Wow, 9 weeks into the course! Feels like there's a never ending stream of work, wait, I said I wouldn't be negative... Never ending stream of productive exercises that'll help me improve! I would feel alright-ish as of now with the work we have left to do until the Christmas holidays, except, the blog about something we find interesting in video games history... I find everything fascinating and would like to pick a good area to do it on, and at the moment i've just done the factors that drive the technology. Putting this aside, here's the low down on how the week has gone:
Visual Design
On the way to the Abbey pumping station, the scenery was rather nice in Abbey park, everywhere I looked I saw a potential tree to model for the foliage project in game production (I've already picked & photographed the 2 trees I'm doing though). Nevertheless, it's a nice place to sit and draw. I thank the people working at the station to open it just for us. A side note not really important to the course, I've previously been to the National Space Centre 3 times in the past (during my school life) and never once looked at where it was on a map, and nostalgia hit me when we walked to the place I sat and ate lunch which was probably around 7 years ago now! Moving on, the lighting wasn't bright inside, but in some places, the light hit the metallic surfaces to creates a great contrast & highlights. I only got 3 sketches done and rushed the last one so it looked a little bit dodgy - alright overall though.
Heather's life drawing was a new one for me, using pens which bled with water... I thought it would be a disaster. Although, it turned out I was pleased with my last drawing. You could clearly see the first sketch left no time to wash, the second was kind of there but not really, and the third was much better. If I did some more, I would hope that it would improve further. I am starting to see myself improving, proportions can be a bit off in the 2min sketches, but things seem to come a tiny bit better now. So, 'a good day at the office'.
Game Production
Having done the building & gone through the texturing process multiple times now, it is certainly faster. I got the trees' base/structure done & textured before the lesson and I actually felt kind of good about what I'd done this time. I know it's only a low poly tree, but it's hopefully just another step that I've taken towards better work. Throughout the day I was thinking "these branches are going to take forever", which was because I knew that I hadn't got reference photos which were easy to cut out. I spent around 3 hours cutting out two of my branches, just to mask them out from the background. Although, when I saw the result in 3ds max wasn't too bad, I felt 75% happy with how it turned out. I still have to position all of the planes around the tree now, but I'm glad that I have got a big chunk done within just today.
Critical Studies
This time it was all about our blogs! I know I'm not exactly great at blogging, but I thought that what I was doing until this point was alright. However, it was an eye opener as to how much more professional we have to be using this media. A great point was raised in the seminar about how we represent our course here at De Montfort, therefore, I will try to be less casual but still maintain enthusiasm through the use of exclamation marks! Apologies if this is annoying to some, but it's a good way to emphasise a point, so that's what I'll do.
3 Points I need to improve on for future blogs:
-Include Images where reasonable
-Reference properly
-Gather more academic resources
These are obviously just things I'm going to try and do from now on, and will set out to continuously improve how I write, structure, and research correctly for these blogs. This day was very helpful, and hopefully anyone reading these will notice a change in how I go about my future posts.
A good week overall, which considering how I started (crises all over the place), is a better mentality to have!
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