Week 3: Captain Hindsight

Week 3 of third year has just passed and with it my first project. It was stressful getting it handed in on time and to some state where I could be proud of it. So this week is going to be kind of a long post as I am going to be picking apart the last week or so and self-evaluating the up’s and downs of my first project back.

Starting on a positive note, I feel like I am noticeable quicker at my high poly stage of my pipeline. This is something I have tried to get quicker since Christmas last year back when it was dominating all my project time. Within a few days of this project I had created a full high poly base in zbrush containing almost all the features I wanted in the end result. This gave me time to play around with different designs straight into 3D. This was invaluable to my design process. I feel like the quicker and more efficiently I can complete this stage of projects the more effective the rest will be. From what I gather industry professionals spend usually 50% of their time working on the high poly model and to a high degree of detail and accuracy. So my aim by FMP is to be in a situation where I spend no more than half my set time on it, without sacrificing any quality.

This leads onto my next point, I spent much of my second week noodling around in zbrush trying to get my fairly realistic sculpt to be much more like my intended art style. This led to a lot of avoidable wasted time and a massive drag on my confidence and enthusiasm. If I had started with the specific style in mind and planned it in at the beginning I could have saved maybe 2-3 days out of this project giving me more time for re-topology and texturing. Then there was the stylisation in its self, I found it taxing trying to emulate the style of an entire franchise which has been building that recognisable look for years. After analysing some concepts and character models I managed to find some consistencies in the design that I could reproduce.

I have a problem when it comes to decision making, I always knew this but it became much more apparent when I didn’t have enough time to let it play out. With only 3 weeks to complete this project, that didn’t leave much wiggle room for indecisiveness. This is also something I need to work on as it has a knock on effect on my time management and ability to make solid design decisions, not to mention the stress that comes with it.

A part of projects I always enjoy is lighting, posing and basing. The kind of end dressing up, it’s the bit where I feel like the project comes to life. In this case I created almost like a small diorama, now it was pretty basic and could be dramatically more refined as I did it very last minute however I think it was really beneficial to the presentation of my project something I usually struggle with. Over the summer I did a similar thing with one of my personal projects and since have made an effort to do it with everything in my portfolio.

After speaking to Mike Kelly at the end of the project he gave me some feedback on my end result and how I can improve and refine to help push up my grade. One of the made points here was my materials(as I had no other maps). I need to revisit much of my texturing and go in when I have time to refine them, I intend to go in and hand paint highlights and try and create more convincing materials.

I also gained some feedback from past students who pointed out technical errors in my characters. This included as gaps in the mesh, intersecting geometry and material problems, soon to be addressed.

Final Presentation: