Studying riiiiight

Hello again all you beautiful people. Its been about a month since the German intensive course ended, and I have been attending my normal studies at the Technical University (TU) of Graz. I wanted to wait a few weeks before writing about my courses to see if I liked them and would stay in them. Also, the first few weeks were kind of slow, so I didn’t have much material anyway. Currently I have three courses I am attending at the TU, but I’m little unsure about continuing one of them so I will leave it out for now. I don’t have that many pics to add this time, so read if you want to and check the very little I have to attach this time.

First course is Social Media technologies. The title is rather vague, but the course focuses on using social media as a data set for research and what kinds of information and research, we can utilize it for. The course is rather slow as we just had our second lecture today, but the main assignment of the course is to perform a research into something we want to look into, using social media sites as our platform. This means crawling the sites for wanted information and then analysing the data and reporting it. I am mostly interested in how we are going to crawl or gather the information for our research. I have done some analysing of data sets in previous courses and it can be fun breaking down large sets of data and trying to find interesting points to talk about. Currently we are doing a presentation on pre-existing research articles that used social media as platform. They are fairly interesting topics, but in the end many of them get really number heavy and at least my brain starts slacking off. We have not set a topic for our group yet but will in a week or so and I will tell about it when I post more about school stuff.

My favourite course I am attending currently is called Animation and Simulation. I have done some animation, 3d modelling, game development and image editing courses in the past, but this seemed more of an in-depth look into methods of spicing up games or animations. We have this course weekly with lectures about different methods of animation. I find them really interesting although sometimes it can get really heavy on numbers and vectors of objects and that confuses me. Still I always understand the examples and the “real world” uses for the methods. In this course we are to create a simple game that utilises two of the methods we are learning about. My game is currently called Moomin Kart where I combine my love of the Finnish Swedish children’s characters, the Moomin and basic idea of Mario Kart games. The methods I intend to implement are motion blur and pathing. Motion blur to visualise increased speed from a power up and pathing to have objects moving on the track. I have a veeeeeeeeery early version that I am working on and I added a shot video of it just to give basic idea what I am doing.

Original sketch for my game