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3D Exploration Game : Reflection


Covid-19 2 : Electric Boogaloo


The Pandas here Represent Covid

This project ended with me being sick the week of the hand in and so I requested and obtained an extension of a week. Because of this, I had the same amount of time to complete this project as I would have done had I not been ill so I will not mention that again but it did have a small effect on my final product.

The first couple of weeks of this project went well I think, I formed a strong sense of the theme and mood I wanted to achieve through collage and image mashes and set myself some clear and achievable goals. The trouble began as I tried to create concept art to formalise my ideas into more precise images. I really struggled to create any kind of concept art, the fear of the blank page got the better of me more often than not and as a result, I ended up avoiding working on the project at times when I should have been pressing forward. I now know a good way around this would have been to grey box out my ideas using tools such as pro-builder or even using simple shapes in Maya to get a solid starting point to sketch over and get my ideas onto the virtual paper. 

Another issue I encountered was that due to this being the first time I had made anything in Maya that was referring to real-world objects I often found myself going to make something that I had style reference for but no technical reference for in the form of orthographic drawings or pictures, (largely this is a result of a lack of experience so I won't make this mistake again, however) what I should have done is start to make any given scene and whenever I would go to make an object that I had no references for, skip making it but add it to a list. Then using the list of those objects fetch references for those objects then do another round of making. 
The style that I had chosen to work in being very simple and boxy made the lack of direct references for certain objects less of an issue than it would have been on another project as using the research I had done as the references work well enough. But this is something that I will focus on rectifying in future for the sake of my future projects. 

In the middle of this project, I hit something of a wall with motivation. This was entirely due to the season (light levels, temperature and such) and my living situation. Since Christmas, I have been stuck alone in University accommodation. This complete lack of both human contact and other stimulation has made sitting in front of the computer and being productive something of a mountain of a task. Near the end of the project, largely motivated by the pressure of a looming deadline, I did manage to produce a reasonable quantity of work like I had at the start. This is not a healthy way to undertake projects and while I feel overall I dealt with the challenges posed by the current situation I would very much like to not be in this position again. To that end, I'm going to attempt to maintain creative momentum more effectively in the next project by making consistently making and moving my energy to different areas when I start to meet too much resistance I a given area.

Supprising myself I really enjoyed the modelling in Maya. Creating all the different objects and UVing then texturing them was incredibly satisfying and something I look forward to doing again in future.

Overall I feel this was my worst project in the outcome but given the situation I'm in, I'm not that unhappy with it. Also given that the animation project will build off of the work of this project, I have the opportunity to rectify the issues I have with it immediately.

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