The end of my college course has come, I will have to pursue a career and make a living for myself, I have loved everyday of college, because I have bettered myself in a way that I find enjoyable. It’s possible it may not become financially helpful within my life. I hope that it can, after all I enjoy this. the ability to design things from nothing, just time and effort, it’s a harsh environment and more like a battle royal rather than a work environment with the fierce competition and the struggle to be the person to come out on top.
Category: Updates/Random
X Drive Work Deleted
Today we found the X Drive work deleted, now for me this wasn’t a problem, I always back my work up on the college computer, home computer and google drive. However, this wasn’t the case for other people, James for instance lost all of his work then Fraser said he may have saved it all on his USB, which is lucky but hopeful, Brandon and Jordan panicked and Jordan didn’t give any useful suggestions as what to do other that berate others for losing work. Although despite this whole fiasco everyone par James seems to have their work, but unfortunately James is also one of the people with the most progress made within our group so that also damages our expectations.
Rendered Speechless
I have done so many renders already, almost 3 for each model so far and it’s so tedious but it needs to be done, it consists mostly of changing settings and going between Maya and substance, which when you don’t always have Substance is somewhat of a massive hindrance. I have decided that for today I’m just going to prioritize modeling as going between file to file, program to program is starting to rather annoy me, especially when the rest of my group either heckles me for them or just doesn’t care about the renders.
I decide last week before the MVP to make a bar, I was hoping that since it’s low poly that we could get away with it, which was speculated during the MVP which should also allow for the flintlock and cutlass that I made to go into our scene.
Still a week left to get ready for the art book, renders seem to be fine on my end and I’m just continuing progress on scenery models, no clue what everyone else is doing at the moment.
MVP left behind
The MVP is done, we have past a hurdle and now we know what to aim to improve upon, the next deadline is our art book, therefore we are mainly focusing upon model renders for the next two weeks. That doesn’t mean no modeling however, we have to make sure all our models are textured, rendered however we wish to show them off and then finalized within the scene.
Current main renders of mine consist of:
MVP Deadline Fast Approaching
The college week has ended, the MVP is next Tuesday and we , in my opinion, have made a major improvement to our project. Compared to last week and the weeks prior to that we have made a shambles to our old version of the project, which if Fraser has been saving separate versions of the project at certain intervals you will notice easily. This week we decided to add a massive Kraken into the background of our scene, not on the sky box, but rather a massive Octopus that me and James modeled, James modelling the tentacle and I modeling the body, we worked together to texture the models since it was a combined effort and everyone agreed that it was amazing. With instruction Fraser has put it into the environment, without me noticing everyone told Fraser to make it hold a ship which made it even better.
i finished texturing the boat and stayed behind to texture a few extra models just in the event that on Tuesday, before Matt’s lesson I don’t get time to do so, the ship and a few other haven’t yet been implemented yet, with the textures of course which in the case of the ship is extremely important. With the texturing of the ship I would have liked to have a bit more of team help, I asked and got hesitating replies which was rather vexing, although Fraser did give some help but I still think I should have went more with my gut, but I can change that later more to my tastes if I don’t like the current version.
The Flintlock and various other models that I made at home are good, some are textured some aren’t. I modeled a turtle which isn’t of the highest quality but is pretty adorable, his textures need a bit of work. I need to ask if the the pistol actually can be used if not then it is a nice item to have in a Portfolio anyways so that’s something, i messed around with the Spyglass in Key shot to see what the glass would look like the quality isn’t amazing however it was the first time I had used Key shot so that is a factor.
Everyone this week seems to have really got into a great pace with all the extra pressure that is on us because of the deadline. As for individual progress I can’t really refer to everyone else however I do know that Fraser has really gone to town with the scene really stretching the uses of our models to the most within the scene so they don’t go to waste, which seems to have really made him want to do more environment design apparently. I am aware that Jordan has modeled a book, but as I said Jordan and Brandon have kept to themselves a lot these past few weeks and James has been working on a lot of environment assets and again you will have to refer yourselves to his blog for that info.
Vast Improvement
As I mentioned before, some time to clear our heads would be good for us, and that has proven true, we are all back, the progress today has been great. I have been slacking the most, a few troubles here and there with the boat, every face had two or three behind it so I will be doing that at home tonight since I have a slightly older version at home to redo that aspect again. However, everyone else has been getting on with their work, the progress is far greater than any other single day for a while. It hasn’t been this productive since the start of the project as of late.
Also as I mentioned before I did make a shark at home, weirdly despite how easy it was to make it made me very happy to see it finished imagining the textures on it, since I don’t have substance painter at home obviously.
I have shown it to everyone else and they agree that it will fit very well in the project however we are having trouble deciding where it might go.
Thursday I will update the blog on team progress and project progress.
Group Progress…Eh!
Not much has been done, not a specific persons fault we have all procrastinated, however we have all voiced opinions, determining the problems in our group and I personally believe that over the weekend given some time we will all come back with a better attitude towards our work and put our heads together and better the outcome of this project.
I have not finished those models that I planned to model earlier this week, I will start those this weekend. I am thinking of making a Shark since we are somewhat lacking in wildlife in our project, since it’s an open ocean I thought for a bit of danger we add a shark, maybe as a stretch goal he can attack you in the water, whether that will come to fruition I don’t know.
As well as the shark I am thinking of making a Flintlock Pistol, I know we aren’t supposed to have weapons but I’m hoping that since it’s stylized that we can get away with having it, not on the character but just somewhere within the scene, a massive stretch goal would be to have a character or at least a hand to hold items.
However, these obvious stretch goals are to be thought about later, right now we need to focus on the easier items on our list.
Back in Action
We are back from our time off, we are steaming ahead and are raring to go. We have a deadline is Tuesday, two weeks from now, for our MVP and we are determined to have a MVP that we can all be proud off, we have all really stepped up our game since two weeks prior. It would appear that over the time off we have all become rather bored and being back in college is somewhat of a relief for a few of us.
Today, we mulled over a few more ideas for our art book, throughout the week Brandon will being playing with those ideas with input from the team to create something we can all agree upon.
Everyone is putting their heads down and getting on with work, Fraser seems to be enjoying using Unity now despite what he voiced at the start of the project, James seems to be taking his own pace and being very successful with that. Jordan appears to be very lax as he works, getting his jobs done, however he could be more of a team leader, agreeing with everything rather than debating ideas and really mulling them over, Brandon is keeping quiet and working and I’m just doing what I’m told to do, after college I am planning on doing some extra non-voiced models just for extra effect and plan on unveiling them later this week.
Minimal Progress, Relax
So far, since last week not much has happened, I have secluded my self from almost everyone, (especially form the group project) so that I could relax and enjoy, however I have done work, or at least started work. Looked into making rope again, as for some reason despite Matt showing me how to do it and me being unable to figure why it doesn’t seem to work when I want it to I have persevered, I have looked into make fruit which isn’t difficult, won’t take me more than 20-30 minutes to model all of the appropriate fruit,( Bananas, Oranges, Coconuts, Limes, Lemons, etc.) all basic things to make and some cutlery and various different types of tableware also.
Ins’t much but I am making some progress despite this being a time that I can relax, however our lecturers do insist upon us doing work 24/7 apparently which only makes us want to procrastinate more when we do have the time, although it just becomes a vicious cycle again.
Again, as mentioned last week, progress does grind to an immediate standstill, after all we do require Substance Painter meaning for the time being we a forced to resign ourselves to leisure until we are back into the college weeks and we have access to the programs necessary, after all don’t want to go to a large amount of effort to find out that the work we did was all for nothing now do we, that just wastes more time.
Holidays, hooray
So, for the first week so far I have cleaned up the ship and the cannon in my spare time. (Haven’t had as much time as anticipated, been constructing flat pack furniture) They are looking good, they both still require texturing, might texture these at home considering I have a version of Substance Painter 2, only a few versions older than that of the colleges, however texturing it now then finding out it might not work with the other textures, so on and so forth may be unnecessarily tedious.
Plan on checking in on thee others to see what they have been doing, already know Jordan is doing work somehow, despite keeping up his playtime in Overwatch (I don’t think he sleeps). He has already contacted me for documents required for his blog posts also. As for James, Brandon and Fraser I have no clue about their progress upon the project, most likely stale at the moment given the fact the main hurdle is texturing and considering all of us, not including Brandon are using Substance Painter 2 to texture which is hard to acquire at home. Despite Brandon not requiring Substance Painter to texture considering he is using Photoshop, (Even though he doesn’t know how to use Photoshop either) it is unlikely that he is going to be getting any work done what so ever in regards to the project. Not saying that the rest of the group always does work and that we don’t waste time procrastinating however, he does manage to take it to another level.
As mentioned before, no clue of the progress that James and Fraser have made. I might try to contact them later in the week to get their progress for the blog, unless I’m busy which is extremely possible this week apparently.
NextGen - Dillon McClennan 