Wednesday, 7 February 2018

Week4 - Crunch hits already

This was really tough, trying to get ahead or at least just stay on track with environment for games took a lot of hard work.  I wrote out a chart of all the elements I needed to: model, sculpt, bake, texture and implement and it was a little scary!  I managed to get a huge chunk done though but as a result all my other homework got pushed right up to the wire.  I then had to do a few tough all-nighters just to do them a little justice and after all that I am just going to have to repeat the process again :p  I know its always an option to just phone in homework for other classes but I just have such a guilty feeling when I think about doing that plus I really enjoy all the other classes, animation, rigging, creature modeling the assignment are all enjoyable... So its quite easy to get lost in an assignment and just enjoy it.  Well I am just about staying above board for now so I can have my cake and eat it too, at least for the next couple of weeks.
I didn't have much time for creature sculpture this week.  I only got to spend one evening sculpting this character, which is a shame because I would have loved to spend more time refining the design and costume!  Though I may be able to come back to this design for the final.  The theme was a character you could find in the Cantina bar on Tatooine.  I am not a huge fan of the strange starwars background creatures unless they are mounts or more brainless I guess... I just find them a little weird for my tastes.  So I went for more of a sinister sith/geisha style creature instead.  It was interesting to have such a short time budget to create something original and I guess as a result I had to just go with the flow and not think too hard just to get it done.  I do wish I could spend more time designing this character but just diving in without overthinking was kinda fun too!
Making progress with all the pieces of my level design final.  I have almost all of the props modeled now phew and some of them have a bit of texture work too :) I am trying to build everything up piece by piece so I will give all my props a bit of basic texture work and see how they look in engine before I take individual props to a more polished level.  That way I think I can maximise my productivity and not spend too long on a prop that doesn't get a lot of screen space.
The texturing and shading midterm was a really tough deadline this term but I really appreciate it since it pushed me really hard to get a lot of substance designer, modeling and texturing done all for week 5.  I don't think I would have pushed so hard if this deadline hadn't been looming!  The assignment was just to put a little diorama together using some of the props and textures from my environment final.  I probably wont be using the flesh texture in my environment final but I wanted to go for an Amnesia style creepy vibe to play around with vertex painting.  So creeping flesh was actually kinda fun to play with.... weird sentence...

I am still working on my animation which is a run cycle for my character.  And for rigging we have moved onto building control shapes.  Its not too exciting so I wont bother with a screen grab but I did get a little Python practice this week by building a couple of scripts that automate part of the control shape building process.

Next week looks like it might be more of the same.  I feel like I still have a mountain of work to do for my environment final.  There are just so many props and modular pieces that all need to go through a little bit of sculpting then texturing and baking etc.  I hope I can do everything I plan to do for my final!

No comments:

Post a Comment