Week 1. Game Art Episode II - Return of the Artist

It’s that time of year again. Once again I must climb back on the horse, as we kick of the second year of game art, and admittedly I’m being flooded with mixed feelings as already a year has gone and I am nowhere near the level of personal skill I would like to be right now. However, hopefully with this year I would like to see a jump in both 3D and 2D skill as I had previously saw last year.

Start of first year vs. start of second year

Anyway to kick the year off it seems like we have been thrown straight into the deep end. No welcome backs, no starter tasks just pure Game art projects which should result in blood, sweat, tears and something pretty at the end of it. Just what I’d like.

The projects that have been listed over the year include:

• The film room project

• The Sentry Gun

• The Dichotomous Duo (character project)

• Off the map competition

Out of all these projects I’m most excited for, it is the character project to which I have been preparing for over the summer. From studying and refining my weaker areas in character art such as rendering skin, drapery and hands.

The film room project

As I mentioned previously, we were quite literally thrown into the deep end as our tutors revealed to us that we were to build a room from a film scene using 3ds Max and Unreal 4. Hearing such a task as someone who spent the first two weeks of the first year worrying about 3D, admittedly intimidated me. Thankfully over the summer my friends and I attempted to make our own project similar to this one; a diner room.

Unfortunately, summer got the better of me and I didn’t contribute to this project as much as I should have. Taking this back to the film room project, this prior group work experience has inspired how I am to approach this project and this is evident in how my group and I have planned out our project and our approach to the work.

For the film room project our group agreed to re-produce an interior of Jay Gatsby’s house in the latest film iteration of The Great Gatsby.

To make sure that we are on track, my group and I adopted a similar means of tracking progress and planning out smaller sizable goals via Google documents to ensure a live feed of progress as well as to ideally inspire each other to work towards creating a great project.

Looking back, although I am quite happy we adopted this method of organisation and it has so far seem to produce results, It did cause conflict within the group already just to get this system started up. I feel already my attitude to group work needs to change if I am to survive not only on the course but within industry as well.

Reflecting on my roles in previous group work even before the course, I have always seemed whether intentionally or not assumed the role of a sort of leader or someone in charge of logistics. I always worry whether this means for lack of a better term I am a “bossy” figure. Although it clearly wouldn’t be a comfort zone for me, I would like to experience taking a bit of a back seat once in a while as part of a learning curve to understand how to work when I am the one taking the orders, not giving them.

In the future hopefully this will be possible since we have now managed to finish admin work this week and more practical 3d planning isn’t my area of expertise so it would be bad of me and detrimental to the group if I were to still take helm.

PBR, Visual Design and life Drawing

In addition to the film room project, it has been clear that this year having an understanding of PBR is essential to this project. As a result of this on the couple of days I spent my time researching PBR trying to gain an understanding of it. Admittedly this was quite a struggle as I felt it was a wall of so much technical knowledge to cut throughout having access to older years always helps and as of now I feel very comfortable with the theory of PBR.

In other aspects of the course, in visual design we started a master class in composition and in life drawing we started to delve into technical drawing with a deceptive skewed chair reference. Visual design I always appreciate and I was excited to make a start learning composition which I will eventually delve back into as I felt there were slight areas of the lesson I was unclear about. However I think my main confusion comes from the fact that I haven’t had a chance to apply what I have learnt towards my own paintings and compositions.

On the subject of Life drawing to be honest I was quite disappointed that instead of a human model we had to use a chair as reference but I appreciate the work that goes into organising models so it didn’t bother me too much. In fact as simple as I thought drawing a chair in perspective would be, this in actual fact was a challenge which has taught me about humility when it comes to studies. In the future I will not be quick to judge whatever task I have been set.

Action Plan

Finally this week ended with critical studies in which we discussed our plan of action to how we are going to make the most this year. We reflected on 3 main points that we believed went well last year. Looking back what went well about last year was that I made new friends who have helped me grow both as an artist and a person. I also feel that my work made a significant leap in technical ability however I feel like this was more of playing catch up with those around me rather than becoming a strong artist. Finally although the first two weeks were very hard with 3d I do feel I have managed to grow as a basic 3d artist which has laid somewhat of a foundation for this year.

This year though I do understand I must keep pushing both as an artist and a person. This year I need to think about building a portfolio of work which does mean perhaps I need to start treating more works as so called “magnum opus” rather than just throwaway doodles. I would also like to push my 2d digi painting skills pushing my rendering skills and seeking more “real” but constructive feedback both from tutors and the art community.

Finally I would like to push own personal confidence and start believing in myself and what I do. Admittedly I don’t think I have a real action plan for something like this. All I can hope is that I can find the right support and also push myself more in the deep end.

Its sink or swim, and I plan get myself swimming (with some help of course) or go out kicking hard.