Digital Reflective Journal #6

This week I made a lot of progress towards finishing Adam’s character model, with the last few stages left being baking and rigging the final model. At the start of the week, I went into Uni to have a in person peer feedback session with other members of the games group. For this we sat around a table and discussed our projects. Whilst this was fun and engaging, there were many people there with limited things to show due to it all being digital, me being included. Never the less I went through and explained the narrative concept of my game to the group, which was met with much praise. This was a good reconfirmation that the core project concept is still very strong. Unfortunately, however I couldn’t stay long as I was limited on how much I could work on the project due to the files being on my home computer. When home I continued working on my project using YouTube videos as reference for the more technical aspects. Later that day I had a second peer feedback session online. For this one I showed my progress on my model up until that point, along with my animatic. Both of them received high praise, with special attention being giving to the direction of the animatic. When looking at my broader work however a piece of criticism was that I still lacked refined concept art for my project. This has been a recurring issue in my project, however at this stage it doesn’t make sense to take time out to develop it when I am already scraped for time as it is. It is for this reason that I have started creating multiple test renders for my project as not only will they help serve as guides for improvement, but also act as concept art for my Game Bible.

In regards to my test renders, for the first one something went wrong with the UV’s which resulted in the downloaded material looking like plastic. I posted it on slack and received feedback from my tutor on how to make the skin look more realistic. In the end through the problem ended up being very simple and after fixing the UV’s and editing the materials I was able to create a test render that looked extremely realistic. I then later showed of this render during the games group online feedback session, to which a got a lot of compliments for how realistic the skin and the hair both looked. During that session I explained that the last few things that I needed to finish for texturing was to add nipples, nails and eye lashes. This however proved much more challenging that I had thought as I had used a procedural texture for the skin to save time, instead of going through and texture painting the whole model. In the end I was able to get good results, with the exception of the eye lashes as the combination of the lag and weird geometry make getting uniform eye lash hair sims very difficult. In the end I concluded that since I was planning to have the room lit darkly anyways, I could get away without including the eye lashes.

All in all, I made a lot of progress this week towards my main character model. However, despite this I am very behind in my production time table. I knew going into this project that this was a very likely outcome as I had no experience in producing a high detail character from model to being animatable. Whilst I have done such a thing with a simpler character model in the past, for that one it required far less steps and didn’t have any time limit attached to it. It was because of this that when planning out my animatic I designed it with a transition cut in the middle. This means that I am able to cut out the latter half of the animatic, whilst still having it make sense. Ultimately, I don’t really want to do this as I think that the second half of the animatic is very strong and helps to highlight the contrast between Adam’s realistic design that that of normal dreams. However, at this stage I think it is very unlikely that I will have the time to complete it to a good standard of quality. Because of this, when Adam’s model is completed, I am going to shift my focus to just the first scene. If I find the time afterward however then I will try to include the second half, although I don’t think this will be likely.