First Semester Review

Throughout the first semester of final year, the feeling of coming back into the home university set up after being away for a year was something that was quite daunting to me. After returning and starting to make some real breakthroughs within our team work, I felt more confident and comfortable with the requirements of final year. With the help of my team and the tutor team, my first semester of final year has been one of huge learning curves the have benefited me in my team work skills and my confidence in the field of production.

With the major project in full swing, my dissertation was something that continually sat in the back of my mind but wasn’t something I was truly giving enough focus to until it got towards the crunch time of the last few weeks before hand in. I enjoyed the research aspect of the dissertation but found the hardest stage of writing it thinking of the first words to write down in the document. With the help of the tutor team I was able to complete the dissertation in good time and I enjoyed getting to delve into an aspect of animation and technological creativity that I wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.

I made big leaps forward in semester one is relation to trying out new softwares and have become more settled in my ability to model assets and pre-produce a project. I am excited for the second semester as we take even more steps forward and begin finalising our work for the end of year show. My role for the next month or so is finalising the textures within our environment, producing final models for the scene and then moving onto animation tests with our newly rigged characters.

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Optimising Models

To optimise our scene even further, myself and our Director, Cassie, decided to start deleting faces for various models in our scene that are never seen by the user. These are mainly on furniture, large counters, table items, counter items, fridge and kitchen door. In this blog, I will post the videos of a few of the newly optimised models, some images from the process and explanations from other blogs and videos I watched as to how basic models need to be to ensure our scene is optimised as much as it can be. I found the article from Evermotion on optimising scenes to be very helpful in giving me the knowledge and understanding of why optimisation is such a large part of a project such as ours. The real time rendering that we will be using within unity is processing a lot of information at one time. If a project has a lot of textures, geometry and animation, this can be described as an expensive project. Not that it costs a lot of money, but rather i...

CV and Business Card

Before heading into the big bad world of employment and potential freelance work, it is essential we leaving Undergraduate level with a professional portfolio of components we can use to sell our skills and help put us on the industry map to propel us towards a future career. This is in regards to two main pieces of self promotion. The CV and business card. It is important we have these designed, printed and accessible on the night of our end of year show so that company reps, directors and other industry members can view our projects and then take something tangible away from it to remember who we are and what we are capable of. When it comes to CV, I have always been taught through my years of business orientated education that it is simple, clean and not overly creative. I was always taught that colour is tacky, images are resented and icons are acceptable but need to remain minimal. When I approached this initial design stage of an updated and a...

Expressions and Animation Testing

As key posing and refining animation have begun and have progressed, myself, Lorna and Megan who are animating our narrative, decided we needed to gather a larger collection of research. For this research, we wanted to gain both primary and secondary assets that could be used to assist us in giving our characters life, personality and attitude. We knew that the best way to do this, yes, is the way the voices are recorded and spoken, but from an animation perspective, it all comes down to body language and emotional expressions. With this in mind, we set out to gather our own, and trusted research material that could be used as reference for us as we develop our animations. Firstly, we captured images of our own faces portraying various emotions as we see them. Secondly we were fortunate enough to receive a book full of expressions and references from our tutor Henry, and this was so valuable to us and we took many photos of the emotions and shared them on ou...

For One Last Time

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