"Special Jam" Time Trail 17/10/16

I did a time trail with the rest of my next gen group to try and get us going back to our pre-holiday mind set. The way that it worked is that we had 2 hours to create something that can represent a keyword. This time it was "Loop".

As you can see from the image, I decided to create a model of a desk fan. Why? Mainly because the word loop can apply how something repeats in an endless cycle. One of the best way to see that are thing that go around in a circle, and I just thought of a desk fan because I had other ideas such as creating a landscape of a racing track. The reason I did not do that is because I only had 2 hours to finish, and to make it interesting the landscaping would have to be altered by a large amount.

The only criticism that I got was that the fan should have been spinning in the cage. Aside from the time limit the reason for this is because I don't know how to do animation in 3ds Max and because the fan blades are part of the main body of the fan mesh.

The main pointers from this experience were that, for the bars of the cage were all extrusions from the rings however they were to thick for what a fan appears to be so I scaled them down however this affected the ring to make it abnormal. So adding in a small extra extrusion at the base of each bar stopped the unwanted scaling. The other point is that (for me) there are a few extra shortcuts that I never knew such as double clicking on an edge highlights the entire edge loop. This was useful for using the chamfer tool, too smooth out parts of the model like the fan blades.

The main point that I took for this is that the company Framestore sometimes does time trails from all that are willing to participate in the challenge. This can be something I can use to keep my skills with different modelling software.