Game Art Week Twenty Four

This week I continued making the rocks for the off the map project, using the clay brush and slash to carve into the rock shape. At this point we had the terrain and some white box trees put into the level, so I used this to take screen shots and do very quick paintovers, which I thought would help the group visualize the layout and look of the level more. As we decided at the beginning of the project we were going to have puck as a character guide the player through the game, I helped out by getting my fiancee to record to sound bytes to show the group and see if it was suitable for the character.

This week we also had our summative pitch presentations, this time I felt a little more confident presenting my work, I improved my presentation with better layout on the sildes, added a background and presented each piece of work better, which I added a gradient background and made each image larger to fit the page so it would be more visible to my audience. I also finished my dichotomous poster, I decided to use a composition that would portray the relationship of both characters the best, which the protector character at the back large and overlooking the smaller protected character at the front. I used my zbrush sculpt of the smaller character and photobashing to develop a realistic representation.

Game Art Week Twenty two

This week I continued with the off the map project, which I continued producing environment concepts for the different areas of the level, for example the first clearing, the pathways, titanias area and oberons cave.

This week we also had our formative pitch presentations of the dichotomous character project. This was to receive feedback from tutors, to improve our presentations for the final summative presentations. I feel my presentation had lots of relevant points to talk about my characters and I decided to present my work from the start in order, to show how I developed my characters and discussed the choices I made. My feedback was fairly good, however they picked up that I didn't feel confident in my work and it showed in my presenting skills, to improve this I want to practice my presentation more and I decided next time I would wear my kimono costume, as it relates to my characters and might make me feel more confident presenting. I also need to remove most of the text from my slide and focus more on my work, rather than talking about audiences and similar games. Now I have the feedback from this presentation I can start working on improving for my second presentation, I aim to add a background to my slides to make the presentation look more interesting and visually pleasing, but to make sure its not too distracting from my work. I want to do paintovers on my low poly model to show what my character would look like with more time and improvements. I also will have finished making the poster for the two characters to present next week.

Feedback to feedforward

Now that I have progressed onto the second year of Game Art at De Montfort University, I need to reflect back on my first year, so that I can develop as a Game Artist and improve for the future.

To reflect on my first year I need to think of what I thought went well, what didn't go well and how I can improve on these. First of all, I believe my most successful project was the zombie pick-up truck. I felt my visual design and concept work had been the most professional I had achieve from all my projects; I was able to present my final work in a polished layout and create a final piece I was proud of . I was also very happy with the final 3D model of the car, it was a good representation of the concepts and a Toyota pick up truck. I also felt I was quite successful on my building project, I was constantly receiving positive feedback from tutors, which was giving me confidence in my work. I felt like I was achieving the required look of the model overall, in 3D and visuals. I was happy with the final project and didn't encounter any problems during this project. Overall I felt my visual design work went well as I was constantly developing and learning, which helped improve my skills and work.

In my first year a major problem I was constantly having was time management, even though I was able to finish all projects in time and to a good standard I was happy with, there moments when I could of given myself more time to work on something extra to improve it or develop it further. for example I really struggled with rigging in my character project, I gave my character a long skirt and I found that rigging it was difficult. I tried my best and looked at lots of tutorials, but did not get it rigged properly in time for the hand in date, furthermore, if Id given myself more time at the end I could of work out how to rig properly or asked for more help. which leads to my next point, I also felt a lot of aspects in my 3D work did not go so well, such as unwrapping and rigging, these are both something I need to improve to be a better Game Artist. Also a personal note about what didn't go so well on my first year, was making sure I was able to get enough sleep so that I could get up to commute to University. I struggled to sleep a lot last year and need to make sure I change this so that I don't become ill and can be alert for lessons.

Considering my first year, what went well and not so well. I am going to approach my new year in a better way, I am going to make better use of time management to make sure I get the work done with plenty of time. I will also aim to learn more about 3D modelling and engines, I need to be able to get a better grasp of my tools of work, which I will watch tutorials and ask help from tutors.