Ice Cream

       Who doesn't love ice cream? Except for those who are lactose intolerant, everybody does! For those of you reading my blog, here is some ice cream that I made. This was actually a simple project to do in Maya. All that you really need is a few simple shapes and some color.

       For starters you need the basis of the project. In this case it was an ice cream parlor, with a bowl and a cone. Next you have to make all of the basic shapes, which includes several spheres, a cone, 2 tori (otherwise known as the ring), a background, floor, and a table. The floor, background and table are all made of stretched cubes. In order to make the bowl you first need to take a sphere and cut it in half using a thing called difference. This means that you cover about half of the sphere with a cube and then go to Boleans then difference. That basically just cuts the sphere and gives a basic bowl. If you want a bit of an edge to the bowl You need to extrude the top a bit inward to make it look like a rim. For the ice cream scoop do the same exact thing but then add a cylinder to the middle. For it to actually look like a scoop you may need to use another sphere that fits in the scoop and then  use difference again and get rid of the part of the handle that sticks into the scoop.

       For the actual ice cream you just need to make spheres of different sizes and then use the 3D texture cloud to give it that texture. You can also add other things to make your favorite, for instance I made cookie dough. We also had to make a cone with ice cream in it too. I decided to have a little bit of fun and turned it into a neapolitan snowman. For the record, yes, I did want to build a snowman (Frozen, the movie). It was actually pretty fun making this project and I had a lot of fun doing it. When making the cone all you need is the cone shape and simply add a yellow color to it and add a bump map which gives it the pushed in look. I guess that is all I have for this project.

Until next time, this is Jake Smith.

Real Or Hoax

       Another day, another project finished. This time I have made a website depicting myths and legends that may or may not be true. This was actually pretty fun because I have always liked stories that sound almost too much to be true. When I was younger I had multiple books about those kinds of things and to this day still have them with me.

       My favorite story was one about this woman who was driving home very late at night. She saw an elderly woman holding a grocery bag and decided to help the old woman. She pulled up next to her and asked if she needed a ride home, the elder woman simply grunted her address and got into the car. As they were driving, the car stopped at a stoplight and was waiting. As they were waiting another car's headlights filled the car with light. The woman driving looked over and saw various knives and other sharp objects inside of the elderly woman's shopping bag. She then got her first good look at the old woman and saw that the old woman was actually a man. She continued driving until she reached a part of the road out in the middle of nowhere and started faking that the car had suddenly died. She told the man, who was completely unaware that she knew his secret, that she had a spare battery in her trunk and asked if he could go and get it. As soon as he stepped out, she tossed his bag on the ground and sped off. The next day she looked at the newspaper and was shocked to find the man's face on the front page, saying that he was an escaped convict. She quickly notified the police and told them the address that the man had told her the night before. In the end the criminal was never seen again.

       When I started the project I began to make all of the boxes of various colors that you can see by following a helpful video. All that really needed to be done was to make multiple div tags and then apply css styles to them. One of the easiest parts was making a css style sheet that would apply to all of the pages of the website. In order to make all of the pages, I simply copied all of the coding and pasted it into a new file and just changed all of the wording. After having my work double checked, I was told that I forgot to add headings and to put them into an unordered list. Next I decided to go with a sort of vintage look and used Courier New to give it that old typewriter look.

       After that I was able to finish with some time to spare, so I then made my own logo for the website instead of the default logo. When I was making the logo I wanted to keep it close to the original but also make it better than what it already was. I started with the words "real or hoax" and added a little bit of color to them. I used the old trick about blue being the color of truth and then proceeded to put a scale next to it because it is the American symbol for truth. Also it is the Candor symbol in Divergent, because candor means truth. It's nerdy I know but also funny if you think about it. Anyway, the next thing I did was make the hoax part of it. I made it look kind of like a fail stamp kind of thing and put the Loch ness monster next to it.

       It seems as though i've pretty much explained everything. If I could do this project again i would definitely spend some more time making the text itself look better, to me it seems as though i just kind of slapped it on there. I would keep the basic parts and colors of this website if I did do it again. I will soon have another post depicting the next project.