Jingi

Friday, April 15, 2005 » gaming school update work

So it turns out my last quarter at UCSB is definitely going to be my favorite. I'm only taking three classes, so I don't expect the work will pile up too badly. Sometimes I even come back from class and find myself writing out some of the characters from the day's Chinese lesson for review, since I usually get out on the early side and still have some motivation to be productive. Amazing!

I also resigned at my campus job, which helps with the shorter hours a bit. In its place, I'm doing some work putting together a Website for a company in Boston. It gives me hope for keeping up freelance projects on the side, since it's got work-at-home hours and—I hate talking about money, but—generous pay. Also, it's great to be able to just mess around with CSS and get paid for it. [Tangent: I recently put together a list of pros and cons for different navigation menu styles, and right at the top of the list of cons for my favorite two styles was "not compatible with Internet Explorer." I hate hate hate hate hate how Microsoft is single-handedly stunting the potential of the Web.]

One of the other things I planned for all of this quarter's job-less free time was learning some new tricks. That is, Maya, ActionScript and PHP. Granted, they're all a bit tricky so the latter two may have to wait till the summer, but Maya has been a great experience so far. Right now I'm just going through some tutorials on the basics, but the training videos are really excellently-done and easy to follow. I've been watching around one to two hours a day (although this week has been light because I've been practicing instead), so it's sort of like just having an extra, self-paced class. As for end results, I had character modeling for games in mind when I began (and still do), but I'm proud to say that I've already been able to put my fledgling skills to use: I needed some awkward perspective shots for some pieces for my drawing class, so I threw together a couple quick models of a Russian sculpture and the George Washington bridge. (The bridge is not one of the slabs, by the way.) After a little rotating, I ended up with some great reference images. Now I can't wait to get into lighting to use along those lines.

Of course, I've still managed to burn up plenty of free time with a few new games. A couple weeks ago it was Half-Life (the first one), and now it's Tekken 5, in which I think I've finally graduated past Fighting Game Mentality Level 1: mindless button mashing. It was a fierce struggle, however.

So, that's about it. To sum up: enjoyable classes + freelancing + learning software + still tons of free time = yum. Now how come it took four years to figure out that formula?