Week 4: Game production

Wow, this was certainly the most difficult week so far; we were set our new project 'Sci-fi crate' on Tuesday and had a week to complete it. I was a little bit concerned to begin with but figured 'how hard can it be?!'... Very.

I think the biggest mistake I made was at the beginning when I felt comfortable enough to model the crate without watching any tutorial videos. I used the planes provided as reference and managed to model the crate within the first day. That was completely fine until I came to unwrap it. I haven't had much experience in texturing despite my previous knowledge of Maya- its something I really struggled with and kinda managed to do okay-ish if I posed my beauty renders right...

I spent the entire day struggling to unwrap my model, with things just not working how they should with no explanation. After achieving nothing after an at least 8 hour day I decided to give it a rest and come back to it the next day. I eventually realised that I had in actual fact modelled it slightly differently to the example video and my unwraps wouldn't work in the same way so I infact needed to restart my model. So that was two days straight up wasted.. I was a little bit frustrated to say the least but knew that I really needed to up my game.

But after a very long week I achieved what I set out to do!

Beauty render of my crate

Copy of my conclusion of the project because I've already summarised it once!

" Overall I’m generally pleased with what I have produced although I feel like having learnt so much along the way I could probably start it again and do a much better job. 

I think I could probably make the model itself more interesting rather than following the example; I had originally tried to do it myself first time around but ran into some trouble unwrapping and didn’t know how to work with the model I had made so had to restart which was quite frustrating as I had wasted a good two days of my time. Although now that I understand unwrapping better I know I could do a more interesting model and have a better knowledge of how to unwrap it on my own.

As well as this I spent a considerable time experimenting with different textures and different looks; I didn’t decide on exactly how I wanted it to look in terms of metal and how worn it was going to be so I was learning as I went along too which took up a lot more of my time.

Due to the amount of time I essentially spent messing around putting different types of textures on my map I ended up running out of time to come up with a really interesting design. I had decided to do my own design rather than follow the concept which we were told was acceptable but I didn’t spend any time actually designing it so in my opinion it turned out pretty bland in terms of design, although I am pleased with the textures and effects I was able to get onto it and I feel like I learned a lot over the duration of the project.

Also I was introduced to various maps such as bump and specular. I was only able to create a bump map and apply it but if I had more time I’d do some more looking into the different maps so that I could improve my work.

But generally with the complications that I came across I’m glad I achieved this outcome and I know that I have learnt a lot from it so the skills will hopefully follow through to different projects."