Comfort Zone:
Miro Links:
Self-Reflection:
This final year has been incredibly difficult, and I am hugely proud of the work that I have created both individually and as part of a group. Having not worked with any 3D medium in around a year due to placement, I was apprehensive about my skill level, but I feel that my base modelling and texturing skills have improved so much during the past year. Additionally, I have explored more facets of 3D environment building and texturing that I had absolutely no experience of, and rather, was completely uncomfortable with – such as a 3D scan environments, painterly textures and shaders, geometry nodes etc. RnD has been an area I’ve enjoyed immensely during the past year. I threw myself into hand-painted textures for the first time properly and really enjoyed this process. It was long and laborious, but I feel that the resulting look for the interior textures is pleasant and I am incredibly proud of them. Finally, the chance to work with a new software – Blender – has been really useful and this is a programme that I will be experimenting with more in the future. I am happy to say that I feel that, in the case of my 3D art particularly, this has been the greatest body of work I have created in university by far.
With that said, there are definitely areas in which I can improve in the future; this year has taught me that I am quite underconfident in my technical skills. I have proven to myself that I can come up with solutions, allowing to bring my/my group’s visions to life, however, I have often procrastinated certain tasks due to fear of a lack of ability, or not knowing where to start. I hope that going forward I can take more initiative in kickstarting some R&D, as when I gained the courage this year, I truly enjoyed it.
I believe that my environmental design skills need some work – particularly in relation to colour theory (both in 3D and in 2D). This is an area that I have always struggled with, and have been consistently trying to improve over the past years – which I will continue to do in the future – but, sadly, my mediocrity in this area has felt especially apparent to me over this past year as I have faught to lay asset base colours in my scenes.
When texturing, I fully embraced the hand-painted look by physically hand-painting each individual asset I created. As mentioned previously, I am so happy with the results of this; however, I believe, as this took me hours and hours of work, I should perhaps have tried to work out a combined approach with procedural and hand-painted methods rather than fully hand-painted. This may have saved me some more time and allowed me to move into other areas of the pipeline to assist more quickly.
I wish I had had more time to experiment with grease pencil; sadly, it felt that my time was better spent assisting other areas of the pipeline, but if I had been able to save some time from somewhere else (i.e. reducing texturing time) I may have had more of a chance to look at this feature.
Finally, I believe that I potentially worked too much – this is a real and consistent issue that I have, and it often causes a lot of burnout or sickness. Whilst I believe I have improved on previous years, not readily volunteering myself for everything that needs done as it pops up and instead allowing my team mates to handle a share things where they were able, I still think I could have tried harder to take time off and away from this project; whilst I am extremely passionate about my education and Comfort Zone as a whole, and this trait only shows I truly care about this work, I spent much of the weeks leading up to dealine tired and contracting a flu.
Previous Blog Posts:
Project: Comfort Zone – Pitch Prep, Pitch Presentation and Feedback.
Project: Comfort Zone – Pre-production, Pre-Prod Presentation, and feedback.
Project: Comfort Zone – Production, Production Presentation, and Feedback.