bloom - submission post

Reflective statement

Over the course of this project I forced myself to learn and use as many programs as I needed to. With many games companies using many different programs I find appropriate to learn as many as you can because you don't know what they will use. In this way I feel as if I'm pushed for time to take in a lot of knowledge rather quickly. Having said that, I am happy with what I added to my repertoire. Orantrix, dDo, ART, and Marmoset Toolbag 3. 

I felt the most uneasy towards the beginning of the project in which I couldn't decide exactly what type of design to go towards. On top of this I realised I was finding it hard to distinguish between good design and personal aesthetic preference. Though it's okay to have them crossover; I thought I was relying too much on what I tend to gravitate towards. However in the end I have become rather fond of Sawa's design. Whether or not that design was properly fit for 3-D is another thing. I found when doing the retopology that the design of the suit was not exactly efficient as the subtle silhouette difference made for a lot more work with not a lot of visual "pull". I was also completely unsure if the retopology I had done would animate properly, no matter how much research I had done. But this was more an issue of my inexperience than obliviousness. Speaking of which, I had conducted a great amount of research both beforehand and at the time in order to reduce the amount of grandeur mistakes made. I did however make a lot of mistakes down to simply not knowing a small part of the pipeline that would nevertheless stop me from moving forward. They felt like good mistakes, though. Ones that I knew I would not make again and thus help me speed up the process in the future. For example I had a problem with Marmoset Toolbag in which I didn't realise it did not accept material IDs. Whilst it seems insignificant, it actually became rather difficult trying to figure out how to break the mesh up in order to have the skin and body elements separate to texture them properly. 

As an over-arching theme; I don't believe I managed to optimise my character that I made in 3-D well enough. But this would've been to do with becoming overwhelmed with the workflow and thus slipping up on the cleanest way to do things. Although I must say, and this is partially because the character was for games; at no part did I feel as if I was making decisions that could be classed as "cheating." In that regard; I didn't cut corners because I couldn't figure something out, but I also didn't cut corners in a good way - for optimisation. This will be something I'd like to explore in the future.

As a last note, and perhaps I'm shooting myself in the foot here, my one major gripe with the presentation of my project is the pose I gave Sawa. Though I used reference from a real ice skater I don't believe I chose the right one. Aside from that, this project has been an eye-opener for what I can achieve by myself as often I tend to subdivide what one person's role is, akin to how the industry works. This project has given me more confidence with what I can achieve by myself and also a good idea of where I stand skill wise and what I need to improve on.