http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/tim_brown_on_creativity_and_play.html
Tim talks on the ideas of how creativity works, and how it can be encouraged. He starts off with an experiment. Everyone has a sheet of cardboard, and they draw a person’s face next to them within 30 seconds. Lots of “sorry”s are exchanged. Tim goes on to explain why adults are so embarrassed when showing their ideas to others. It’s all about trust and security; about being in an environment where everyone is free to try and fail. Then Tim contrasts adults with children, which proudly show their drawings without embarrassment (most of the time). In early school years, activities like recess and play times let kids express their creativity by trying out different approaches to problems. Tim points out that play does need to have a predefined set of rules for the participants to follow, otherwise play is unproductive.
He then jumps to companies that encourage their employees to be creative and have fun with their work, such as Pixar, Google, and his own company IDEO. Pixar has jungle like huts which breaks the blandness of a regular cubical. Google has a giant dinosaur with pink flamingos. Weird, but cool and funny ideas which encourage playfulness. Finally, Tim explains a couple approaches to testing creative ideas. For physical objects, prototypes work great. They allow people to take a look and manipulate the idea which always generates more feedback. If it’s an experience, role playing helps by identifying the events that occur along the way, giving the designer empathy in the situation they create.
I really enjoyed hearing Tim’s ideas. As someone who has a blast playing with ideas and concepts, I was encouraged to look past the constraints of self doubt and judgment. I’ll definitely take his challenges to play as the opportunity arises.
This post will be to document the problems I ran into so far, and the fixes that worked for me.
Maya Batch Render is Slow, use Terminal Rendering Instead
Having Maya open while rendering is a waste of memory, it makes your batch renders slower. Maya opens up a separate program just to render the scene anyway, so its better to render with terminal.
How to do it:
Read more…
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/howard_rheingold_on_collaboration.html
Howard Rheingold talks about how collaboration has changed throughout the ages. He describes the challenges of language, cultural, and technology barriers.
One of the barriers that he talks about is the prisoners dilemma, where two prisoners have a choice to make, but can’t trust each other to make a choice that benefits themselves. With collaboration, they could step outside of the dilemma by interacting with each other to find out the best solution. Howard’s examples include eBay: a service where traders can trust each other based on reputation. More examples of collaborative efforts in technology are open source development, wikis (Wikipedia), Bittorent(file transfer where you upload and download simultaneously), and Folding@Home (a program that runs protein folding calculations). By using the power of many brains, you can end up with a much greater resource than with a individualist approach.
Collaboration definitely plays a huge role in the internet’s popularity. The whole social media phenomenon can only survive with collaboration. I also really like the idea of distributed computing (Folding@Home), because it makes use of the wasted idle time of the millions of computers worldwide to help a cause. Collaboration is also key to a successful large scale project. Having many people who specialize in a certain area pool their resources creates a strong product if the team is managed effectively.
This week was divided into texturing up the remaining areas, and I’m rendering the frames as I type. There will be about 40-50 hours of render time all together, so its intense. I can’t just set it and forget it either, I’m setting up the door animations each time, and each door animation is 14 frames. I’m tryying to be optimistic about it getting completed on time, we’ll see. I’ve already lowered the resolution and settings to optimize the time per frame, but they’re still taking from 6 to 12 minutes.
On the bright side, here’s some more renders.
Been cruising as fast as I can with texturing. I didn’t give myself enough time in the schedule, but I’ve already done lighting so I’m using the extra half of next week to finish texturing up.
http://www.ted.com/talks/john_maeda_on_the_simple_life.html
John Maeda is a design philosopher. He distils what simplicity is, and discovers when complexity works better. He admits his tendency is for the complex; he has 5 daughters, and his early design work features complex patterns. Simplicity seems to follow John wherever he goes. On his vacation, he saw a series of companies using “simple” in their slogan. He also contrasts the simplicity with some complex things we love, such as relationships and nature.
I find simplicity is very important to design. We use many aids such as grids, spacing, typography, and icons all to simplify communication to our audience, which creates a greater impact. Even complex design must start with something simple. Its like the Occam’s razor principle: given two solutions to a problem, the simper one is better. Less work and better results, works for me!
GASP! 90% of the modeling is done, it was a good week. I completed the annex, medical office, and mining facility. The only thing left for modelling is the exterior building shells, which won’t be seen for most of the game.
I had to do a bit more concept art since my early stuff wasn’t very detailed. I find it helps a ton having something concrete to work of off, otherwise I just fumble around and can’t gain momentum. Next week will be texturing.
