Off Topic Productions

So after a year of on and off work I have finally completed project 2 of the 3ds max Fundy class by 3d Buzz.

Here is the class intro video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvyL3Mc77uk

And here is my video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlwIgwgyL2Q

Learned a lot, had a lot of fun. Tell me what you think and injoy.

Holy crap, that is damn impressive, DE! Back in the day I started the 3dBuzz class for Max, but I got lazy when I had to write a paper and stopped. Are you going to continue on or is that the end of their classes?

There is one more Project after this one on character animation. I think it's 30 hours of videos.

I have their C++ and Open GL tutorials hanging around, but there harder to fallow then these tutorials where. I might go back to working on them and then come back to character animation later but I'm kinda at a crossroads.

Collage starts up in the fall and I'm planing on majoring in game design from UCSC: http://www.cs.ucsc.edu/game-design

I could continue with the 3ds Max fundie class and have more skills in the long run. Or I can start work on the programming sides of things so that when classes hit me in the fall I'm a little more prepared.

Most likely I will be laxing for the rest of summer though.

That is friggin awesome. Oh man that is so wicked, I would totally buy the training courses if I could but $99.99 USD is far too much for me at the moment (though I may be able to get that soon). I would love to learn 3DS Max and C++ myself (mostly the former), I actually have Cinema 4D at the moment and have been playing around with it but have only managed to make a pillar lol.

How hard would you say this is? This is definitely something I'd look into. Good luck at college by the way!

Holy crap! that was awesome..

Well done! I know nothing about the process but it certainly looks great

~Psychotic~ wrote: How hard would you say this is?

55 hours of video for this project + 20 of intro to 3ds Max. Add on top of that you need to do everything they do in the video plus your own work and you end up with somewhere around 150 hours of work. At lest that's what someone told me over at 3d buzz who took part in the actual class.

It's really not that hard to be honest, although a lot of work, it is vary enjoyable work. Although it can be hard when there covering a subject you might not care too much about, like learning 3ds Max's particle system even when you know your not going to be using it for future, the hard parts are over before you know it and the rest of it is just flow.

Mr_Cyberpunk wrote:Holy crap! that was awesome..

Thanks!

Very nice, you managed to recreate it very accurately. I get the impression that you're not sure what part of game design to focus on, and are at the stage of trying everything out? If this is the case, I wouldn't bother with more Max fundamentals; it looks like you know what you're doing, and skills based around specific tools are not as transferable as general art skills.

It also seems that some of the things that you're learning are not directly useful for games: particles, camera shake, and all that jazz. By all means do the character animation, because that is useful (and cool, it's what I used to do), but if you want to get a taste of things in a limited time, I'd take a look at what will actually be directly useful.

On another note, the music you used was pretty fitting lol.

Fuck, I may have to re-evaluate my opinion of you (slightly ). If you'll allow a little criticism, I think the explosion was too fast - a bit of slow mo or more extended aftermath would've made it feel more substantial. I notice it was like that in the intro video though, so it's not really your fault.

But yeah, very nice. And the music was indeed well chosen

Jonas wrote:Fuck, I may have to re-evaluate my opinion of you (slightly )

That was an unexpected response.

What did you think of me before? Maybe I don't want to know.

Jonas wrote:I think the explosion was too fast - a bit of slow mo or more extended aftermath would've made it feel more substantial.

Yeah when I was looking at what the explosion looked like at first by rendering a frame and taking a look I thought it looked really good. Then after rendering it all out I realized that it was way faster then I wanted it to be. Still that last scenes took longer to render then all the other scene combined so adding more partial effects and keeping them on camera for longer would have translated to a much longer render time. Not that it wouldn't have been worth it but Max's particle system is only useful inside Max so demonstrating that I can make really cool particle effects in max seems like a mute point to me.

Congratulations for your perseverance, I don't think I could keep going at it

WHOAH....
That is kickass! Great work. Keep it up.

I wish I was motivated to do 3D work as much as I am motivated to do 2D work.

Trestkon wrote:Holy crap, that is damn impressive, DE! Back in the day I started the 3dBuzz class for Max, but I got lazy when I had to write a paper and stopped. Are you going to continue on or is that the end of their classes?

Papers and essays (boring ones anyways...) are the scum of uni and college. Such a motivation breaker. I've got a 2000 word essay on Experimental Video due friday that I haven't even started. *shudders* Left it 'til last as usual...

Now essays on game design are much better. I got a High Distinction for my Computer Games theory class last semester. And I used TNM for examples in one of those essays too!
TNM; the gift that keeps on giving.

teknikal wrote:Papers and essays (boring ones anyways...) are the scum of uni and college. Such a motivation breaker. I've got a 2000 word essay on Experimental Video due friday that I haven't even started. *shudders* Left it 'til last as usual...

That's why I never went to University to learn Design, for the most part is bloody theory work. Whilst, the course I'm doing at Polytechnic is practical real-world experience. I don't need to know the friggin history of Design in the real-world, yes the principles of Design are important (and we learn these anyway) but why bother learning and writing about shit I'll never use? Will the client give a shit? Probably not.

~Psychotic~ wrote: but why bother learning and writing about shit I'll never use? Will the client give a shit? Probably not.

Damn right. When the hell am i going to find an essay that examines the history and evolution of music video clips helpful in my future?