Personal Review Year 2

You cant really review something until its finished, well that’s my excuse for leaving this final blog task till now. 

Never really thought about it before buts its quite a daunting thing uploading all of your work onto disk to be marked, not sure if that’s because im nervous I haven’t done enough. well its too late now. 

So this year, how’s it been, what have I achieved and what am I gonna do with it ?

I started off aiming to reach all the deadlines, not fall behind on the work load and generally sort my life out. There were a few misshaps here and there and I wasn’t over excited about the 3d work I produced in the first term but overall it’s been a blast.

I remember having the standard critical studies talk before we broke up before Easter, Mike was warning us about the impending group project which would start IMMEDIATELY after we got back from Christmas.

To be honest, I was a little bit scared.

We were warned that every group has there fallouts, people start hating each other and this rage is usually expressed on and caused by… ‘the slacker’ basically, I didn’t want to be this guy.

I knew when we had finished pulling names out of the hat that we had an incredibly strong group, not complaining or anything but knew I was gonna have to keep up and pull my weight so I wasn’t dubbed as, ‘the asshole that doesn’t do any work’

‘a group is only as strong as its slowest member’ – so they say

But all in all the team was great to work with and I ended up really enjoying the group project. Coming into labs everyday wasn’t a chore and I ended up learning new skills, particularly in my digital painting.

My biggest regret is deleted everything of the teams Dropbox. Woops. Left me feeling really guilty (it was an accident) but luckily we had backups so no damage was done.

Looking back I wish I had got a little bit more involved with the UDK aspects. My knowledge only goes as far as; importing assets & textures, limited amounts of material editor usage and lighting capabilities. Seeing as we have to produce our rooftop level using UDK, would’ve been nice to enter this project with a little more background knowledge.

I feel my digital paints have got stronger this semester. I finally got round to downloading Photoshop CS5, CS1 was feeling abit too outdated. I’ve adopted the technique of creating the image totally in black & white first, making sure its tonally correct, then adding colour by using a new layer with the blending mode set to overlay, very useful for applying colour without overly affecting the rest of the image.

 I honestly feel that my improvement in 2d, has shown through into my 3d work. Drawing isn’t a waste of time !

Overal I think this years been an excellent learning experience; Learning new skills and techniques which I can take forward and use next year in my final major project which I am really looking forward too. As we are expected to produce a lot of work in year 3, I really need to sort my life out and plan plan plan so I’ve got some sort of structure to my life.

Bring it on