Personal Reflection

Digital media projects delivered an open brief for whatever creative concept we could come up with, with the one goal of the outcome being either entertaining, useful or a positive influence on the world around us. For my direction I decided to explore the world on ‘going green’, focusing my work around energy consumption in developed and developing countries, with the output being an informative website and teaser trailer for a virtual reality project called ‘Goodbye 100’.

Overall the process was enjoyable and rewarding but didn’t come without its fair amount of complications, in particular with the self education of new technologies and design techniques. Creating a 3D believable world is no easy task and the total time of 70+ hours of work and weeks of trail and errors supports this, however the output is now complete and I am happy with what level and quantity of content I was able to produce in the set time, I also feel the quality of work is to the best design I could achieve with the amount of education in each area I learnt.

Breaking down the project the first complication came in the form of designing 3D models in Blender, this although now a simple process to me took time to perfect and there is still so much left to learn. I needed skyscrapers, small houses and white picket fences created for my suburban world, now falling apart, this was achieved through watching tutorials on Blenders website, then applying what I’d watched to my own concepts, although the final output models are fairly basic, I’m confident enough to try more challenging ideas come future projects.

Then next process with problematic stages came in texturizing these assets using Substance Painter, this again involved learning tutorials from their website, but problems began firstly because I hadn’t unwrapped any of my models in blender first, which meant I was painting textures onto several surfaces at once, making the whole design a complete mess. Once this had been addressed I spent the next few days designing different textures for each house, so they didn’t look completely the same, I spent some time also researching different layouts and look for both the website and the game to gather an idea for what overall presentation I wanted.

I attempted to stick the previously outlined timeline within my research and development file, however I think it is always important to continue to work on a project if there are still improvements than can be made, therefore I will still be working on the final output of this project until the deadline, whether this this comes to adding new assets, or polishing presentation videos.