Today I've been wondering what to blog about, but now I know. It's Spooktober, and that means Halloween is coming up. The wonderful day we know and love kickstarted thousands of years ago and has come a long way. The holiday began as an Ancient Celtic festival which marked the beginning of winter. The Celts had a calendar that began on November 1st, and they believed ghosts came out on October 31st, the last day of their year. Druids, Celtic preists, built massive bonfires for sacrifices and the people wore costumes usually made out of animal heads and skin.
When Rome captured much of Celtic territory, they combined existing Roman festivals with the Celtic holiday. Feralia, a day late in October, was a Roman day commemorating the dead. Pomana, another late October day, was for celebrating the goddess of fruit and trees, which probably led to the modern practice of bobbing for apples. A few hundred years later, Pope Boniface IV established All Martyrs' Day in mid May to honor important dead Christians. Pope Gregory III changed the holiday to November 1st and to include saints as well, and the previous night became known as All Hallows' Eve. In the early United States, southern states began to hold parties to celebrate the harvest in late October. Ghost stories and spooky tales spread across the country by the late 1800s, but Halloween was not celebrated everywhere. Waves of immigration helped improve, popularize, and spread the holiday. Soon, Americans were dressing up in costumes, going to people's houses, and asking for candy. Trick-or-treating partially emerged from impoverished people on All Saints' Day parades begging for cake in England, and wearing masks on Hallows' Eve to protect themselves from ghosts. Halloween parties and movies became immensely popular in the mid and late 1900s, and the holiday finally became ubiquitous. Summary
History.com Editors. “Halloween 2019.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 18 Nov. 2009, www.history.com/topics/halloween/history-of-halloween
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You may know 3DS Max as a 3-D modeling program widely used by game designers. I have several months of experience by now, and I’ve realized many things about the program.
Usually, I love working in 3DS Max. I thrive in the blank canvas of the creative 3D program. There are truly countless possibilities that I can make, and that’s one thing I love about 3DS Max. Also, the tools available in the program are very useful for making things like trees, Rubik’s cubes, and houses. After years of playing the popular sandbox game Minecraft, I’ve developed a deep love for 3D creativity. Working with 3D Studio Max in Digital Design has been the best part of my day very often. However, even the best program is bound to have problems. The immense lag I’ve experienced this past week compiling an intricate Old West scene has been infuriating. It takes almost thirty seconds to render my scene because of the vast number of things in it. Sometimes 3DS Max leaves me angry because of other circumstances. For example, it takes a few minutes for the program to boot up, which is always an annoyance. 3DS Max can also unexpectedly crash and delete all your progress, which happened to one of my classmates today in Digital Design. Although 3DS Max is far from perfect, it is probably my favorite computer program I’ve worked with. It offers creativity along with helpful ways to foster creativity. The problems aren’t very abundant, and don’t pose a huge challenge for me. I think I might just really like 3DS Max... Summary
During the past few weeks working in 3-D Studio Max, I began to use compound objects for the first time. Compound objects offer unique ways to group, spread out, and edit shapes in the program. I initially worked with boolean and proboolean, two similar ways to group objects together. There are five main different options which let you easily modify your shapes. The union operand parameter allows two or more objects to be combined without the intersecting sections of the individual shapes. Merge, although similar to union, keeps the overlapping volume. Attach is also closely related to union also; it can combine two shapes. Choosing the intersect mode will only keep the intersecting portions and remove the remainder of the shapes. The subtract option deletes volume of one shape as well as its overlapping parts.
After working with boolean, I moved on to blobmeshes, which can give objects a slushy or blob-like appearance. Next I learned about lofting, a way to make custom shapes with a single line based off a few different 2-D objects. Textplus and procutter were the next compound objects I used. They gave me an easy way to implement text and make indentions in shapes. Then, I used sweep and array to complete my understanding of compound objects. Sweep can create a unique pattern often used for architectural moulding, and array can space out and duplicate objects in a custom way. I fell in love with boolean in particular because of its simplicity and usefulness. It's not complicated to learn how to use, and I easily mastered it. There are so many ways to use boolean, as I listed above. Each of the operand parameters available offer a new idea that's just begging to be made, such as the ice cream cone below. Summary
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AuthorHI! I'm a 12th grader and on this page, I will blog about me and what I'm going through, both in Game Design class and in life. There are a mix of required blog posts and personal reflections, which you can sort, among other things, below the disclaimer and archives. DISCLAIMER
The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Durham School of the Arts or Durham Public Schools. Archives
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