Month: February 2017

My main focus this semester is getting Nazir modeled & animated. Given that he’s the first non-human character I’ve ever created – and only the third overall – I was a bit unsure how to approach some parts – namely the tail and wings. As a bird lover, though, I came pre-bundled with plenty of knowledge on bird anatomy, and of course I had at least 3 reference tabs open at any given time. After 10 different .mb files, at least 15 hours, and about 3,000 faces, I achieved my final result.

Now on to UV mapping!

This week I started to mock up some designs for what you would see on the app during gameplay. I wanted to keep the HUD simple with buttons that would allow the user to change the stats of the cards. The upper right hand corner would be the place for the “settings” or refresh tool that would help to close the app or reset the stats for all your cards.

After my presentation last week, I realized that I really need to hone in on what it is I’m going to focus on. Everyone unanimously agreed that, in a broad sense, paying attention to the act of creating  is more interesting than focusing on how YouTube has affected the world. Upon thinking about that, and after some initial research, I completely agree. Everyone knows that YouTube changed the game when it comes to consumable media, and focusing in on something that many people don’t pay much attention to (smaller creators) may even make my project stand out in the crowd of other YouTube documentaries.

Today, I mainly focused on doing some online research into some other YouTubers that aren’t super popular that continue to make content. My result? There aren’t very many. Take SatansUnicorn for example. She has only 47 subscribers and at the time of writing, her last video was 3 years ago. My channel, on the other hand, has 53 subscribers, and at the time of writing, my last video was 3 weeks ago. There are a number of other creators that I’ve found in my initial research that follow a similar trend as SatansUnicorn (what a name, amiright?). Take itsthatJodi. She has only 36 subscribers and her most recent video is only a year ago (though her first video was posted 2 years ago).

Interestingly enough, Alice Iona has a little over 1,000 subscribers (1,233 to be exact) and her most recent video was 1 year go with her first video being 3 years ago. It’s also worth noting that her first video has just under 3,000 views (a big feat for a small creator) and her second video is 1,200 views shy of 90,000. Wow. Then, after that, her next final 3 videos total at around 500. This is quite interesting, as someone who had as much early on success as she did just stopped seemingly out of the blue.

There is much more research to be done, and I’d hope to find a few people to interview to include in this project.

After researching a bit today, I am glad that I have decided (with the help and input of everyone else in class – thanks guys!) to go down this route. From a research perspective, this is much more interesting to me, and I am really looking forward to really getting into this.

 

Until next time.

P.S.

While thinking about views and subscribers for all these other channels, I decided to take a quick look at some of my analytics and found that two of my videos have over 1,500 views (!!!!!) which is really awesome and is inspiring me to delve into this even more

Today I worked on building a ‘Matrioshka Brain’, which is where my narrator aliens live and run their massive simulations.  A Matrioshka brain is a hypothetical megastructure proposed by Robert Bradbury, based on the Dyson sphere, of immense computational capacity. It is an example of a Class B stellar engine, employing the entire energy output of a star to drive computer systems.  The idea is that a megastructure surrounds the star and harvests as much energy as is possible.

The star that the alien Matrioshka brain resides around is a green star.  There are, in fact, no naturally occurring green stars, but the idea is that this is actually an artificial star the aliens built themselves.  Both the brain and the star are meant to illustrate the incredibly advanced technological level of achievement the aliens have.

Here is a video test of the result: