn't take long to replicate from the blueprint.

Here is comparison image of the wing in WIP stage and completed wing:

here is comparison image of WIP rudder and a completed one:

However the main unique thing is replicating the car’s grill/wire mesh component as the blueprint had shown it.

Here is the component in question:

Also I modelled the Lamborghini reventon wheels because I had an idea to animate the wheels to fold itself in like conventional aircrafts do to take off. However, I eventually decided against the animation.

Here is the image of the wheel in comparison with cylinder before I modelled it   (I had replicated from online source):

Not only that, I also had modelled the interior from scratch with exception of the seat(Which I had modelled prior to via blueprint), steering wheel and jet thrust controls which were all replicated from online source.

Here is the compilation of images regarding the model I sculpted:

An WIP seat from a early stage of modeling via blueprint.

A quick model of jet thrust control and the floor bit textured (I decided make the floor piece part of the Jet thrust control to save time texturing it.)

A completed model of the racing seat.

And racing seat with textures

A WIP steering wheel.

And completed steering wheel.

Texturing process of the 3D model

What I did is select the whole top section (excluding the windows) to UV map texture the car body as to simplify the texture process of the whole 3D shell in three sections.

However, I had to refresh the textures on the body and both the wings as well the the rudders multiple times (due to savefile not loading the referenced images). In spite of that, I managed to fixed the issue rather quite quickly.

I had textured the car to give further details (only half of details shown).

However, texturing the other components of the car took less time then the car.

Here is the image of the car with the textures applied as well an image of the completed concept car:

Here is one or two images of the wings/rudder, jet engines and the one of the wheels:

 The Process of animating 3D model for 9 second loop

The process was simple setup to camera to do full 360 turntable animation while I animated the finished car to do simple “flying” animation which loops pretty well.

However, I animated the wheels and the jet engine (both the turbine and exhaust vent) to give the feeling of a short takeoff and descent landing animation  

Rendering process of the animation

I was happy with how the animation turned out, I batch rendered the animation and imported to After Effects to give a little afterburner effect animation for the car (which I had researched online on how to create the effect) then applied the afterburner effect by layering the effect on top of the footage.

And here is the image with overlayed Afterburner

In all, the afterburner effect didn’t take me too long to create and animate the thrust effect.

With that done,  I rendered the animation as video.

Final verdict of the whole process

After assembling the scene I started to work on the lighting. I had some difficulty with the lighting, I found that there the scene was casting shadows in a odd way during at some parts of the animation. In the end, I disabled the shadows and decided shadows wouldn’t be required in the final product.

With the lighting I had set-up, the batch render took around 30 minutes to render the 360 frames at once. 

In After Effects I decided to enhance the clip with an audio that I downloaded from the website Bensound.com (Epic).

With the Treasure Chest completed, I begin to assemble the scene for Pirates Gold  which took me less than an hour.

The process I took was to import the provided assets and place them where I wanted them to be. However I left both the treasure chest and board in the centre of the scene while I moved the trees, grass, sea shells and starfish appropriately. 

After placing them, I decided to improve the scene a bit more by modelling one or two rocks for scene which I thought improved the aesthetic of the scene slightly.

I was happy with the way how the scene was set-up:

Here is a snapshot of the scene as it is:

How can you use social media for your career? What strategies can you use? What is unprofessional on social media?  -(Dena, 2015)

These questions that Christy wrote in her blog are quite intriguing. 

I would use social media for collaborating or networking with other professionals, job hunting, as well as showcasing my work.

One of the most common unprofessional behaviours that people tend to do on social media was communicating inappropriately such as talking improperly (e.g. swearing) and displaying unsuitable content.

After I did some research online, I found four strategies on how to manage your social media professionally.

1. Know your audience and be interactive.

2. Provide value content for your audience

3. Go deeper in conversation with your audience.

4. Expand your social media presence.    

I think that these tips are very useful for me. I would implement these tips in the near future for professional reasons. 

The tip I found most helpful was to be in depth with your audience. 

I like this tip because I think I can always benefit from understanding my audience better. My future blog will benefit from it as it will provide interesting content specific and appreciated by my audience.

References

Pascale, A. (2014, March 5). 7 Tips for Managing and Maximizing Content in Social Media. Retrieved 17 July 2015, from http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2332197/7-tips-for-managing-and-maximizing-content-in-social-media

Accessibility

In terms of accessibility I believe that the blog has covered different disabilities which some people would have as consumer (within the industry). Those specified in Christina’s blog are:

Mobility

That the product should allow consumers to have the freedom of free movement which means they should not be restricted of their ability to make use of their skills.

Vision and Auditory

According to the blog,  the statistics for people who are visually impaired are one in seven to one  in  twelve.  However, for a group of people who have hearing problems or their hearing is impaired can find a visual film that have closed captions. Given that there is a disparity in information received by people with visual or hearing impairments, I feel that people who have either disabilities should have more options.

Diverse teams  & Events

I do realize that you have to be aware of the cultural society we live in to accept the people as they are  instead of  just focusing on specific type of people to work with. That includes accepting people for their skills and their ability to work together as a team for any projects/ events that requires in depth collaboration.  

Conflict Styles and Competition

I am aware that you need to have a clear understanding of the conflicts that arises in your career. the types of conflict that may arise through collaboration are:

Interdependence, incompatible goals (where the goals between two people or companies interfere against each other),  Communication problems (this often occurs when people can’t collaborate efficiently because of the language and cultural barriers, the time zone  between people)     

Bibliography

iamtulus, & SlideShare, 1p. (2011, April 7). Organizational Behaviour - Conflict [Powerpoint]. Retrieved 10 July 2015, from http://www.slideshare.net/iamtulus/organizational-behaviour-conflict

Bacal, R. (1998). Conflict prevention in the workplace: using cooperative communication. Winnipeg: Bacal & Associates.

Dena, C. (2015, April 20). Week 5: Inclusive Design. Retrieved 9 July 2015, from https://medium.com/self-directed-practitioners/week-12-inclusive-design-9df8f239653b

The Phone Call

I believe that  receiving a phone call from a company for a interview can be a nerve-wrecking and exciting experience for some people. After all, the phone call is one of the initial stages of job hunting.  

The phone call is usually informative, particularly about the interview process and its scheduling time.

In relation to my own experience, I received an email regarding the schedule of the interview. The main reason why I  received an email instead of the fore-mentioned phone call was because I was overseas. At the time, I felt excited because to me, it represented a stepping point for pursuing my ambitions. 

Interview Questions

The intentions of the interview questions are to test whether the candidates are better suited to the role.

Candidates feel nervous for the first time because they are interviewed by someone they had never met before and they have to convey their responses in a professional manner.

My first interview was an anxious one because it was important to me and I wanted to do well.

From the Pixar interview category in Christina’s blog, my interview was a mix of Behavioural,  Situational, and Video questions.

I found that during the interview, I felt that the questions ranged from easy to moderate. For some of the questions, I had my responses prepared beforehand in case if I had any difficulties.

The Sneaky questions

The intentions of asking “sneaky” questions is to find out more about how the candidates handle high pressure situations and how advanced their problem solving skills are.   

I had one of two similar questions during my interview that got me thinking for awhile before answering them because it was stressful. I would believe that the candidates could feel stuck when answering related questions.

For an example,  “If you were a part in a car, which part would you be and why?”  (Dena, 2015)

My answer: I would be the accelerator because I get things moving. 

Week 2: What do animators, audio engineers, game developers, filmmakers, web developers, and graphic artists share in common?

There are similarities between different disciplines of the creative industry. As Christy Dena (Dena, 2015) covers in her article, there are 10 key points that Rosalind Gill’s study found that best depict work life traits that a new media worker has. They are entrepreneurism, short term, precarious work, low pay, long hours, keeping updated, self-learning, informality, industry-wide inequalities and exclusions, no future and having passion for one’s work.

From what I have learnt from the article and further discussion, I understand the collaborative nature that we share in the creative industry is important. As no project can be done by one person alone, it is imperative that we are comfortable with other people. This is why networking is an essential asset to working in the creative industry. We know people and their skills through their ability to communicate about their work. I would like to grow my confidence in collaborating and networking with other professionals. I find it a valuable skill, and a key asset for surviving in the creative industry.

Entrepreneurism is the ability to come up with ideas. As being a creative professional, I recognise that ideas are important as they drive the industry. I like developing my own ideas, and will seek to keep being inspired to drive my creativity. As the article stated, being entrepreneurial or creative is a mindset. I would like to grow habits that fuel this mindset throughout my career.

I also believe that DIY learning improves your ability to be creative and collaborative as a learning attitude. We can always find room for improvement in our personal and professional skills. Additionally, as most of the industry tools and systems used are regularly updated, it is important to have this attitude towards learning to remain a relevant and skilled employee. I would like to keep this attitude throughout my professional career as it is a highly valuable outlook to have.

References

Here is the pre-after effects rendered demo.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2ojqVJZnGPSY0pRakZrZ0pZMVU/view?usp=sharing

i was satisfied with the movement of the camera as well animation of the vegetation appearing into view during the scene.

and another one, a finished “commercial” title