School's Out for Summer

Heavens rejoice! Angels are singing! The semester is over and I survived taking two classes on top of all my other overcommittments -- and I think I may have even managed to earn an A in both classes. (For the first time since taking classes at UHCL, this was in doubt. It's easy to earn an A when I take a single class. It's harder when I double the class workload and add in all the other stuff from this spring!) I had my final test in my digital media studies class last night and as I walked out just before 8:30, hand aching from the four pages of essay questions I had to write, I felt so, so relieved.

(Side note: When did my hand become so wussy? In high school, I used to write pages upon pages of notes by hand. I only remember my hand aching once -- my senior year, towards the end of the week of IB exams. By that point I'd probably hand-written tens of pages of discussion and essay questions. Ugh. I can type much faster than I can write, that's for sure.)

My 3D modeling class finished up last week when we all presented our final projects. The assignment was to create a story and depict it using at least 5 models and 10 frames. Now, I'm not much of a writer so the story part was a little tough, but it was easy to come up with something I wanted to model. Since I'm already starting to think about our November trip to Japan, I decided to model some Japanese things and write a story about a ninja. I'm not going to include the cheesy storyline that goes along with the scene I depicted, but I'll show you the models. I was pretty happy with how the project turned out. Four months ago I had zero knowledge of how to use 3D modeling software, much less make something actually look somewhat realistic. And after four months, I was able to produce this! Pretty cool -- though the learning curve for Maya is so freaking steep that I could continue for another year and still not understand how to do everything I want.