The Sweetness

So far this week has been totally sweet. Windows Programming: easy. 3d Content Creation: awesome.

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This month, Windows Programming teaches us MFC, which is quite similar to what we learned last month, Win32. So we're basically just learning new names. HDC is now CDC. HBRUSH is CBrush. HPEN is CPen. Pretty easy, eh? I'm grateful because my Left Shift key doesn't like me, so now I have less to capitalize. Oh, did I mention C++ is case sensitive? Well, it is. So one HBRUsH will give me three errors saying: "PC Load Letter? WTF does that mean?" Not quite, but "type identifier not found" sounds pretty close.

We worked on a tile editor program today. I finished in record time: 1 hour. Part of it was the simplicity of the project. Think of a chessboard. Instead of white & black or red & black, you can select from 8 colors. You double click on a square and the color will change. Red->Black->Blue->Green->Yellow->Orange->Purple->White->Red-> ... These colors are actually part of a bitmap (*.bmp) which is loaded into the program. The chessboard can actually be any size, but for this project, we weren't given any specifics ... yet. So all I had to do was code the display for the chessboard ('bout 8 lines total) and program the double click event to change colors ('bout 5 lines). The rest was Visual Studio prefabricating a project. Copy and paste the code for scroll bars ... Boom. Done.

And this tile editor will be worked on thoroughly over the next few weeks. But it's totally awesome because it's much better than what I had been doing in Computer Club. Which was me coding the entire chessboard instead of just selecting the tiles in a window.

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3d Content Creation isn't meant to teach us all about Computer Animation. It's to teach us about the computer animation concepts. Like rendering and bump mapping and ... stuff. We received a copy of Alias Maya 5.0 Student Edition to work with. I've never done anything with Maya before; the most visual program I've worked with is Adobe Photoshop (which is sweet). So yesterday we just had to go through a tutorial. That took maybe 2 hours, including the install time. The only bad thing about the student edition is that a fruity watermark appears across the screen: "Maya! We'll eat your babies!" Maybe it was closer to "Commercial use of file prohibited by license." But c'mon, it's the same thing.

But the tutorial was wicked easy and apparently we'll be using Maya to create an Unreal Tournament level. I've never played UT, so I have no idea what goes on in it. I'm also too lazy to find/install UT. But it oughta be cool.

I'd say the greatest part about Tuesday's 3dCC was the video lecture. The video was about the history of computer animation, narrated by Leonard Nimoy! Nine out of ten Helens agree: Leonard Nimoy is the bomb.com. He's narrated quite a few of our video lectures. But so anyway, I love old computers. The movie made me want to switch degrees to computer animation, which of course I won't. But maybe someday I'll pick it up.