ITP BLOG
I thought it would be funny to put this stock video of a random man explaining something in the forest project I’m working on. He reminded me of a dad explaining to his kids how not to get hurt on a hike.
I had a weird thing happen when I tried to export the video. Everything went well, but when I played the video, it glitched out. Right after it exported, Unreal crashed and the mesh was all meshed up when I came back to re-export. I attached the video with the error below.
This week unreal tested me, and I kept running into errors that led to hours of youtube tutorials, documentation, office hours, and bothering classmates. Things finally started to come together at the end of the week, and I’m getting to a place where I’m happy.
Problems I’m still having:
Successes:
Extinction clock part II:
I have been thinking a lot about my extinction clock and maintaining simplicity but still share essential information. For this piece, I’ll be using the IUCN Red List of threatened species as a reference.
The clock will have five screens, all displaying different numbers.
1 – # of critically endangered mammals in the world
2- # of endangered mammals in the world
3- # of vulnerable mammals in the world
4 – # of extinct mammals since the last count
5- when the list will be updated
The five faces will take up 23% of the clock’s face representing how much “wild” land is left in the world, according to a recent study.
The placement of the faces is a rough representation of where the 23% is globally US, Canada, Russia, Brazil, Australia.
I also want to include a compartment on the back that has an explanation document.
Next is to order my parts and study how to change 12C addresses on LED backpacks to run multiple LED panels on the same two pins.
This week I focused on camera movement and the timeline. One problem that I kept running into was the animation scrubbing in the timeline. For some reason, I could not get that to work. It rendered out but wouldn’t play on my timeline.
This week I worked on developing multiple characters for my piece. Manly, I focused on working in Make Human, Mixamo, and Radical. The hardest part was making a person that I enjoyed, and I kept going back and forth to modify features. I believe I was in the uncanny valley – slightly creeped out by the elements. I’m excited to dive deeper into Maya and develop better characters in the coming weeks.
I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the idea of time these past couple of weeks, but the topic is so complex that my mind wonders in multiple directions, and I can’t seem to focus on one particular aspect. So I thought it would be interesting to explore this confusion in my first sketch. I studied something that takes seconds to complete and something that takes billions of years.
Sketch 1- food coloring dripped into warm water and photographed at three frames a second for 40 seconds.
Sketch 1A – P5JS sketch of a solar system spiraling; the background is a single frame from sketch 1. When I zoomed in to the individual frames, it reminded me of the milky way, which led me here.
This week we were tasked with practicing packet sniffing.
I used the free, open-source software WireShark . For this exercise, I ran in on my computer while logged into the NYU network, and I wasn’t using my laptop at the time, so I only sniffed 459 packets.
I thought it would be interesting to take all the HTTP data and run the IP addresses through NS Lookup on my terminal. I wanted to see the companies that my information was traveling through. To do this, I filtered by HTTP and downloaded the data to a CSV file, and I then uploaded it to google sheets and isolated the IP address.
I noticed that most of my information was going through either amazon web services or google.
Next, I ran a tutorial on WireShark that allowed me to test a nonsecure HTTP website. You can see below that I was able to find both the user name and password. It’s fascinating how easily I was able to get that information and just how vital HTTPS is.
I’ve continued to work on my Runners High piece this week. Using assets from the marketplace, I built an apartment that transitions into a magical room and then to a glass floor. The process is slow, but I’m enjoying how the piece is shaping up.
For my project, I’ve been exploring the concept of a pinata escaping from a party and running down the streets of suburbia to its freedom. At the end of the short piece, the pinata will be grazing in a field with other pinatas like a herd of deer—an ambitious project for sure.
To start, I wanted to block out the house and repeat it into a suburban landscape. After building a house with geometric shapes, I realized it was way out of scale. The house turned out to be about 300 times too big. After office hours with Tom, I learned how to group all shapes and turn them into a static mesh. The problem with producing a mesh this way is that the materials seem to be fixed, but it is scalable. I was now able to build a network of roads and replicate the house throughout the grid. Happy with how that turned out, I changed the skybox to replicate a sunset. The next problem came when I loaded the world the following day, and the houses had all disappeared. Below is are screenshots of my journey.
I think a lot about threatened and endangered species and have been working on an interactive piece centered on the topic for several years. For the piece, the image fades based on the predicted extinction rate of the species. Viewers can bring the idea back by standing and looking at the photo.
I want to continue to work with endangered species; however, for this new piece, I would like to move away from the use of images and build something that can be permanently displayed and not necessarily convey what it’s keeping time of unless the viewer investigates.
