Introductions and Areas of Interest

Hello! I'm Nathan, and I'm in my second quarter in the Digital Media Master's program. I received my Bachelor's degree in Studio Art from University of Pittsburgh, where I was one of few students with a focus on digital mediums. I am primarily a digital illustrator with experience in hand-drawn 2D animation, and I've spent my time since undergrad learning the ins and outs of 3D modeling, texturing, rigging, and animating for video games.

There's a range of topics I'm interested in exploring for the duration of this course and, hopefully, beyond.

At the top of my list includes Blender's Grease Pencil tool: This tool is a combination of a 2D and 3D workspace with a focus on merging 2D illustration and animation with all of Blender's 3D capabilities (sculpting, vertex editing, full 3D rotation, and more). Simply put, it allows 2D brush strokes to be manipulated like objects in 3D space. I have only dabbled with the Grease Pencil to the extent of knowing that it exists. I'd really like to research how well the Grease Pencil meshes with Unity for creating animations and game assets, or if anyone has ever managed to create a bridge between the two.

The second topic that has piqued my interest for a long time is graphical shaders---specifically writing shader code for Unity. I have only a surface level understanding of shaders and how they work, and have never experimented with writing my own shader code. I know how insanely vast and malleable shader code is (to the extent where entire games can be coded using only shaders to instruct what appears on the screen). I'm not looking to go that crazy, but I do really want to see just how experimental I can get. I have always felt that shaders are the perfect combination of artistic and mathematical(?) creativity, and while I'm not as strong in the latter factor, I know it would be a great field to dive into with no limit to how deep I can go.

I suppose I'm most interested in visual development and design for games. Perhaps I could make some kind of small game or animation by the end of the course, but ideally my focus would be on the process of creating unique visual effects.