Digital Reflective Journal #5

This week marked the first week back from Easter holiday. At the beginning of the Easter holiday, I was behind due to me having to take time out of my project to deal with complications in my Uni application. Because of this I spent a large portion of the holiday doing work. For this I completed my story board and animatic, going so far as to record test narration to help plan out the pacing. In addition to this I also starting modelling the Adam’s character model as he is the main focus of the game trailer. Whilst part of me thinks that it would have been better to sort out my list of third-party assets during this time, I decided against it for two main reasons. Firstly, was the fact that I wanted the model something as I hadn’t done it in a while. Secondly, is that I knew that when I returned to online sessions at Uni that there would be plenty of distractions that would make the modelling process take much longer.

On the first day back, we had a peer crit and an optional drawing session that I decided not to attend as I still needed to spend more time modelling. In the feedback session however, due to people having connection issues, it ended up being just me and one other person in my group. This made the feedback session much less helpful as neither of use had much to add to each other’s work, especially since we had just come back from holiday.

After this, I had the next two days mostly free, allowing me to refine my model and begin the retopology process. Up until this point I had been keeping inline with the new production timetable that I had made during the holiday. However, once retopology started it became clear that I underestimated the time that it would take. This was especially the case for retopologizing the face which required specific loop flow to be properly animatable. Because of this what was meant to be a 1-day task ended up spreading into a 3-day one. Whilst this has set me back in my timetable, as I was hoping to be finished with the texturing at this point, there is still enough wiggle room in the later stages of the project to rectify this. However, this is still fairly concerning as at the time of writing this I am 2 days behind on my production schedule. To remedy this, I am hoping to make back time during the scene compilation stage. Additionally, I have found an addon for blender that, if it works on my computer, cuts its render time by half. It is for this reason, with the addition of me being more familiar with the program, that I decided to use it for the whole of the project as these two things in combination will save me a lot of time.

Moving on from this, I also had two other sessions during the latter half of this week. The first one being a new additional weekly peer crit for specifically the games group, whilst the Second one was a unity workshop. In regards to the additional peer crit, I personally didn’t see much point in having two weekly feedback sessions. This was mainly because I was already struggling to gain much out of the one session that we already had, with most feedback just being conformation that my project is on the right track. However, despite this, it was fun to see the other game students’ projects. Furthermore, whilst I didn’t gain much feedback during the session itself, I was able to see a student who was doing a CGI project and was at a fairly similar stage as me. This helped to communicate that whilst I was slightly behind in my timetable; I was still making a reasonable amount of progress considering the medium that I was working in. Moving onto the unity workshop, whilst it was fun to make a basic 2d game, the skill set that I was learning didn’t have any real bearing on my project. Instead, I found it to be something that I would only implement after my project in a later stage of my education.

Overall, whist I am happy with the quality of the outcomes that I am producing, with specific regards to the anatomy on Adam’s model, I am still behind on my schedule. Hopefully though with the tactics that I have developed I will be able to rectify this and catch up.