Week 01 – Learning Curve

During the course of this year I will be posting weekly entries reviewing the week’s activities.  

Last week was my first week back on the course after what felt like a very long summer. I realised quickly that I had become complacent after a summer of working (at a bar) and the changes to the course caught me off guard a little.

Straight off we were thrown in the deep end with a group project using PBR (Physically based rendering). We had dabbled in group projects last year but never actually got to go ahead with one to completion so this was a first for me.

We are now using PBR and Unreal Engine 4 for every project, before starting this project all I understood of PBR was that it calculated light in an extremely realistic manner and had no idea how to actually implement such technology.

However in the short time of a week my fears of the new changes have been quelled and I now feel much more comfortable working with a group and texturing with the new maps that PBR requires.

Texture I made for the shield. 

The first group project was set for our game production module and completed in groups of 6. We were given a basic concept of a small scene with a Viking feel to it and tasked with creating the 6 assets in the scene; however the task was not as simple as that. The assets had to be completed in a round robin manner so each stage of an assets creation was completed by a different person.

There were 6 assets and 6 stages, I ended up making a concept for a bench, modelling a hog, UV unwrapping a Tankard (and cutlery), texturing a shield, reviewing a barrel, and re-texturing a table. In the end it was a great experience full of new learning opportunities. If anything I feel like I’ve learned more about 3D asset creation in this last week than I did for the entire last year.

All the assets in engine.

The second group project that we started last week is one that I am very excited about and has only just started really. In a small group of 4 the task is to re-create a scene from a film as realistically as possible.

Our chosen scene for the film project.

I once again had my preconceptions challenged when we were choosing a scene to recreate. We had our first choice rejected for valid reasons; all of our choices were from our favourite films and the combined colour palette was akin to mossy mud, in other words pretty uninteresting. So we changed our choice of the Eyrie from game of thrones to Andy’s room from Toy Story (specifically Toy Story 3). We have 3 weeks left on is so I will be posting updates each week.

Most other aspects of this week were a welcome return to the norm, it was great to have access to the labs again, and one thing I missed greatly over the summer; life drawing classes. I feel like a lot has been achieved this week which only makes me more excited for the rest of the year.