Group project can can

Ah finally, tommorow the group project will be over and my constant cycle of working for 2 days straight and lightly resting on the third is at an end - hoorah.

I was planning on typing up a big essay type thing but frankly i now despise this fsking project and how its sapped me away from doing any decent art and im tired and still need to slip in some relaxing Bioshock before i go to bed, so I'll start with the positive and end with the negative, like a battery(!)

Okies,

Positves -

+ I learnt the Unreal3 engine! this is probaly the biggest pro that dosen't involve ppl or social structures and the like and means i can bring that knowledge onto the third year and my final project

+While the quality of my modelling may not have improved the speed has, something which would take me an hour or so now takes me around 15 mins to create and unwrap

+This weird culture ppl have of creating a single model, say the van or tree and then spending weeks tweaking it has finally been smashed after they realise they had to do 10 models or whatever in a week

+I've learnt a fair bit about colour theory and techniques constantly refering to the colour wheel chris gave us

+Using the engine meant i could try stuff like lighting and compistion of scenes,in greater clarity and detail something i would have really struggled to do in 2d

+Having created all of the surface and wall textures I think im pretty good at making textures and creating tiling surfaces, in fact making textures was something i found i really enjoyed and im already looking foward to making loads for the third year project - bit sad really

+I found that a models silohuette and general colour is more important than any niggly details on the texture, once its in the engine and lit most of the detail is lost anyway

+Although a bit of shambles this time around, I've learnt how to better prepare myself for potential future group projects and what might go wrong

+I would either be mad or a complete and utter bastard now if it wasn't for Ben reining me in now and again

Negatives,

-Peoples imagination and enthusiasm getting in the way of realism and logic only for them to realise later they were too ambitious

-Spending weeks doing concepts before we had a solid art style guide so they in effect became useless after one was picked

-How i reshaped and modeified the entire shape of the Queens building and never had anyone, perhaps the 2d leads, give me guidance or say perhaps its actually a bit cack

-The group working in a hugely linear fashion, spending weeks working purely on 2d concepts and completely ignoring any 3d concepts and experiments and then completely dropping 2d and working purely on 3d - the two should have evolved and bounced off each other i feel

-A solid art style not really ever being decided which lead to problems in what to include on the asset lists and all the way down to the final lighting for the level - guesswork is no subsitite for proper research

-People working in a completely fractured way and not coming into a centralised location such as the lab where something as simple as a model could be passed back and forth in a few minutes as opposed to a few days

-Peoples constant reluctance to come into the lab even when texted

-The importing process being completely ignored again and again with me and Ben having to resize textures, reset pivot points and so on over and over again

-The same model resized does not a new model make

-people purely interested in where there teeny weeny model was and why it wasn't in yet and never taking an interest in the the bigger picture and why it wasn't in yet

-How even though it was never my job i ended up creating and concepting the entire lighting for the level as well as the layout of all the models, something i felt the art leads potentially should have helped me with

-Reluctance on the part of some people to just get on with it, expecting input from myself for something that wasn't my area before they would do anything



And finally i think the biggest negative is how massively the whole project has dug into my 2d, 3D engines and modelling and so forth are something i pickup pretty quickly but art is something i really want to improve upon and i found myself constantly having to go back to tweaking this and that in the engine because people expected it, leaving me literally no time for the 2d
side of the course which more disheartens and saddens me than irritates me

So it became a bit of a bitching fest there but whatever thats what makes me tick, while i certainly would not like to repeat the experience again I've learnt an absolute wealth of information i can take into my third year and later life

Not a penis

Just been going through my computer looking at some old stuff and i came across this half complete texture for that crab thingy i was working on, suddently hit me its leg looks like something else altogether