Year 2 week 4

Game Production Project 2

Film Room Post mortom

Answer the following questions and hand the sheets back to the tutor in your lesson

Team Name: HardCandy

Team Member: Johannes Coetzee

How effectively did your group work together?

I feel like our group has work well at the start as we all knew what we had to do and when to get it done by. But as time went on and it got closer to the dead line the amount of communication seemed to deaerate and it just seemed like it was me asking everyone to meet up and for work.

Did the group’s scene feel coherent and to the discussed art style?

Deciding on the art style really wasn’t the issue, the problem with the group was that everyone’s work had a different level of quality. E.g some peoples work would be high poly and well textured, where as in some other people limited them self’s far too much and ended up with poor models, even the textures were sloppy.

What do you think was your weakest stage?

Concepting / modelling / unwrapping / texturing / feedback / engine

Explain why?

The amount of feedback in the group was probably the thing that pulled the group down as there were very little thoughts and ideas being thrown into the group. This meant that textures weren’t up to others standards and that errors were over looked.

How do you reckon you could have supported each other more successfully?

I think I should have given more feedback to everyone’s models and texturing because when I was putting it all into Unreal I was finding allot of errors such as Pivot points, textures with the UV map still shown and even the models not being finished. If I had just given feedback then I wouldn’t have to have spent so much time fixing them myself.

How would you better organise yourself and your team in future group projects?

In the future I will make feedback forums for everyone to fill in each week so that there is a definite amount of criticism going around.

Who were the standout members of your team, those who helped the most?

The most effective member would be Liv as she made a great time sheet for everyone to fill out and stick to.

Year 2 Week 3

I can’t do it anymore!!

I think group work is really starting to pull me apart. It’s started out pretty well this week as we all got to know what assets we are doing and when they need to be done by. It took us a while to get the right frame choice but once we did I felt like I knew exactly what to do. Just so you know, we need to pick a frame from a film and the model it exactly in Unreal 4 with all PBR textures and lighting.  

Okay, so I have 5 assets to create and texture before Friday and I did. I completely finished all of them by Thursday and was already putting these into engine. My team mates were set on the fact that they must have it done by Friday. Its Sunday now and I still don’t have everyone’s meshes, textures and assets. I’ve also had to do some of their work for them just because it takes them to long to fix things. Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying I’m captain perfect but at least I have done modelling 101 like resetting x form and resting my pivot point. It’s just all these little things that’s taking time out of my free time to complete! Next week it’s by birthday so I won’t be able to get everything done in the week. So now is they time to do it!

Once I put everyone stuff in the level it actually looks really good apart from some low poly models and crappy textures. I just keep having issues with unreal 4 because I just kept pressing buttons without knowing they did. Then that messing up the whole map! I can tell the next week is going to be very stress full.

Year 2 Week 2

Either I’m disorganized or no one wants me.

So now that our warm up project is over, it’s time to move onto a more challenging project with a longer deadline. On the Monday we were told that we all have a brand new project which is called the film room project. We have been asked to stay in our groups from the previous project and to find a film to model. That sounds simple right? Well… no apparently not. In that room I was in when we got told this there was only on more member that was in my game production. I said to her if we should go find the others to start this project. Once we found the others it turns out they had already found team members to work with. So now me and Anya were like okay we can just go find two more people for the group and it will be fine, but no she ended up going with some other people and that left me on my own creating mood boards for a film “my group” hasn’t even picked. After all this I decided to group up with a good friend on my course but even he said I couldn’t (do I smell or?) due to too many people in that group… So now what? After looking on Facebook for and low number groups I finally found a home!

The Group was called The hardest candy girls! YAY!!! -.- I now belong to a group called hard candy girls. I’m sure they will change it in the future. They seemed pretty cool and they also had a pretty good film idea which was Hard Candy!

I had never seen this film before so I took this opportunity to do a bit of “Homework”. This film is about a girl who gets kidnapped by a pedophile but she ends up kidnapping him!!! BAM, BAM, BAAAAAAMM!! It’s actually a great film I recommend watching it. I can see why they choose this film because of the colours they use in it and I’m glad it’s not just another mainstream film like the matrix.

So after watching this film I did some pretty colour studies and found out some pretty cool stuff about their colour pallets. I found that in all the negative scenes the colour pallet was cold colours and in the positive scenes they used lovely warm colours!

This project seems exciting and promising so I’m really looking forward to it!

First week back!

See I told you I would be back no problem! Not only have a passed the first year but I feel like this year I’m really going to pick up and accomplish allot more. My time table seems a lot more busy this year as I’ll be in every day, which is good I guess because that means I won’t be getting into the lazy hobbit of sleeping in often like every other student. Im not sure if it’s a good thing or not that something like 60% of first years got kick of the course. I guess that means more 1 on 1 for the rest of us.

So where can I start? Well game production is pretty much every lesson which is awesome! But apparently the industry has completely changed the way we texture objects now. This has pretty much frustrated all my peers, but to be honest I think it’s a great step into making games much more realistic and visually appealing which is why we are all here. It’s just a bit of a pain because everything we learned last year is pretty much irrelevant and we need to get used to it all again.

My visual design hasn’t really kicked of yet because it’s nothing like the first year where we would be asked to go out and draw something 20 times, but instead its allot better in my eyes because everything we draw is all part of the projects that’s set for us in game production. This means that I will be much more motivated to go out and draw stuff.

So far this week has been great! I’ve started with a great attitude and outlook on my year and I really think that I can do much better than most other people. So bring on year 2!