27. Sunny with a chance of rendering

As i carry on working on working on the dynamics i have been thinking about the context for the visual lava metaphor, so i thought i could use an asset i made last semester which was the sun crated using the 3D gas effects in maya. I think that making a solar system of sorts and having the sun animate really slowly in the background with planets in orbit around it would work really well and make the fact that the visual is planetary a lost more clear.  

here is a HD render of the sun, it was moving too fast so I eddied its turbulence and how fast the effects reacted and re rendered it below. If it is moving too fast then it will break any illusions of its scale and movement, uprooting the realism. 

This one works much better but could even be slower than this, soon i will get the planetary lighting and metaphor into the scene too and ill see how it all looks together. 

For more context i have been thinking about having another scene with a classroom globe and an actual lava lamp in it. 

Ive been looking up some references for modeling the globe its self and what kind i might go for. So will have a mull over what one will be best for the scene after i have made the lava lamp.

26. Dynamicly speaking

Its been a busy time of animating the continents , or attempting to, I have restarted the emitter and technique for dispersing the particles a few times. Below is a ipr render of it so far with a little texture applies using a simple shader

Link to youtube video of a continental time lapse of the past and future http://youtu.be/uGcDed4xVD4?t=1m37s 

Looking at a few images and videos for inspiration for the shape I used a mixture of rotation and self attract to start animating the particles. 

The fist part of the animation was one of the initial animations, its bitty and the particles appear as the cluster together - causing it to look very fragmented and as if they appear out of nowhere. I thought that maybe I could reverse the animation and have them start as a mass and then fragment apart, that will be my next goal. The latter part of the animation is a better iteration as two of the larger surfaces come together and and a bridge of 'land' between them. this is more of the looks as i was going for as it better visualises masses clashing and forming new continents. 

Last Crit Feedback

My last crit had mixed reviews, with an overarching feeling that it wasnt as good as a previous presentations. I did try something different in the way i started the presentation as it was meant to be thought provoking harping at that a connection was made by the first deep thinking men and women back around 10,000 years ago when agriculture and more higher levels of thinking created new tools and objects. The presentation featured a picture of a tree and a rock and aimed at saying that maybe they were once observed rolling down the hill with great gusto and ease, they were then connected with faster travel and utilised to transport goods due to their ergonomic properties that would of only been associated with their basic shape. Its hard thing to imagine, how we had to have a first thought as it were for every discovery. This abstract thinking may be a loose arching theme in my project but it is the main spirit of the work. That thinking differently yields new ideas and new discoveries, all be it as an individual in a classroom when the penny drops about a topic, or a scientist having an epiphany under a tree after being hit by an apple. I will maybe have to polish up how i present this idea in a different package to get the information across better.

Other feedback was that I needed more assets and to have more final work, time is pressing and i need to push on with getting them finished up. It has been a hard month but i think i am on the right tracks with the project, just need to bring it all together and not get caught up.

Last point of the presentation feedback was that i needed to think of some context for the assets, like the lava and how would they be presented?

Aims for the next few weeks:

- Get asset production up in general
- make some tough decisions about the lava metaphor, since its taking so long to render
- think about context for the assets
- thumbnails and playblasts of how they are going to be presented

25. Post haste

Recently i have been mainly constructing my presentation for the last crit, looking into getting my terminologies down as I bring together my notes from my proposal and work on the main areas of my study.

To clearly map out all of the connections between the facets of the study and how they all intermingle is challenging in itself, finding the key words will help me to improve my academic writing and enhance my dissertation. It will also serve to give a more generalised view on my work and concepts, allowing them to become more accessible to a wider audience. 

This will help me to explain how the analogies or the metaphors create new connects and the theories behind it all. I have also been looking into institutions that use the same sort of ethos or that have similar goals be it for more inspiring or visual effects, vs more educational and piratical applications. 

http://the-private-eye.com/html/conservMENU.html

I have discover a great source that is right at the more abstract and creative part of my project its a institution that runs workshop for kids to allow them to be more open and creative in the how they view the world and what they do. "The Private Eye is a program about the drama and wonder of looking closely at the world, thinking by analogy, changing scale and theorizing. Designed to develop critical thinking skills, creativity and scientific literacy - across subjects -"

This incorporates the key ideas that allowing our mind to make its own connections to what it sees, enables a more natural and longer learning process to occur. Learning something a set way is non-constructive to how our brain or how us as individuals form our own meanings. 

Seeing it used in a growing workshop that is already employed over america, lets me see that the project does have a certain amount of value and that it is being increasingly employed to better the visuals and incorporation of visuals within the educational system. 

Another really good spuce that i have found is the The National Science Foundations website as they have yearly visualisation awards where they showcase the best visual interpretations or imagery. Looking at these give me a good insight into what new or dynamic projects are being broached within the sientific realms. It also has very close goals to my own with teaching though new more effective visuals or inspirening images that provoke the mind or showcase the hidden wonders of a topic.
http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/scivis/winners_2012.jsp

I found this game that won an honourable mention in the awards. Its a small game that focuses on teaching the theory's or relativity, which is a very very complex topic to put it ligtly, but  a way of understanding the loose fundamentals or key ideas is well demonstrated here. The reason i like it despite its poor visual style is that its highly interactive and memorable. How it creates a memorable link from relativity is using a little character called velocity raptor, which from the get go plays on the physics term velocity instantly making it a connectable character when thinking about velocity. During the game you must navigate the level using the effects the theories of relativity have on the environment when travelling close to or at the speed of light, this distorts space and angle of the images, the colour and the character itself. Explaining these in classes with just text and static images would never come close to building the imagery and memorability that this game can offer as the viewer can get a 'feel' of what it would be like in an abstract manner that really just enforces the general principals for further knowledge. Its this foundation to a foreign or unimaginable topic that my project aims at visualising. 

The only downside of the game is its target audience and how it is presented, it is a bit condescending and with this advanced topic being brought up too early the connections would not stick or ground themselves into long term memory, rendering it rather arbitrary. If it was slightly more visually pleasing and advanced, but maintained the same humour then it would be in good stead for early high-school students.

From looking at this one of the main points i have grasped more is that the audience is so important, and with teaching i believe that this can be bent in regards to how young children can still be taught complex topics but that it needs to be very well done for it to relate to there stored memories and capita of information they have  acquired.