Evaluation

Kinga Makowka

OUDF503

Evaluation

This brief was different to any others I have done in the past. I liked the freedom of being able to find something I would enjoy doing. It was hard because most competitions are animation or film based. But there is a way out of every situation. What really helped me is social networking sites. After attending the recent Bradford Game/Animation Festival I got in touch with one of the environment artists from FuturLab. I was lucky enough for him to set me a a brief and give me tons of tips and advice to start with.

Even though he set the brief he told me what he wants to see there was still this sense of freedom because I could choose what I want it to look like, feel like, choose my own target audience.

I enjoyed every part of the project, even the research purely because I love reading about space, mythology, crazy theories and that’s mostly what I did.

The only negative about not having that many restraints is the indecisiveness one minute I was sure I am creating a whole planet, the next I was convinced it would be more interesting to do floating islands. This is just an example but it took some time for all the ideas to settle and for me to make up my mind.

I tried my best at sketching as much as I could during this project, purely because my drawing skills are not the greatest and I want to improve them. I feel like I did not do too bad of a job and I will carry on with this practise during future projects.

What I am not so good at, and it became quite a problem lately is scripting and things. I had all the scripts because I found them on forums and things, but applying them where they need to be applied was a different story. The more I tried reading into it the more people confused me, so in the end my environment doesn’t have a respawn set up. It’s quite difficult because it is quite tricky not to fall off… So this is another thing I really need to start digging into, I am planning on getting some books to try and get at least some basic understanding of this so it’s easier to figure stuff out afterwards.

The other problem I’ve been having was with my textures. The structures were quite big. And my textures seemed to stretch quite a bit, I am not sure why because I tried my best for it not to happen.

Another thing I wanted to talk about is my terrain. I did not use the tool in Unity for that because it was floating islands so I tried to model a floating island, but then again came across the texture problem, and it was really frustrating… Because it either looked so unnatural because it was too perfect or it looked too square and… In the end I just improvised, I am not really happy with the result but again that’s just another thing I’ll spend some time looking into when I have some time to spare.

I completed my environment for a while before the brief deadline because he wanted to give me some useful feedback and ways to improve before I hand it in.

I receiver some really useful tips which will definitely come in useful in the future.

He told me to make sure there is a bigger contrast between the foreground, rocks and temples, and the sky/space. He said that while the grays and browns might be more realistic, it doesn’t make for much of an interesting piece and told me to NOT BE AFRAID TO PUSH COLOUR. Which is something that does not come easy to me, I usually try to make things dark and scary which usually makes it a 50 shades of gray/black thing... so I will have to play around with that.

He commented on the cloud in the sky, I thought it’d make it seem a little more like Earth just to make it seem more, livable but he says that it makes him think less of space and more of just our sky so it’d look a lot better if I swapped it for something like a nebula in the background, and with that have rocks more of a yellow/red tone and it would help the space become more interesting.

He told me to play around with a diffuse detail shader and it should sort out my problem.

He said all this along tons of others and I am so grateful for all of his help, and I see all the mistakes I’ve made and I will be fixing all of it very soon.

I wanted to improve this environment before the deadline but other deadlines which happened to be in one week didn’t let me do that. I do not blame bad planning for once, because I think my planning was quite good this time. I worked on everything bit by bit and I am pretty proud of myself it is just before the deadline you want to spend this extra time on it just to polish it up, but if there are a lot at once it makes it kind of impossible.

Overall I think it was a really good experience, you start seeing things from a different perspective, I always thought it’s best to make things as realistic as possible but really you want to blow things out of proportion and make it crazy awesome. Also receiving feedback from someone else than your teachers and friends is very good, because it seems to be a completely different kind of feedback. This positive helpful experience will definitely push me to do it more often!