Evaluation

Major project was a bit stressful, and the finished piece wasn't quite what I had in mind. I think this was largely down to my inexperience with poly modeling and the kind of quality I wanted to produce. I set my sights fairly high and it seems clear that I still have a lot more to learn. I helped out all the team members when they had problems or came to me with things that needed adjustment. The work was a lot of fun but what I will do next time I think is focus on one environment, and get help from other team members to make characters and props to put into that environment.

I spent a month rigging the characters for animation, and although the animation didn't quite come together, I don't think it was time wasted, because I managed to learn a fair bit about rigging during this time. I do think however, that for the next project I would rather use CAT rigs which we could then simply import into the UDK. I think the next step for me is to get better at modeling and texturing. Over the summer I'm going to redesign an existing character model and practice more modeling and improve my facial sculpting.

The rendering was difficult to approach because like with the modeling, I haven't had much experience rendering high quality lighting. Using the Mental Ray renderer for example, I had to adjust things like gamma because it seemed to fade a lot.

I would still like to do a game project for next year, but I would like to be more prepared for it this time. Rigging I would like to have worked out early on in the project, and I would need help with the backstory for the game project. I was thinking of doing very low poly modeling, Slipgate for example (http://slipgatecentral.livejournal.com/34068.html) and exploring some sort of 3d style. I'm very interested in exploring detailed modeling techniques, Vitaly Bulgarov is one of my favourites (http://www.bulgarov.com/). I would like to focus perhaps on improving one aspect of my 3d work, and a natural choice would be to improve my characters I think, at least this is what I would like to do for next year's projects and indeed make my third and final project more of a success. Thank you very much =)