To begin our second semester we had an Assignment where we had the intention of creating a game in partnership with the Games Designer course where we had the opportunity to have the experience of working with another team and being free to create any style of game, in the process of creation I had many learnings and great challenges that I had to face that made me learn new skills for a professional field in terms of working in a group. In the process of creating a full 3D game, I was feeling very excited and anxious about what we were going to start organising! The style of game our group chose was a (first-person) game that was intended to be about construction. With this, our group had positive feedback where we could already start our game project, each one of our group had a role where each one selects what they like best or what they have the most knowledge for me the point that I have the most knowledge and I want to improve my skills the most was in the modelling and animation part which was a great challenge because it was a bit complex for me because it was the first complete animation from scratch that I had to do! To make the game we had the idea of using/creating two characters where one would be a hand and one would be an entire character for the game. At first I was very excited to start modelling, but I didn’t know what I would have to face during the process of modelling the characters.
When I started creating the characters, my job was only to do the modelling and add textures, but unfortunately due to difficulties at the beginning with one of the members who was responsible for creating the characters from scratch, he was very late and didn’t give much idea, so I had to make some changes and try as quickly as possible to solve the problems before starting with the part I was really responsible for doing! The 3D character process. On the way to making the character modelling I didn’t have too many problems with the characters I had to create two from scratch one was to make a hand with the arms region and the other was a real estate agent who was the whole body in total 2 characters to be modelled and animated. Throughout the modelling process I did everything with a lot of calm, fun and enthusiasm to be able to see everything finished and coming to life in the way the group wanted, but as the modelling of the (Builder’s Hands) went on I started to find parts that were difficult to work with because it was my first time modelling hands, I had to do a lot of research with the help of tutorials that could help me visualise and understand ways of modelling the hands, making them move fluidly but like in games without looking too real. For this reason, I had to dedicate long hours to better understand the aspects and visuals of the hand movements; as for the (Real Estate Agent) I had a lot of fun making it I didn’t have many delays with it as I had with the hands but because it is a character with a more elaborate outfit I had some difficult points in these aspects to model the character’s suit it was a bit complicated because it had a lot of details so I made a change in his clothing style making it more modern and making it for modelling, for this reason I was able to finish faster and have more fun with the way the characters looked visually!
After getting feedback from my group, I started preparing the skeleton part of the character to start animating them, in this process of animating it took a few hours to get the most basic movements of one of the characters in the game, to get a little more ideas for the movements of the characters in the game I asked for some ideas that the games group could say what they would like visually in the levels in the game, so one of their team helped me by giving me some basic movements that would be interesting in the game in each level. To be able to animate the hands I had a lot of difficulties that took me a few hours and that led me to do some research to help me understand the errors; some of the help from tutors helped me to be able to create the movements of the fingers (Constructor Hands) that were coming out a little strange with the movements of closing, holding objects and keeping the hand open, in all this it took long hours of trying to get the final process of the animation and have a good movement in the hands and fingers that were my biggest problems. With everything, after long hours making the hands I had a lot of problems with the skeleton of the Real Estate Agent, my biggest difficulty was connecting the skeleton with the modelling of the character by creating a Re-Generate Ring that ‘didn’t work’ in any way on the character, for this reason I had a lot of delays that made me worry a little more about the delay in delivering the animation to my group, But after many hours of processing and discovering errors in my animation, I had the help of a tutor who taught me and showed me the part that was in error, so we were able to solve the problem and deliver the animation to my group with some ok movements that made them happy with the process.
With everything, the process of making the character I feel very satisfied, proud of the part of the modelling and sculpting of the builder’s hands and the estate agent, which were very cool in the modelling process, with these long processes of the two modelling of the characters I was able to learn and put my knowledge and learning to have a good result in them; to be able to do the modelling I used Blender as the main sculpting application, modelling and animating I was able to learn a lot of new shortcuts for commands that I didn’t know that in the end made it a lot easier for me in terms of time, for example with ( Full Bone ) where it helped me not to spend many hours creating and making a skeleton on the character’s body, also with this module I was able to learn how to sculpt a hand and have a better idea of how to make the retopoly on the hands where they were points that made me delay and have to start over many times, I was able to learn more about UV mapping, where I had a few doubts, but by making the characters I was able to improve a little more on this point, where now I don’t waste too much time, in Substance Painter 3D I was able to understand a little more about how to work using the tools it provides, making the process of importing textures much faster and more fun, with the part of animating and creating the characters from scratch I was able to learn how to solve some problems with Rigify Face, where it was the part that gave me the most problems with the characters when importing them into the game. Throughout the process of creating our game, I was able to learn a lot from the situations that arose during each process of making the characters that were:
- Organisation.
- Team communication.
- Work development.
- Professional Proactive.
- Being pragmatic.
- Being flexible with situations.
- Being calm and sensible in difficult situations.
- Acting quickly with problems.
- Solving problems.
- Dealing with delays.
Throughout the whole process of this module I had to face situations that I wasn’t used to. I really enjoyed having this opportunity to work with another group and being able to learn about people and their very different ways of working and different ways of producing things, especially when it came to organising content. What I was able to learn a lot about at this point was the delays that I had to learn from my own projects and having to keep calm in order to resolve them as quickly as possible, to be patient with stressful situations that we usually have to face in a group of people with different ways of working, to face moments that were a little stressful in terms of organisation and communication, which unfortunately in our group we didn’t have much of and for that reason I ended up having delays in my part of the project. The part where I was a bit more discouraged and challenged was in having to sort myself out in most parts because my group didn’t share much information with the game group and the animation group. However, with everything that happened, I was able to put a lot of things into practice that I learnt throughout the project, such as the retopology part that took me a long time to do, hair styles that I was able to get more ideas of how to model and even sculpt different hair styles, Weight Paint in Blender at this point when I got to the process of painting the skeleton I would spend days doing it because I didn’t know how to understand the commands and the places to mark but with many tutorial guides I was able to better understand this important tool in animation, with the game I had to study a little more the world of game designer that I didn’t have much knowledge with this module made me understand more how much fun it is to create characters and then be able to see them creating life and a game to have fun; I confess that I never had much interest in the area of games, but with the help of some research I began to realise how wide the world of games and animation is! As a result of my research, I was able to see different styles of games and have more opportunities to work with the Unreal Engine 5 software, which was a very important learning experience for me; I’ve always wanted to have more knowledge of other tools that share the modelling/animation area and the opportunity to perfect myself in the use of this application made me very excited, but also a little stressed because it’s a bit complex, but with the help of some tutorials I was able to understand more and see how interesting this platform is, which visually improves the quality of our 3D modelling.
With all these processes throughout this semester/project I feel very proud, as I said before I feel very happy with what I managed to deliver I didn’t have the ending as I really wanted missing some more aspects in the characters as for example in the hands of the builder in the middle of the process I started to have many problems with the construction of the hands and so I ended up not giving many strong details in the region of the nails I wanted to have left more striking this part, make more real in the region of the tattoo on the right hands; as for the estate agent, I wasn’t able to do much more with the short time I had due to the long delays that occurred in the process, but with the estate agent character I would have liked to have done more detail in the hair area, giving it more movement, but in the end I really liked the style that I ended up with these would be some modifications that I would change if I could. But with all that, this was the project that challenged me the most, for the first time working with a new team, different ideas and different production processes, in this assignment I had to be very flexible and calm for the reason that I didn’t have much communication from the team and help from members of my animation group with this making me have to often do the work alone and do more things with the little time I had; in my opinion depending on everything I managed to acquire skills and thus make me more enthusiastic about being able to do other projects and so I am very excited about the next projects to be given to us!
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