Today, I’ve launched my new and redesigned version of my personal website, aradreed.com. Between going to classes and working on projects, I spent the last week on revamping my website using the front-end framework known as Bootstrap. While it’s not quite a masterpiece, I’m quite proud of my work. I will still be leaving this domain up separately as my personal blog while my website will host my projects and show off my work.

Nintendo’s popular loyalty program will be shutting down later this year to make room for something new (I’m excited to find out what it will be like). To help current members spend their unused coins, a bunch of new rewards have been put up on the site, both physical and digital ones.

A few months ago, Nintendo released figures, called amiibo, to be used with some of their popular games using the Wii U’s built-in NFC (Near-Field Communication). With a peripheral planned to be released for the 3DS this spring, it will soon be compatible with the figures as well.

So my winter break ended yesterday, and my classes have started up again. I wasn’t nearly as productive as I thought I was going to be, but I did create a few 3D models on my own and started on lesson 4 of the tutorials. Each of my models are video game related, and I hope that you recognize them. If not, then I question your taste in video games.

I just recently finished up lesson 3 of the 3D modeling tutorials I’ve been trudging through. With finals this week (and my sudden urge to play a lot more video games), my progress has been a little slow. Hopefully, I can jump up to a much quicker pace when I go home for the winter break this Friday. Lesson 3 had me creating both a shark and a sword as the projects. You can see my work on these in the images below.

So it turns out that the previous model I had done of a castle wasn’t the end of lesson 2 as I had originally though. A second optional part of lesson 2 consisted of texturing the castle, so I decided to borrow some time from my sleep and finish the castle up tonight (I may regret that when I have to wake up in a few hours).

I haven’t had a lot of time to work on my personal projects lately, and I imagine that I’ll have even less time soon with finals coming up. However, I had an extreme urge to create something today, and it’s about time I finished up lesson 2 of the Blender tutorials.

Recently, I’ve started learning 3D animation using Blender. My first lesson is now complete, and I’m excited about continuing through the lessons. The project for the first lesson was to build the famous yellow submarine, as seen on the Beatles album.

3D design and animation is another one of those topics that I’ve wanted to learn about for a long time. It is quite a time-consuming activity though, so it was hard to keep up. However, I’ve decided I want to take another try at learning 3D modeling and animation.

Wow, there sure was a whole lot of good stuff to hear on today’s Nintendo Direct. If you haven’t watched it yet, I highly recommend it. If you just want a basic overview and some thoughts, continue reading.