So as the course comes to an end, its time to take a critical look back over the past 6 months of my life as a Game Art student. I can say that overall Its been good! Difficult… but good.
Considering I was oh so close to switching courses to fine art at the start of the year, I believe ive made most progress in the 3d production side. The first few weeks or so were honestly pretty horrible as me and autodesk just didn’t get along, I barely understood any of the lectures and didn’t really ask for any help, just suffered in silence. What didn’t help is that a lot of people already seemed to be familiar with the software advancing through the lectures with ease, which just made me even more useless haha.
I think I started to get to grips with the modelling during the Building Project, however my texturing was still abit dodgy as at this point I was still using tile-able textures rather than unwrapping and using texture sheets, purely because I didn’t know how to unwrap properly. It wasn’t until the van project where Mike explained to me planar unwrapping and everything started to make sense.
What I found weird is that I got more assistance from people around me rather than from Heather, I guess its difficult to help a class of our size and keep everyone satisfied. At least you get to have a personal chat with her when she walks round with the register.
Also I never understood any of her tutorials at the beginning of the lesson haha. Didn’t know any of the terminology and she went through it so quickly I just didn’t take anything in.
I think my main issue this year has been my time management and work effort, often struggling to keep up with the workload expected from the visual design part of the course. Although we are meant to be ‘full time’ students so I don’t really have much of an excuse.
Im just abit jealous, it seems that all of my friends on different courses have it easier for the first year. When im in my room working, my flatmates will be in the kitchen/living room combo having a fifa tournament/getting drunk. It’s just not faaaaair haha.
I guess it is good however that the first year is to test our capabilities, to see whether we can handle the next 2 years of the course so its not a shock to our system. Just wasn’t expecting it to be as intense.
Ive enjoyed going to the various locations, drawing thumbnails to prepare for a final piece. Pumping Station was my favourite, would’ve been Bradgate Park but its too cold, windy and miles away. I think my drawing skills have improved since the first semester, particularly with scale and rendering techniques. I definitely still need to work on my digital paintings. Im not quite sure whether or not this is a skill we’ve supposed to have developing already? But anyhow they are improving as time goes on.
The life drawing classes are useful also. However I feel that it would be better if we got a little more tuition during them, for instance where ive done classes before the tutor would be drawing at the same time, describing the best way to draw the pose. Its good that Chris and Jack walk round everyone giving advice, but a little more general assistance would be nice.
I do enjoy the critical studies lesson, I like the variety of things we do such as talking around the table, watching selected scenes from films or just discussing interesting things. However I do think we should really talk about the blog tasks more, seeing as that’s what I assumed these lessons were about. Would be nice to have more of an idea how we should approach each task.
I’m definitely glad I decided to persevere through the hard times at the start of the year, the course is actually fun and very interesting learning a lot of new skills for a career I would like to pursue. Next year If there is a second year awaiting me, I definitely need to increase my work efforts and reduce the amount of money I spend on nights out and other recreational products. I will take Chris’s advice because I don’t want to become a lazy stoner who does no work haha.
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