HTI BLOG SHIFTED

To make thing easier for everybody and to keep things simpler and neater, my HTI blog is now at


http://crasonghti.blogspot.com/

Thank you and sorry for the inconvenience.

Eternal spitshine of the insane mind

VS

So we did this exercise in class today, kinda felt similar to meditation to me. So with each breath, i exhaled the bad and inhaled the good.

Then came the part where we try to visualise a figure of inspiration. People i knew in real life started coming to mind, then came fictatious characters and mascots of inspiration.

Lo and behold, before me stood two figures, or things i should say.

Mickey Mouse, and the viewcube from maya.

So the cube started off with hinting that i urgently needed to do the assignment due today. Mickey told him to back off, and that i could easily finish it on time, and proceeded to ask me how my day was going so far.

I didnt answer, cause I thought to myself,

"I'm in a classroom meditating, and mickey mouse is talking to me."

"Am I insane?"

Before i could get into anything, the exercise was over. Oh well.

Its a mad, mad world.

Update on "A Game That Creates"

So. Improvements or should i say slight addition of rules to Round Robin that spoke of earlier. We decided that to bring us all together in a more engaging fashion, we would attempt to link each others stories to our own story in an attempt to make them appear to be from the same imaginary world or universe.

Be warned, mildly adult language is used. (Just to say I warned you, but we were a little insane.)

Quality is not the best so i will attempt to summarise the universe we created.

There is a girl called Flower, probably the most recurring character so far. She has a brother, called Tower (yes folks, it rhymes). As it would seem, Flower chanced upon their long lost father who is a drunk homeless naked man, and in her joy...... she slept next to him..... naked...... in the underground pass...........

OKAY MOVING ON.

A gigantic midget happens to produce twice the mass of food he ate whenever he clears his bowels. His mother is angry because the house became full of his faeces. Along comes our heroine Flower who comes to this house full of faeces, and says "I'm Hungry!", before collapsing on the ground.

Two unlinked stories follow (we had no idea how to link these im afraid).

1.A sword by the name of excalibur that was so heavy that nobody could seem to lift it. one day an old lady discovers it and tried to take it. She howls a loud warcry, and her muscles bulge into the size of a giant, but she fails to lift excalibur. And so the legend continues.....

2.An obese lady goes shopping with two big baskets, who fell down badly. She hurt her head so badly she went for plastic surgery.

After Surgery she is too skinny to lift her two big baskets. So she gets the nurse to help her carry them, who in turn falls down badly too, and also goes for plastic surgery........

Stay tuned for an ending to this tragic tale......

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So like I mentioned earlier, we happened to lose ourselves in the process and ended up with completely senseless yet fun stories. The process is actually mor challenging now, and the stories dont need to make sense at all.

Conclusively the modification allowed us to relate to each story somewhat better since they were from a cohesive universe.

Operation Round Robin Universe is a success!

DGDD 01

Jason Hwang

Ka Sing

Yu Xuan

Yen Hsien

And Daryl.

A Game That Creates.

So For the HTI module we were made to play a game in groups of 5. Each person with a piece of paper and pencil were to write a single sentence that would be the start of the story, followed by passing it to the next person, and that person would add a sentence to that introduction, and the process repeats itself, eventually ending on a decided limit of turns.

The formula for this process is also known as Round Robin, which could be applied to anything that involves a group of people that take turns.

So upon arriving late to the class (I knocked the batteries out of my alarm in my sleep), within moments i found myself having to write up something interesting on other peoples pieces of paper.

Least to say it yielded extremely strange results due to the varied personalities that were present. It was refreshingly fun despite the slight awkwardness now and then from facing a different plot twist during each new turn.

The game can range from a quick and fast way to churn out ideas or a long process that can allow unfamiliar acquaintances to get to know each other through the game.

The positive outcomes could be multiple stories for a project, creating or improving friendships, and most obviously an alternative to killing time (just kidding...).

So a quickly and badly drawn example of what the process of round robin is like.....

So moving on, I actually see this simple game as a ruleset that has limitless applications where creativity and social improvements apply.

I will be posting pictures of the outcomes from this exercise soon.

New Project!

Yay! Hooray! Inspiration and ideas flowing today!

Inspired by some of the Imperial Aircraft from warhammer 40k.

Wheeeee~~~!

Happy Birthday Mei Jing.

HTI Entry 1 - Structuralism and Semiotics (Part 1)

These are just some examples that I felt represented the 

ambiguity of Structuralism and Semiotics.

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1.They got exactly what they wished for, but only in the literal sense of the words.

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2.What do birthdays truly signify?

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3.How do symbols mean different things to different people?
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1. Structuralism

A form of systematic and 'structured' thinking, structuralism is a certain frame of mind that people use to approach a subject or topic with.

From my understanding, Structuralism is exactly as the word of origin represents; Structured thinking, the study of each systems structure in both literary and scientific theory.

It started from a movement originating in the study of linguistics by Ferdinand De Saussure. Eventually finding itself being applied to more than literature. Anthropology, Sociology, Literary theory and criticism, and a few other areas of studies.

From these studies, Structuralists formed a few common beliefs with regards to 'intellectual trends'. Firstly, the structure determines the position of each element that form a whole. Secondly, every system has a structure. Thirdly, structuralists mostly study the 'structural' laws of the elements coexistence with one another. Lastly, the structures are the essence and truth of what lies behind the meaning of a system.

Currently, the extent to which Structuralism can go is not so significant for me, but rather its essence of mindset is almost tailor-made for how games are made.

Firstly Games nowadays have different genres and sub-categories, each which can be said to be a system of a game. By structuralist thinking, each game genre has a certain structure. Which is exactly right, because game genres are defined by the structure of gameplay.

Next, each and every factor or 'element' plays a role that coexists with every other 'element' in order to form a whole system of a game, which we would refer to as game mechanics.

Lastly, although within each genre the games will differ completely in style and taste, it is the genre of gameplay that determines the true intent of the games appearance.

Puzzle games such as Portal or Tetris are completely different in style, but both are structured to make one think logically.

The same can be applied to all games, and this much taken from structuralism helps me to systematically understand games as a whole.

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The rest is continued in the next post...

Progress!

So the holidays are ending this week, and i look back at how ive spent this refreshing break.

The most well spent holiday ever since GCA!

I can say that although there are no visual improvements in most of my work, i have put the time to good use relearning a lotta skills, mainly speaking with my drawing and some neat tricks in 3d.

A re-evaluation of my goal has made me reorganise my priorities though, most importantly, maya is now second place, first place is now the ability to draw.

I can not stress how much drawing makes the difference between a technical artist and a concept artist. 

A technical artist may have AWESOME 3d modeling skills, but he wont be able to achieve anything in the "design" department as much as he would like to give major input for any part of the design process.

A technical artist, who takes the well drawn concept of a concept artist, and models it into 3d.

But in a lot of cases, the concept artists can not only draw the concept, but model it just as well as the technical artist can. And being a concept artist is something i would like to be.

So with the start of the new semester, its gonna serious business from now. I may have been goofing off the last time, but it's go time now. No mercy.