First Grade

Two posts in one day. It's a record!

I wanted to share the joy of receiving my very first Australian grade. It's for the 3D Character class where we had the assignment of making a pdf with our concept, references, sketches and model sheet. At the moment we are building our model in Maya with the model sheet in that document. View the pdf here.

The result: my very first Australian grade is 100. Yes, I had to look up what that meant but it was the highest score possible. I am now extra happy.

Road Trip

From the 12th till the 14th of March three French housemates and I went on a road trip along the Great Ocean Road. I can advice everybody to do this trip one day. It is fantastic!

We rented a car early Saturday morning and started driving to the west, along the coast. This was the route we took:

Thanks Google

The weather was good and the views were amazing. We were totally happy cruising in the car with the windows open and nice music on. We stopped at lots of different places, most of them the more popular sites.

A new thing for me was sleeping at hostels. I was a bit worried that I wouldn't be able to sleep properly because of snoring men but that was only the case the second night. One person also farted really loud that night. Great fun. Besides that and the lovely smell in the room the next day, sleeping in a hostel is not that bad.

Back to the actual trip. Because everything is so beautiful and a picture says more then a thousand words here come the photos:

Erskine Falls

First hostel

Twelve Apostles

London Bridge

(Picture taken by one of the co-road-trippers, Nicholas)

(Another one by Nicholas)

The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology

Is where I go to school. I love the name, it sounds like I'm attending an Australian version of Harvard. Nobody says Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology though, just RMIT.

"Uni" is huge, my school map says there are 108 buildings, each with different levels and rooms. It even has it's own Mac store and gym inside. The main campus is right in the centre of Melbourne with a few lost buildings scattered over the rest of Melbourne's central city. I go there by bus and train, which takes about an hour if I'm not seduced by the many coffee places for a skinny-soy-flat-white.

At the moment, I am doing five courses. Officially I can only do four but I still have to make the decision on which course I want to drop. I might even have to drop another one if I need more time for my paper. Sometimes I am really good in thinking about decisions really long which is quite frustrating in this case.

After checking RMIT's website on courses, going to orientation, talking to teachers, following an extra class and checking out the website again these are those five courses:

• Interactive Digital Media Project A: fancy name for making a game with around five people;
• Design Studio 2: about game concepts, presentation, platforms and Unity. It's a course that accompanies the project;
• 3D Character: this is exciting because we are modelling and animating a character which we will (hopefully) in the end personally control with Microsoft's Kinect;
• Marketing Principles;
• Location Imaging Practice: this is Photography.

RMIT for me is a bit like the first weeks at a new school. In classes, everybody is super quite and keeps their mouth shut when the teacher asks a question.

In one of the classes I did a little sneak peak into what people were doing on their computer while the teacher was speaking: Facebook, Minecraft, Facebook, Graveyard, Wikepedia and an internet game. I should add that I was being a good student, taking notes on my laptop.

I might even be turning in an even bigger nerd since I really love the library here. It is really big and has lots of tables to work on, scattered over 2 levels. Another handy thing is that you can book group-meeting rooms with a whiteboard and computer with a big monitor on the wall. There are books too.

Cliffhanger: next post will be about the Great Ocean Road.