Today was our
year’s review for the first semester and it’s fair to say I was pretty anxious.
It seems the whole year has, to varying degrees, suffered from the infamous
second year blues and while I wasn’t affected that severely I didn’t escape its
grasp completely. In short I just wasn’t content with anything I produced,
especially in 3D, and was generally dissatisfied with my projects. You can
gather from this that I wasn’t quite sure how this review was going to swing.
This afternoon I
walked into the meeting room across from the Cintiqs taking my seat aside Mike,
Max and Heather readying myself for the worst. While Heather’s good mood was a pleasant
surprise in itself my grade didn’t disappoint either and I’m very pleased with the
B I received. I was told for the most part I’m
technically ahead with a sound understanding in the various software packages
we use but what they want to see is more artistic love put into my work, make it
‘sing’ as they said. So the next step is nailing my
materials which requires me to fiddle around UDK and Photoshop more with my textures. As I've said here multiple times my textures were what I felt dragged me down at times but I believe I'm making real progress with them this year. Fortunately my building project didn't drag my grade down as I feared it would and instead they seemed pleased at what I produced with a special shout out to my file organisation. Regarding the building I'll be getting a breakdown on here over Christmas which I'm sure will be an interesting read.
They also banned me from Crazybump.
After recovering from the shock of the end of my relationship with my favourite Normal map software I found myself in front of the visual design panel with Mitch, Emma and Chris. I was less nervous about this review than the one with before it as I was more familiar with where my major errors were but I received a healthy confidence boost after my talk with Heather and co. I was graded at a C but with some of my traditional works I was pushing a B so I'm glad to hear I'm still progressing well. It seemed the biggest issue that was raised was my depth and defining my fore, mid and backgrounds which is a problem that's has continued over from last year, a similar issue to this is my pen pressure and I need to be harder with it as well as utilising it better to help define my depth. Composition was also an issue which I completely agree with, the focus in the past term has been on drawing what I see but after reading tutorials, researching composition a couple posts ago and listening to Mitch it's clear that that's no good and I need to mold what I see to create an idealised version of what's in front of me. However while my traditional skills are progressing well digital is dragging my grade down. They understand that I'm new to the medium and I'm not gonna pick it up immediately and my progression is slower than I want but I'm beginning to feel I'm making ground with it so over Xmas I'll be hitting Photoshop hard.
Overall I'm really pleased with where I'm at and it's been a much needed boost to the system to hear from our overlords, the course team, how well I've been doing this term and the major points I can take away from today are:
- Focus on improving my materials and artistic judgement in Game Production
- Improve my use of pen pressure in my work which should help define the depth more
- Increase the planning and composition that goes in to my work
- Improve my digital skills
I'll be getting the final couple of blog task for the semester done within the next few weeks which I'll follow with break downs on the building and vehicle projects and I'll throw up a selection of visual design work from the semester too which will lead into the new year. Right now I'm knee deep in both the Mortal Engines project and the art test for the BMW internship which I'll have a post about it up fairly soon.
Looks like I've got the next wee while planned out then. It's gonna be a busy Christmas.
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