And so we come to the end of my final year at Glamorgan University,
and the end of my degree.
It’s been a wild ride, particularly with this final project;
I ran into time-management issues early on, mainly as a result of taking too
long fussing over details, and procrastinating on tasks I wasn’t quite sure how
to handle (trees for my environments being one strong example). Some projects
evolved; one collaborative project was intended to become a fully-fledged game
demo but floundered upon the team’s introduction to the engine, the other gave
me experience with trying to replicate something that my creative lead had a
very specific mental image for, and the back-and-forth exchange of ideas and
feedback that took place in that project was something that I found extremely
invaluable.
Overall though, I’m rather happy with what I produced in the
end. It’s a rare thing that a project I complete lives up to the image I have
in my head at conception, but this year, I think it’s actually been pretty
close, with the Knight and the Garden in particular. I’m sure that in time I’ll
look back on both of these projects and see them as hopelessly amateur, but
right now I’m happy with them and that’s all I can really ask for; as an
artist, I’ll always be looking to improve in every project, and I suppose
knowing I’ll dislike this work when I look back on it later is (hopefully!) a
sign that my work will have evolved further in the meantime.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this final project,
it is this: take the plunge. If you’re unsure of how to do something, don’t
wait around until the perfect solution arrives in your lap, test things.
Experiment. See what works. I did this when experimenting on how to combine
multiple textures for my landscapes, and it paid off. If I did these projects
over again, I would have liked to do the same for my work with planes and
alpha-based shrubs and trees – I hesitated with these, and it cost me. Some of
my attempts at these were successful, others less so; I would like to take more
time to examine how some succeed where others fail, and why.
I still feel like I have a lot to learn, though! It’s the
Dunning-Kruger effect in action, maybe; every time I learn something new, I
discover a little more about how much I have left to learn. Overall I’m pretty
happy with how my final production work turned out this year, and I learned a
lot, but I have a few weak spots that I want to work on improving soon; in my
next project I want to use Maya, learn how to effectively polypaint in Zbrush,
and possibly experiment with retopologising software. I think I’m going to be
using the design for an existing IP for this one, so I can concentrate on the
technical aspect rather than the design, but it’s a design I’m extremely
excited about. I’ll say no more at the moment, but: watch this space for
updates ;)
Peace!
-
Liz
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