Blog 8

Week 8

For week 8, I finished most of the modeling and lighting, and needed to start thinking about the player input aspect. From the start, I have been wanting to use a midi mixer as a light controller, so I started working with that this week. At first, I needed to figure out how to get an input from the mixer. There were some tests I did that let me figure out the built in number associated with each input. From there I was able to get the input from the different inputs and map their inputs from 0-1. Then I created a function that took that number and changed the color value of a specific light. I did this for the different light colors, light brightness, speed of the moving cube and particles, and the rotation for the cube and size of the particles.

While figuring out the different midi inputs, I discovered a different glow/emit setting that made everything look better. I was trying to make the emission materials glow consistently no matter what color they were. It turned off ambient light throughout the scene, and made it so my lights were the only emitters. This option was in the environment tab, and made everything look better.

This week I focused on fine tuning my current project and less so on the influence from other artists. Despite this, I needed to think about the hardware for my project, and the direction I wanted to go with that. I wasn’t aware of any famous artists who used midi mixers in their work, so I drew upon DJs and audio techs for inspo. I wanted my control to be intuitive and aesthetically pleasing. I achieved this by only mapping specific sliders and knobs to achieve a layout that made sense for my project. I grouped all of the light sliders together so it would be easy for the user to change them all quickly. The other section included the sliders for the cube and particles. I think that this will make the controls easy to read when I present the project.