I managed to take advantage of a spare half an hour the other day, so I used the time to render a quick preview of the enviroment, plus Id like to see how the enviroment reacts when the camera is moving around, expecially the Luxor Pyrimid.
Thursday
Test Run
3Ds max Screenshots
Ive finally managed to get together my screenshots from 3d max, I wont show them all here but I will try to show my design process.
One design problem I had lately was with the pyramid in the middle of the board, despite the fact that I had made a good texture to give it the reflective glass look but I couldn't seem to get the effect to look right. So to solve the problem I made a clone of the pyramid and made it slightly bigger around the smaller one, I gave that one translucency properties and a dull grey colour, then I gave the inner pyramid the texture and the reflective properties, this effect filtered through the slightly larger pyramid gave it the effect I was looking for.
Further Life Drawing
Here are the other pieces i did from observation, while this is for my own benefit as a practitioner this did help me understand objects and surfaces more and so could be counted towards study for Exploring Multimedia. Here are a few examples of what Ive been doing since the beginning of summer.
Life Drawing
During this term I have been developing my skills as an artist, my ambition is to become a better designer both for environments and characters. Since I got burgled and lost my laptop and 360 Ive been feeling disheartened and found it hard to draw. After talking to Danny Kay and spending some time tyring to think of how to get the ball rolling again I decided to attend life drawing classes, which worked and I have learnt many things from doing it which I can reflect in my personal studies.
Las Vegas Boardgame 4
Once I had fully constructed the ideas I had for the game I went on to make some test designs on Google Sketchup. This way I could get a good idea o how my model will look in 3D before starting on my main design. Making them told me a lot of things about how they are going to look as well as gaining a good 3 dimensional idea of the space that will be taken up.
Las Vegas Boardgame 3
Now I have established various designs and made my choice on what I want to include on my boardgame it is now time to think of the specifics, I have made a board using Flash to correspond with how I want my board to be constructed. This way I can build around it an keep true to mydesign intentions. 
I have also made several more textures using flash such as the smooth black reflective glass of the Luxor Hotel Pyrimid, which was made using faded white lines against a dark grey backround which when put in 3Ds max looks like a large wall of glass with square window rims. I chose flash for some of the texture making because you can make simple and bold images which aheave an effect I want to utilise in Autodesk 3Ds Max.
Wednesday
Las Vegas Boardgame 2
It became instantly apparent that I can't exactly rip out the whole of Las Vegas and put it on the board because thats just going to be too hard and not really a creative piece of work because I am simply copying some existing designs. So the next loical step I though was to somehow mix the glamour and style of Las Vegas and mix it into a game enviroment.
So like a lot of things in the gambling community I went for a themed approach, by mixing existing well know landmarks that reprisent the Las Vegas strip with the games that are played there so to stick with the theme. My ideas is to take certain landmarks like the excalibur hotel and take there acrcutectural design and make it into a game of set piece, these will also intergrate into the board itself. Also Ihave chosen to use the same board for both the visualisation brief and the animation brief, I belive I can cover both because the board I plan to make in 3Ds Max will have all the ambitious detail for the Visualistaion brief and also there are going to be many moving parts on the board like the Exclibur Roulette Wheel.
Milk Candy Farm
Milk Candy Farm is an idea that me, Jack Boyles and Richard Norman came up with, basically its the name of a web site we want to make from which we will make all kinds of media like animations, films, documentaries, games, really anything we make in our spare time. We are pulling in all the people we know who we feel can contribute, we've been talking to students that cover graphic design, web design, students who want to write scripts for us, and media students who want to help with all things like filming and editing. Jack want to contribute his directing skills and has lots of ideas for sketches and short films, Richard also has lots of ideas and plans to make use of the website and he also wants to practice his skills with a camera and show off his smooth hand held work.
Personally I can contribute a lot because I know how to use flash very well and I can easily make web based animations, I am also currently learning script so I can make games but at the moment I'm looking for a programmer to help and even give me a learning boost. I can also contribute artistically by doing storyboards and the endless list of design ideas for games and other media I produce all the time. On top of this the three of us live together and are constantly collaborating ideas, this would also make it easier to run a website as at least three of us are around to keep it organised.
Despite all this there is one other key factor that is attracting all this attention and that is that I'm and receiving £800 from the government and its not the kind of money I want to spend to myself so I am putting it all into this idea to Milk Candy Farm a budget. This will give us the chance to put money into some of our efforts and explore some new ways of producing media.
I think that this will be a very productive way of spending our spare time, we can only benefit from doing this and it help us by beginning a network, even if it is among friends it will build from there.
Monday
Las Vegas Boardgame 1
I started this project by thinking of a few ideas from scratch, after a while of considering a few ideas I remembered a boardgame I made for fun when I was little after watching the gambling episode of the Simpsons, from that idea I had a talk with Andy in a Seminar with him and he helped me realise how it could work as a virtual boardgame. From this I started to make some initial sketches from images I researched on the Internet, I wanted to look at the distinct visual style of the gambling industry, the countless efforts to attract people's attention, the amazing monuments constructed and the astonishing amount of money that flows in and out (but mostly in) of the companies that own it all.
After looking at casinos from all over the world I kept being drawn to just Las Vegas because out of any place in the world it holds the more of what I want visually in one place, also it seems better to make a boardgame about a single place and making one about Las Vegas seems an even better idea. Some of the things I noticed when sketching ideas and looking at Las Vegas was that themes and difference are important, there isn't one big casino that is the same as another. These variations apply to almost anything, from the shape of the building or structure to the use of lighting to even the design of the slot machines themselves. Personally I appreciated all these efforts, maybe not making casinos without windows so customers cant tell the time of day, but the effort to draw in a crowd of gamblers and tourists with bright lights and fantastic shows that try and better their rival companies. This endless and ever expensive competition has spawned some of the most famous locations and visual styles in the world. It is important to try to reflect this in my own work, an environment with a fast pulse that visually represents Las Vegas if it was a boardgame like how Monopoly would represent London if they included more models on the gameboard surface like I plan to.
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