Tenderloin Field Trip
I’m taking a class called Texture and Lighting I, the point of the class is to (of course) learn how to texture and light computer models so that they look as real as possible. Many a decent video game have been ruined because while the game play might have been fun and the modeling decent, the textures or the lighting, or both, were done badly enough that it affected the players response to the entire game.
For the first part of the class our instructor has given us a model of a street scene that we are going to be making textures for and last session told us to bring our cameras this time because we are going to go on a field trip to take photos to use to create our textures of the street scene. The field trip is that we are going to walk over to the Tenderloin District and walk through there taking reference photos and getting “gritty” shots.
For those of you who are not aware, the Tenderloin district is probably the worst crime area in the entire city. In the last 30 days alone there were over 813 crimes committed there, and this is an area that is only about 8 blocks by 11 blocks. This doesn’t even include homicides that might have happened, that part was disabled on the SFPD website that I looked up the crime stats.
So here is the picture for you – all the students (except for yours truly) in the age range of about 22-25, most of them not even from this country, all walking around in the Tenderloin district snapping photos with some nice digital cameras like a bunch of tourists being artsy because they are looking for things that are ‘Grungy’ and ‘Edgy’ so the street scene that we are doing will have ‘character’. Do you see where this could be headed, or is it just me? I just want to know what kind of person would take his class into an area where assault on a police officer/assault with a deadly weapon is a common theme of any police report for any day of the week.
I think I will just go to class today and when he says “Let’s go” I am just going to say no. I can’t stop him from being stupid but I don’t have to be part of it.
Maybe nothing will happen, and probably nothing will go wrong, but I didn’t survive this long by doing stupid things and relying on ‘maybe’ and ‘probably’ to keep me out of trouble. I stayed in one piece by only taking chances when there was a reason to, and getting some ‘gritty photos’ isn’t reason enough for me to walk into a high crime area that I am not familiar with because a guy who has done computer animation his whole life says that he thinks it’s fine.
Yea, this doesn’t look ‘fine’ to me. This is the last 30 days stats from just the Tenderloin. Note that homicides are not included on this chart.
Yea, what a great spot, huh.
**UPDATE**
Yep, I just headed home as we walked out to head over to the Tenderloin. Teacher wasn’t thrilled, but he did say “Well, you’re an adult so I guess I can’t stop you.”
No, I guess you can’t.
