stressful times

Hello! Today I will be talking about my first week of uni and all of the changes I have been through in just a week. I thought first year was hard but looking back...it was VERY easy. I do regret not putting enough effort all the way through since I had a lot more time than I do now...

But life goes on and I am extremely happy to be a second year here at DMU.

Starting this year we have a whole new course structure, because as the game industry develops our course has to keep up with the changes. These are awesome news and because the course has grown bigger in terms of students and staff, we have bigger and more fun projects to do!

Now, we had our first group project. We were given a scene created in unreal 4 and we had to make the assets that go into the scene. This was the asset swap project and as the name says we had to swap our objects.

In other words, I concepted a table then I passed it onto someone in my team that would model it, then the next person would unwrap it and so on.

It was a fun project to do but as simple as it sounds I had my stressful times.

I started by concepting the table. The theme for all our assets was medieval and I'd say that from the begining I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted the table to look like.

This is my concept for the table. It's very rough but it has enough detail for the 3D artist to model it.

Then I was given the concept for the bench and it was my job to model it as accurate as possible to the original drawing and I believe I achieved that.

The next step was the unwrap and even though I got the most difficult out of all the assets I enjoyed doing it and I thought my unwrap was quite good. Later on I got some feeback from my team mates and we decided to change a few things to make the unwrap more efficient.

One good thing about my group was comunication. We would give constructive criticism and feedback to each other which I found very useful.

Texturing was the hardest part. Because we are now using unreal 4 as our game engine we had to use a different way of texturing. No more diffuse and specular maps. From now on we use the PBR (physically based rendering) to texture.

We use albedo instead of diffuse and metalness and roughness instead of specular maps. I had a hard time learning how to use those new maps. It confused me and I felt incredibly frustrated. I felt bad because it felt like I was letting my team down. They were all getting on with their textures and I just couldn't do it.

Luckily thanks to the help of  our tutors I got better at it and I felt more confident on my textures although I
still struggle a little bit.

These are all of the assets I created/help create. The final scene looked really nice considering all of the textures were 512 x 512..

My team mate has the file of the scene therefore when I get hold of it I will be posting it in here.

So this was my first week at uni, exciting, busy and stressful!

See you soon,

Carla.