Today was an awesome and fun day! We got to meet with Rob, a character artist, and Shoddy who specializes in getting models ready for animation, but can also do animation if necessary. We got to meet with Rob and he showed us some really cool stuff. He does the character models in a 3d art program called Zbrush. He claims that “anything is possible” in Zbrush and we got to see many of the features it has to offer, like textures, sculpting tools, UV maps. UV Maps are a 2d representation of a 3d object, and they can be made using MODO, and then edited in Photoshop for fine tuning details. For implementation into game engines such as Unity or Unreal Engine, he imports the character model into Maya so that Shoddy can prepare it for animation. “How?” you may ask? He takes the character model and adds joints to all the places that the animator will move. Then he can edit the joints to make sure that everything is moving naturally. For animation, he sets a few key poses that he’s wants the character to be in in the animation, and Maya blends the motion between the points to make the animation look smooth and natural. Shoddy also has the cutest but one of the most energetic pugs. He likes to sit in your lap, so as soon I sat down he jumped into my lap, and then Chandler’s. He also liked licking my fingers, but he really liked just attacking them; he was crazy and jumping to try and bite them sometimes. But because he was so cute and small, it was so funny! To conclude our visit at Mighty Rabbit Studios, they gave 5 PS4 GAMES as well as a bunch of stickers and an Octodad tie!
Today we began our week at Mighty Rabbit Studios. We got to see some confidential stuff today, so that was really cool, but unfortunately, I can’t really talk too much about it. But I’ll give you as much as I can. We were shadowing a programmer working on this new game called ███████ for a company called ████████. The thing about working on a team of programmers for a big game is that they go through at least a thousand revisions of the code each day. A 10 gigabyte game requires a lot of code and so the code is constantly being added to and edited by the team of programmers. Unfortunately for Kurt, the person we were shadowing, something went wrong and they didn’t catch it immediately (because it takes 30 minutes to compile the code and export it to the platform to test it), so he has to go through 1000 different versions of the code to see where the mistake was made. Fortunately, this time spent troubleshooting can be shortened by doing a binary search of the versions. Choose the version in the middle of the first and last one and if it works, the problem must’ve occurred after it, and so you don’t have to check all versions before it. If it doesn’t work, then all versions after that one won’t work either, so they don’t have to be checked because they’re not the root of the problem. While we were waiting for the versions to upload so he can test them, he helped us improve our games and gave us an inside look at the programming and design that goes into making one of their most popular games Breach and Clear. Another highlight of my day was going to Freddy’s with the team, as you can see below. Today was awesome, and I can’t wait for tomorrow. You can download the game that I worked on today here: 
