Game
production definitely took the most of my time last year; a lot of the things
we learnt I’d never done before which meant that not only was everything trial
and error, but the work itself was more interesting. Now that I’ve got a better
grip on the basics of 3DS Max, I hope I can focus a bit more on my visual
design skills, which to be honest I made minimal progress on.
In some ways, I feel that I went backwards a
bit, because I was scrambling around trying to use digital painting and
neglecting my traditional art skills. It’s easy to want to use Photoshop for
everything because it’s so quick to get started, but in practice I find that
the actual process of using it to create an image is a lot less intuitive than
when you’re physically putting something onto paper.
Digital
Painting has the unfortunate tendency of turning me into a perfectionist, which
means I never get anything done because I’m agonising over every pixel instead of
looking at the image as a whole. I might try to make more of an effort to do
some of the assignments in traditional media I or do preliminary paintings and
then trying to replicate the techniques I used in a digital version.
I also want
to make more of an effort to bring my visual design skills into my 3D work.
Last year I ended up spending the majority of the time I’d allocated to game
production just working on the mesh, and it shows. I need to give a lot more
time over to concepting and texturing, in particular looking at better ways to
produce normal maps. Thankfully the summer projects have helped my greatly in
learning how to make more efficient meshes, as well as giving me a little more
basis from which to plan how much detail certain assets need, and how to best
make use of textures.
As with
Visual Design, my blogging was a bit neglected last year. This year I’m going
to make a real effort to post on my blog at least once a week, and to blog
about my 3D and 2D work in addition to posting the Critical Studies
assignments. By posting my work regularly, including scans of my rough work, I
will hopefully be able to get more valuable feedback, both from the course
tutors and from other students, as well as just demonstrating my creative and
concepting processes.
I’m looking
forward to the group project as an opportunity to learn how to coordinate the
skills I’ve learnt with the work of other people on the course. It will be the
first time I’ve ever participated in a group art project, so I’m somewhat
nervous about it, but I think that ultimately it will be fun. After all, the
group work will be closer to what it would be like working in the game
industry, and it will be good to get a better idea of what that will be like
early on.
