Down to Business

Fresher's week is officially over and proper education has begun. Our week begins on Tuesday, because we only have to go in Tuesdays and Wednesdays (Of course, we're supposed to go in all week).

The computer lab has just been refurbished with a whole battalion of new PCs (Dual Core 2 x 1.5Ghz, 1GB Ram, Radeon X1900 GTs) and when we went in this morning they still hadn't finished setting them up. We ended up crowding around a big plasma screen so our tutor could explain the basics of 3D animation. And then we watched 'The Making of Silent Hill 2'.

I've never played any Silent Hill games, but SH2 looks a lot more cinematic than I thought it was. Looks like scary stuff to me, although I prefer not to play that sort of game (I'm a proper scaredy cat). It was still great to see how they went about making the game, doing all the complex motion capture for the faces and things. It's a shame we won't be doing anything like that; we're focusing on modeling alone. On the other hand, that lets us get very good in that department and I'd quite like that.

Before long it was lunchtime, where half the class (About 15/38) left to get food, leaving the rest of us to sit there doing nothing. In no time we were all having a grand LAN game of Call of Duty, and of the 4 games we had, I was lucky enough to get first place in three. Now I should mention that I don't play FPS games online at all. In other words, it's a total mystery how I managed to score highly, but I suspect everyone else was just tired or something. Ho hum...

We're trying to get Battlefield 2142 installed when it's released. That'd be fun don't you think?

But in any case, I managed to take some photographs of my area 'o learning, which is the 9th floor of this building.

The new elevator block on the side cost £6 million!

Incidentally I've never seen Ghost in the Shell. It's just traditional these days to cover people's faces with the Laughing Man logo.

And for the grand finale:

This is a spliced panorama view from one side of our building.
It's also absolutely rubbish, but I've had enough of Photoshop for one day.

Incidentally the only 'work' we did today was trim photograps of Wheelybins from different angles, then create an inside-out cube in Max, before sticking the photos to it. That's what we'll use as reference for our modelling. Even that was an epic feat for most of us. Ahh, we're so new.