Transt Van project

     It's been a while since I've blogged about anything so since I've spent all day modelling and starting our character project for Chris I thought I'd spend the evening blogging. Seeing as I our Transit Van was handed in the other week and I want to increase the amount of reflective pieces I write, it would seem we have our topic for this entry.
 
  So the van, it could be any variant on Ford's Transit van range we wanted, I opted for the SWB medium roof, although the final model was not completely true to this in the end, we'll just put that down to artistic license shall we? Anyway, our brief stated a 5000 triangle model, with three separate texture sheets for the exterior, interior and lights were needed and a design document. Originally I was a tad fazed by the number of triangles we were allowed to play with but as I began modelling I began to feel more confident with the budget we'd been given. The texture specifications we had weren't anything new really but the design document was and initial I wasn't too sure what it really was, but after asking around I got my head around what Heather was wanting.

 

     I'll be breaking down this piece into three sections, the modelling, texturing and the design document. First up, modelling. As you may or may not know, for most of you I'm gonna go with not, I am a huge car fan and this being are first (official) vehicle project you can safely guess I was a little excited. Coming off the back of last term, one of the things I wanted to improve on was my time keeping, so the Monday or Tuesday of the first week I constructed a time table of what I should be doing over the course of four weeks before beginning my research and rough modelling. For my research I went to the nearby Ford garage and was able to take a number of photos of their vans for reference and textures. and by the end of the week my model was beginning to take form.   
 













     Week two was devoted entirely to modelling while on the side I began work on my design document, my intention was to move into texturing by the beginning of week three. With the van it was the first model where I haven't gone over my budget by a large amount, at one point I went over by maybe little more than a hundred but by cleaning up my model I was able to bring it back to below the 5000 tri limit. An improvement on my budgeting wasn't the only thing I could smile about, my mesh was as neat as I'd ever produced, with only a handful of N-gons, this mesh was also much easier to texture but a took a tad longer to un-wrap, so I'm seeing more improvements over my work from last term and I'm very happy with how the model has turned out. But, and it's a big but unfortunately, by the time I was happy with my model we're nearing the end of our third week. So I'm behind which isn't exactly what I hoped for the project yet it happened. And why? Simply because I did not enforce the schedule I had imposed on myself at the beginning which was pretty reasonable with where I would be and when.

     This ultimately led to me spending less time than I would've hoped on my textures which, as you can imagine I wasn't pleased with the end result. Other than that, there's not really much t say about the textures apart from the fact it felt like an age since  had done it last. Note to self do some in the holidays.

     Riding of the back of texturing we arrive at the design document, which as I learnt is a fancy way of saying a diary. That went pretty smoothly I think, uh not really anything I struggled too much with. I could've maybe wrote a bit more on the modelling process so I'll take another look at that.

     Overall I'm kinda mixed about how the assignments gone, on the one hand I feel you can visibly see some of my improvements over my work from term 1 but  due to my management my textures are worse than they perhaps could be. With our new Gladiator project I'll hopefully rectify my errors over the past month and fingers crossed stick to the schedule I create for it.