New Year New Goals

   Looking back on 2015 it feels to me to perhaps have been the most interesting and fast paced of the past three at university. Finishing with BMW in August there have been a number of opportunities that have come my way from it, some that haven't panned out, others I've turned down and now I'm facing what I believe is perhaps the most exciting of them, my FMP. Returning to DMU has proved to be a play space to explore parts of my skillset that I've not really had the chance to exercise yet, namely art direction, stylisation and interface design. These, among other events in the year, have resulted in successes, mistakes and lessons to learn from which I believe has resulted in 2015 being a year of not only massive professional development but of personal growth too.    

   The biggest of these lessons has been relinquishing the constant need to control everything and being able to improvise more with my projects and goals. Over Easter I talked a helluva lot about the anxiety and uncertainty I was feeling with my outlook and personal projects I was working towards in my spare time. My misguided attempts to try and plan like a year in advance when I remained unfocused and unclear on my direction was really not doing me any good. At all. Taking on-board what I've been able to garner from that experience in Munich was, I feel, a watershed moment early in the year for me. There's still a lot of doubt I feel about my work and the quality I'm working at but that's at a level I'm sure I'll never quite avoid but the bulk of the anxiety I was storing up, the real bad stuff, has been quelled.

 
    That's been one of the major points I've been able to bring from BMW back to labs and in the work I've been producing in Leicester. Avoiding trying to plan out my day to the hour and tripping over arbitrary self-set deadlines I've moved more to working from day-to-day, point-by-point. This I feel has a number of mental benefits but most of all it gives me much more flexibility to tackle problems as they arise or to meet project demands without stressing over where I am in a suffocating and unrealistic time plan. That's not to say of course there isn't an element of long term planning or no benefit to planning at all, quite the opposite, but it's now nowhere near as constricting as before.

   Returning to DMU has had its own flavour of growing pains as well but that's mostly been the re-adjustment of working in real-time environments and being new to Unreal 4. There's been adapting to a PBR workflow which while I've done a lot of reading and research had next to no practical experience as I turned up on Lab's doorstep day one. There's also been a handful of management and quality issues as I've re-found my footing on the course but I feel I've already discussed those to death on here so I'll avoid repeating myself on another occasion. But now at the other end of last term's projects I feel I've been able to get over those hurdles and they've helped to reinforce the mind-set of starting small and working out. 

   There's a lot more I can take from the previous term as my attention turns to squarely focus on my FMP in the new year. I think the main thing I've felt as I've mulled over what I want the outcomes of the project to be is a new found focus on what I want to achieve for graduation. Comparing that to what I was like nine/six months ago when I was all over the place with what I wanted to do shows a stark contrast in mind-sets. So, dare I say it, I'm feeling a new found self-confidence and building on the lessons I'm bringing over from the previous term and the improvements I've made with my work in general I feel I'm in a pretty good position. Looking at various studio openings, not only for games but VFX and visu as well, the skills they're looking for has really grounded and focused my outlook for graduation in terms of where I should be investing my time. These skills are what I'm building the core project from before fleshing out the rest of the concept and outcomes. For me an important part of the project is trying to tie together the various threads of my work. That means working out a way to bring in the graphical elements I've been exploring both in and out of uni, the concepting and art directing I was able to exercise during the Gateway project and of course continuing to push the overall technical, design and narrative qualities of my environments. 

   No small task but a challenge that I believe in the 20 week time frame that I have I will be able to execute my FMP to the quality I'm striving for. And there's been a lot of recent improvements and successes that I can take stock in for the remaining semesters in Leicester, the gains I've made with digital painting, my bolstered confidence in making creative decisions and my improving understanding and application of artistic fundamentals within my work. Mixing that in with the professional qualities I've developed at BMW with self-management, communication and work pace it feels like I'm in a good place for reaching the professional level of quality I want for the project. But it will be a challenge. I have set myself something that is ambitious, that will be difficult and will challenge me but with my time at BMW and returning to DMU I feel I have the skills, the confidence and motivation to achieve the outcomes I have envisioned for 2016.  

     So there's been a big focus with this on the FMP but while that may be the most immediate aspect of my work I'm looking ahead to after graduation and hopefully employment. So there's a handful of things I'm wanting to look into in my own time to help sharpen and expand my skill-set over the course of the next twelve months. I'm gonna keep this blunt and to the point, so firstly in the realm of software I'm gonna be looking into:

     - The Substance texturing suite (something I've already begun taking my first steps with but I'm hoping over the course of the FMP to really get to grips with it.)
     - Vue (terrain creation software) and possibly expand that into e-on's other products such as Ozone.
     - Maya (one that keeps making an appearance but this year I feel I can't avoid it any longer as I feel for a lot of the companies I would love to work for Maya is what they're asking for)

   With the skills I want focus on there's nothing new, if that's the right way to put it, that I really want to look into such as this year with GFX rather expand on my environment and general artistic abilities through:

     - Continued study and exercise of the fundamentals of art and design
     - Improving the technical execution of my work, material definition, modelling accuracy and high poly sculpting. Especially with natural elements as of right now I feel they are a weakest part of my environment creation
     - Put more time into studying cinematography and composition in film

   There's a couple smaller things, photogrammetry being one of them and something that may snowball into something larger is VR, which I'm dying to start playing and developing with, that I want to get round to this year too. Of course continuing the recent momentum with digital painting is also something I'm keen to continue from this year as well. I know that with a lot of my goals from last year weren't met, I think solely down to the fact I was trying to take too much on board, it didn't help that the number of areas I was trying to reach into was pretty spread across the board. So some of those have transferred over to the 2016 to-do-list and as it stands I feel it's far more focused and more achievable than its forerunner and that can only be a good thing.