Upon reflection, I overall feel extremely proud of the work and effort I was able to put in to this assignment, along with how I handled the challenges in the latter half of my work, however I do also feel that I spent a tiring amount of time on the assignment and caused myself to stress as a result of external roadblocks and my own ambition.
When first starting the semester, I was anxious about the module due to struggling to understand what was expected of us. However as I started work on the character design, I found myself growing ambitious with what I wanted to achieve in this assignment, which I have acknowledged is a bad habit of mine in terms of scope and the workload I set myself. I wished to push myself far outside my creative comfort zone and wanted to improve my skills in realistic art and 3D modelling, which I feel that I have achieved with my Opinicorvus. I feel that I had a well structured character design and environment idea, and that I succeeded in my art direction as I was given small critiques on what to improve and positive reactions by both lecturers and other students, which bolstered my confidence in delivering a high standard of work for the module.
Some of the biggest roadblocks I experienced were due to technical issues and partially my own hastiness. The first issue being with ZBrush, which we already lacked a couple lessons on due to the license not being available for a time. I struggled to learn how to properly sculpt in the software, which brought back memories of last year when I badly struggled with sculpting my character for 3D Digital Literacy. It felt like I was back in those early stages of my skills, and I wanted to prove to myself that I am more capable now, the high polygon sculpt I created feeling like the highlight of my work as a result. Due to being on weaker hardware however, ZBrush had lagged for me countless times, at points feeling like I was fighting with the software to get work done. Then the feather issues also caused me a great deal of stress as it took several days to complete, which made me feel as if I were falling behind and pushing me to work tirelessly on the module. Getting my Substance 3D Painter license to work on my personal laptop was also stressful for me, especially when getting access again very close to the due date and technical difficulties continuing to crop up for me to deal with.
Whilst some parts do feel like my own fault for overlooking, I felt that many of the issues I had faced in this module were outside of my own control, and whilst there is a level of frustration and fatigue there, I still pushed myself to rise to the challenge and complete the assignment despite the disadvantages I was working at, so I can still take great pride in what I was able to accomplish in this module.