I started the first semester of honours with great excitement about spending a whole year on a single project. I had spent weeks prior to the first day back at university thinking about what I could do my project on, thinking I would have my idea pretty clear after a few weeks back. But I found that when given a completely open brief, with no direction but my own, I was a bit lost and unable to decide on a research topic or project artifact for quite a while. In my opinion it was a pretty bad way to start, as it demotivated and demoralised me to some extent, so that when i finally did come to the idea of working with Fraser, I took much longer to get into the swing of things than I would have liked. This delay certainly cost me valuable time in terms of both research and concept development, but I tried my best to catch up.
I did myself no favors when building up this motivation by trying to take on too much work, as Iain quite rightly pointed out in my pitch session. And in the end I put aside the Epic Games Competition, and later the Samsung Developer Challenge, in order to give myself more time for Honours, but a fair amount of time had already been spent pursuing those endeavors, which I now wish had been spent towards improving upon my concept development and pre-production for Honours.
As to the actual concepts, despite being happy with the final pieces, I cant help but feel my lack of sketching and doodling ideas in the early stages shows poorly for the development process. It is a fault of mine that I have never properly attained the habit of constantly sketching, prefering to fine-tune an idea in my head before dedicating it to paper or Photoshop. And it helps no-one for me to go back and try to recreate this thought process.
But in the end, I feel that despite not having completed as much visual representation of concept development as I had planned, the concept itself I still feel very strongly about. I spent a lot of time thinking of what I wanted to create in semester 2, and I have no doubt the concept will develop much further during the production period - My preferred process for concept development being to just start modelling something in Maya and working on it till I have something I like and feel proud of. With a solid idea behind me, and the production of the 3D models being the thing I most enjoy, I'm looking forward very much to semester 2 in terms of the project artefact.
In terms of the pre-production work, I'm very disappointed with the amount i got done in the end. Admittedly it did slip my mind for a long while that pre-production was its own seperate module, and not lumped together with concept development. However I did have opportunity to test the production pipeline from maya to UDK, as well as play around with some of the lighting tools in the engine, so I won't be going into the final project totally blind. As for the pre-production of assets, or lack there-of, I have no excuse but the fact I left concepting the environment till quite late, and by the time I had more detailed concepts out, I was unable to discuss them with Fraser to get his feedback on what he would want changed to fit his project. I may not like it but I feel this makes sense, there would be no point in me producing assets that could possibly be scrapped at the beginning of second semester when we meet back up to finalise our concept.
As for the research towards the dissertation, I'm quite confident that I have made a very good start, with lots of new knowledge gained. The more I read, the more immersed in the research I became, and I even found myself enjoying writing the proposal, which I was very happy with. One one silly referencing mishap robbed me of a B according to the feedback, but in general I was still happy with it after grading, feeling a C14 isn't the best, but is by no means a bad grade.
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