USC Ch. 9: Spiderweb Crossroads
11:15pm. Currently seated comfortably on the couch of a very tranquil living room, with my neighbor beside me also writing her journal. Difference is that her entries are actually a daily thing. Whoops. This might be my longest hiatus on here since coming to USC -- my worries weren't unfounded, I've been living on the edge for the past two months with my workload. The 1-week spring break just passed and I haven't even been able to post here. Anyway -- on to it.
The Data Structures/OOP course is relentless, but also relentlessly awesome. Just completed a mockup project of Amazon's cart service, complete with maps and sets, inheritance/polymorphism and a full-on graphical user interface! Most people found Qt programming tedious and/or pointless but I freaking love it, it streamlines so much of the GUI programming process with automatic scrollbars, resizing and the like. This thing took up half my spring break but I don't really regret it.
The other half of my spring break went to this:
I'm not sure what it even is, although I will say it's heavily inspired by the throne in Maplestory's Mushroom Castle. Built in 2 days using a mixture of polygons and NURBS. Speaking of which, NURBS is totally awesome -- it actually implements calculus concepts like rotating a curve around the axis, like whoa. Without that I'd never have achieved all the curvy pillar structures in the model. Learn your calculus, kids! Side note, those staircase handrails (apparently they're called "balusters", TIL) were an absolute nightmare to draw and proportion within the railings. I should probably remodel them using NURBS lofts -- which is what I did for the heart insignia in the centerpiece. That's the part I'm proudest of in the whole model, I think it came out perfectly. Giving it a gold Blinn texture helped out a ton too. All in all, this is the major modeling project I've been waiting to work on, and I'm totally exhilarated by the whole process.
My Trojan 3D printed model on the other hand isn't doing too well. For this semester I've handed the reins almost completely to my roommate, and he's doing a fine job of handling the action figure joints iteratively. Our dorm room has much more of that mad scientist feel now, with the coffee table heaped with dozens of assorted prints. It's just sad that when I look at it, I realize I've done nothing to contribute to that pile -- I'm not the true mad scientist between the two of us. I've began reflecting upon the notion that I may not have the best work ethics after all -- classic perfectionist, always trying to achieve the best possible result in the first run. Afraid of failures, lazy to make iterative changes, unwilling to learn. Honestly, I don't know. I just hope I'll be able to jump back into action with the storyboarding and filming process, assuming we make it that far -- time is getting real tight with only 4 weeks left to learn everything there is to stop motion filming.
And after all that would be summer. I've learned that one of the most pressing questions for CS students is: what summer projects should I work on? For me, it's a massive toss-up between a whole array (heh) of ideas. Like:
- UI/UX, which I've taken an interest in. Has to do with visual and tactile aesthetics, and highly relevant to games and animation tools development. Should I just stick to webdev, which has more application potential in hackathons? Or should I try making something substantial in Qt, which might be a great resume booster but doesn't have much room for individual use?
- Game development. Now that I've done basic Unity programming and also data structures and discrete math, I could try to implement graph search algorithms in games -- recently I've been playing with the idea of an Ice Slider puzzle game, like the ones in every single ice cave in Pokemon, which surprisingly doesn't really exist on mobile yet. - Animation. I could embark on an ambitious modeling/rigging/animation project, or I could also venture into the more daunting, less documented paths like BOIDS crowd animation in Massive. There's also the option of looking into the Maya API and possibly scripting some basic tools, although I think that might be a bit far out at this point, when I don't even know how to rig. Maybe a modeling tool? But what can I even make that's conceptually new / remotely useful? Hmmm.
And a ton more. I'll need to update my portfolio site too, not just to work on all standard computers but also on mobile. And as a final bit (I think this is my absolute longest post so far) I just got pulled into a Pokemon-esque game project. In a few days I'll become an official, contracted spriter for Honmon Inc., a mobile game that apparently uses elemental monster RPG elements to encourage children to read. Huh. The boss is -- also apparently -- a big shot who did undergrad through PhD at Stanford and MIT, in computer science no less, and worked as software/graphics engineer at big shot companies like Adobe, Nintendo, and Creatures Inc. of all places, holy hell. I really hope the job's worth it, because even the best of artists can get overworked and underpaid, especially in a dying field like pixel art. Otherwise, I'm low-key hoping to creep into a technical art position by dabbling in their MATLAB scripts for sprite editing. Maybe an animation script?
Anyway, this is it -- lots of things to consider. I anticipate that I won't be posting here again until May when the semester ends and I'm back in Singapore, but who knows. Until then -- thought purge off. Good night!
