Coffee overdose

Hello! This week have been crazy! Only two weeks left to work on the OTM project. presentations, re-submission of my character project and on top of that a 2500 word reflective essay. It has been a long week and coffee is what kept me going to labs.

On Tuesday we were asked to present our Alice in wonderland project which none of us were really looking forward to but contrary to my expectations the feedback we received was very helpful. The main problem in our level is clear, It's very big and there's barely anything in it.

It feels very wide and square, we still have some key elements missing such as foliage that we were going to work on over the remaining weeks of the competition but it turns out we need to do lots more than just adding trees and flowers.

We were advised to break up the monotony of the scene by scaling the building to different sizes and making the streets less straight. I believe that we were so focused on making it as realistic as possible that we forgot to add our own art direction to it. It was good that the tutors picked up on that since it has given us a new perspective to work from.

We need to populate the scene, and make it lived in even if there aren't any humans in the level. We also need to dirty it up, it's way too clean for a city in the Victorian times!

I looked for photographs and drawings of Victorian cities and made a list of assets we could include on top of the ones we already have. Then I grabbed a couple of screenshots from our level and decided to do reasonably quick paintovers.

Looking at this image we agreed that it'll be good to have almost a vista of the city, so that as the player walks around, he would see a variance in the cityscape.

But this is as far as I got on the OTM side of work because up until today, my character project and more importantly, the reflective essay have become my priority.

As for the essay, it has been tough. Trying to reflect on my year in English is already challenging but having to write it formally and in the format of an essay was the death of me. I was lucky to have my boyfriend correcting my grammar and helping me with the structure otherwise I am not sure I would stand a chance to get a decent grade for it.

I will make a shorter and more informal version of it so you can have a go an read how my year's been so far.

And last but not least, I have successfully re-submitted my character project. Today I went into labs to put my work into K drive only to realise that the animation was broken. It was more like parts of it were missing, and I swear this things only happen to me...and I know that it is my own fault for waiting until the last day to submit it but it's still very annoying.

As well as the animation being partially broken, some of the skinning process had been lost as well and there was no way I could fix that with two hours until deadline.  I've come to the conclusion that either the file corrupted somehow or that I accidentally deleted it.

On the bright side, this time around I skinned the fingers properly so that they don't look broken! I think it took about an hour for each hand...But it was worth it as they ended up looking pretty good.

The main improvements I focused on were rigging and modelling and I changed the textures a little bit (mainly the colors). On my new concepts I changed the patterns on his clothes but in the end I decided to keep the original ones.

Having animated a rabbit I thought that a human would be easier but I couldn't have been more wrong...It is incredibly hard to capture the human gesture. Posing the character and capturing a still image is no problem  but when it is actually moving, there are a lot of subtle movements that aren't very apparent but that without them the characters don't look believable. Because of that, my animation ended up looking a bit rigid.

Well, I have to leave it here otherwise this will turn into an essay and I've had enough of that already!
I'll see if I can post a video of the animation at some point.

See you soon!

Carla.