HOUDINI: Boot Camp Saga Pt.3

Today, the Houdini workshop came to an end. The length of this workshop was only three hours (half the amount of time as the other two!) and it was mostly in a lecture style rather than us doing the inputting all of the attributes with the instructor.  As I'm someone who learns a program by doing instead of watching, I ended up getting lost about midway through. Houdini as a program was truly fascinating, however! I still want to implement it in a game we may make in the future. I don't know for what, but it'll be something AWESOME.

What this workshop left me with was a profound amount of respect for Technical Artists. As our FIEA instructors made a point to tell us: Technical Artists have to be skilled in most of the disciplines out there. They're a middle man between Artists and Programmers, while being a jack-of-all trades for the project as a whole. The most difficult part (I found) about Houdini was the math and equations involved in getting some functions to work and be connected.  I wholeheartedly respect anyone who makes a career involving even the slightest bit of math. Those people are very brilliant. If I am able, I hope to continue dabbling with Houdini to at least get enough proficiency to create tools and assets. A working proficiency would be nothing but beneficial.

After the Houdini workshop had ended, I tried my hand at Adobe Flash. I was trying to recreate what was supposed to be a simplistic apple-eating game but, for some reason, the ActionScript wasn't quite working for me. The code wasn't registering that things like "speed" and stuff had values set. For some reason. Ahhh, processing. How I thought  I was done with you two years ago! While, ultimately, I was not successful in completing the game, this venture gave me some more familiarity with ActionScript03 and implementing it into Adobe Flash one way or another. So, some good came out of it! There isn't a single cell in my body that's even halfway decent with programming.

In any case: while learning Houdini was fun, I'm happy that it's finally over. My brain was complete mush by the end of Saturday's session. Now it's time to begin my second week of classes!