Week 7 and 8

These past 2 weeks were focused on the new village project, which according to our tutors would test all the skills we have accumulated over the past weeks on the course. During this project, I had to work towards a style guide, which consisted of being organic, friendly, and chunky and it has to reflect a medieval/Tudor theme. This was both a blessing and a hindrance as it meant firstly I could refine my ideas over a small subject area and not get carried away however it also meant that I couldn't go too far with my ideas and would sometimes limit my creativity at times.

During these 2 weeks, we learnt how to improve our workflow through iteration and producing a photobash kit as well as doing paintovers of our 3d models. This bit of information I felt allowed me to improve how I approach each project set by game production as before I used to work in a linear path focusing on mainly 2d concepts and then producing a final outcome in 3d. However, these weeks has shown me it is actually more efficient to work both in 3d and 2d as this allows the end result to achieve the highest quality possibly since we can iterate on problems we run into in 3d.

Overall, the village project was a very enjoyable project but hard to manage time wise as I spent too long in the concepting stage, producing silhouettes and didn't anticipate how long the unwrapping process would take. I felt that the process wasn't difficult as I have started to become used to the process of unwrapping using pelt wrapping and quick planar maps to sort my problems. The problem itself was dealing with each individual area and assigning them to each of their individual material ids. This problem was time consuming and at times felt a bit tedious however, I soon learnt to take breaks with each unwrapp to allow myself to recharge and approach each problem anew. Looking back I should have taken advantage of using paintovers on 3d models more as when I got to the modelling stage of my building I had found that my final concept didn't translate so well from 2d to 3d, as the roof design I had initially settled on looked reminiscent of oriental culture. If I had worked both in 3d and 2d more instead of taking a linear approach this problem could've been avoided in the first place. However, during the modelling stage of my project this problem was rectified eventually when I did use the paint over advice given by my tutors to resolve this issue as well as producing a mood board on Tudor/medieval architecture.

For this project, we were also tasked with working in groups, which was a new experience for me on this course. Whilst working in groups there were small problems, which we had to deal with until we had critical studies with Avril who taught us how to be more organised with our teamwork. From her session I learnt that in terms of my personality I could be considered as an explorer; someone who strives for new ideas and hopes to bring out most in people, however this means I can be quite dominant. I personally consider this both a good and bad thing. On the positive side, this means that I can serve as a possible authority figure when it comes to future group work however; this also means I have the problem of being too dominant and not allowing others to voice their opinions. Since this has been pointed out to me, I have since started to rethink how I act around others so that when I do work in another future group project I do not cause conflict.

Finally, we also visited Bradgate Park during these weeks to collect reference for the upcoming tree project. I thought this was fun and very helpful, as I need to go out more and collect first hand reference more. This conclusion derives from my experience with the rock project. For rock project, I was lacking first hand reference and hence I had to fake it in order to get a design, which looked like a rock. Hopefully, for the upcoming tree project I'll be more prepared with my research.

This weeks artwork.

Silhouettes - I think i went overboard with the silhouettes as I only ended up using on design. Personally I feel looking back I used the silhouette stage as a way to procrastinate from future stages as around this time I still wasn't very confident with 3d modelling yet. This however changed when I got to the initial modelling stage of the house and Craig from game production sat down with me and showed me how I would approach modelling by manipulating and scaling verts.