Masters Project - Week 08 / 15th - 21st August.

Week Hour Breakdown:

Wednesday - August 15th - Seven Hours & Ten Minutes - Finished unwrapping Cursed container asset. Finalised bake and model of the ceiling panel. Formed and detailed Crystal tube asset.

Thursday - August 16th - Seven Hours & Thirteen Minutes - Finished forming and modelling Crystal tube asset. Chamfered, smoothed, edited inside ring portion, began unwrapping.

Friday - August 17th - Seven Hours & Twelve Minutes - Finished unwrapping, packing and baking the Crystal tube asset. Began forming / modelling Crystal panel asset and Wall stabiliser asset. Adds detail, chamfers, smoothing groups and cleans meshes. Unwrapped panels, starts unwrapping stabiliser asset.

Saturday - August 18th - Six Hours & Thirty Minutes - Finished unwrapping Wall stabiliser asset, edited wall asset form again, added bake floaters. Did some colour palette research, base coloured Crystal tube asset to test.

Sunday - August 19th - Seven Hours & Twenty Eight Minutes - Blog entry updating, all entries past week 03, daily notes brought together to form blog entries.

Monday - August 20th - Eight Hours & Twelve Minutes - Base coloured most assets.

Tuesday - August 21st - Six Hours & Forty Seven Minutes - Wrote out reflective report, base coloured ceiling panel.

Total time spent this week - 50 Hours and 32 Minutes.

Overview:

The week ahead will consist of me pulling together at minimum base colours for the assets involved in the scene, while making sure that the assets added from this point are needed to make the scene work the way intended, or as extras once things such as texturing have been accomplished. Closer to the deadline the environment progress will have to be dropped, as things such as the reflective report and breakdown cards will have to be created. I'm unsure as to what state my environment will be submitted in, but regardless of its state it would be an incorrect and inefficient move for me to neglect 20 percent of the mark ignoring these blog entries and the reflective report for the sake of adding more to my scene which is only 40 percent, of 60 percent of my mark. The same applies to the break down sheets, even though the environment will be unfinished, there is a large chunk of the marks being given for the break down sheets. I understand that the breakdown sheet quality totally depends on the finished product, but at this point I have to think about the grade given to me, as I can continue to improve the environment after the deadline in my own time.

Wednesday / August 15th :

From the prior weeks entry, I finished off unwrapping the rest of the Cursed container asset and brought it across to the Marmoset scene to take it's place in filling out the environment and making sure the baked detail came through properly. I also decided to come back to the ceiling panel with some new found knowledge, I remembered that I had been shown before a way to edit verts with a mode on that attempts to keep the UV's preserved. It took me some time to remember where the tick box was, but eventually with the help of another student who knew where it was, I was able to comfortably edit the individual planks to fit the outer panel, yet keep the stacked UV's within one another. This was tested in the Marmoset scene was came out much better than expected, although a simple asset, the floater detail really brings together the asset. The next large gap in the scene, and also a focal point of one side of the environment was the tubes containing the crystals on the left hand wall. Once again, these assets were to be completed before the crystals in the case of needing to block off the view of inside the tubes due to time constraints. Most of the detailing was accomplished before the end of the day.

Thursday / August 16th :

A lot of the details had been solidified the day beforehand, but a few edits were made before approaching the next stage. Mainly, what to place upon the panels near the bottom was the main contender, but due to time and to avoid me spending uneeded time upon this asset, I brought across some of the maintenance panel assets and battery asset from other pieces. The usual chamfering and smoothing was done, although so far through the process I realised I needed an inner ring for the glass to read correctly. The same applied to the metal portion where the tube would open up, if viewed from the outside and taken note of, the viewer could spot that even if the outer tube opened, there was another glass circle inside that would not. This edit didn't take long, but it was something I overlooked due to wanting to advance quickly. I got so far through the unwrapping process before finishing for the day.

Friday / August 17th :

As always, I finished unwrapping, baking and packing the asset, and brought it across to view in the Marmoset scene. There were some intense smoothing fragmentation from where the smoothing groups had altered at some point during the process. This was fixed on the high poly, so that the smoothing groups edited there baked down onto the low poly to fix this issue. I debated between whether I should work on some of the upper level portions, but with time being so short, I came to terms with the fact that the upper level was not going to be a possibility, especially with the other submission pieces to accomplish. I focused on getting the pieces around the main crystal in place, even if the crystal wasn't formed in the end, that area would still have enough detail and interest in the environment. I began adding the extra detail needed for the surrounding Crystal Panel asset and Wall Stabiliser asset. The panels didn't need too many edits, while the Stabiliser wasn't grounded in the environment and required some additional detail such as wires, and attachment points. Both assets go through the chamfer, smoothing and optimisation stages together. The panel asset is unwrapped, and the stabiliser is partially unwrapped by the end of the night. These assets were quicker to get through due to the less complex forms involved when chamfering the edges.

Saturday / August 18th :

The day started off nice and smoothly by finishing the unwrapping stage for the Wall stabiliser asset. Both assets were placed together in the Marmoset Scene, and moved to the centre of the environment while the doorway in front of them doesn't have any opacity applied. These were packed pretty quickly due to not having any baked detail upon them, so the packing step wasn't as time consuming. The wall asset needed some attention again as I had to edit and stretch a portion above where the Crystal tubes were placed, so that the asset sat better in the environment and also made more sense. The floaters for the vents were also placed and baked down onto the wall. This meant that the wall was in a proper state to be textured alongside the other assets.

I had a rather large mental block considering the colour pallette of the scene. The reason I was so hesitant to texture most of my assets wasn't because I didn't believe I could accomplish what I needed, it was because of my lack of confidence in making a colour scheme that would work between the whole environment. I did a little research into colours that contrast between one another and what colours have what meanings associated with them. From early days of the project I knew I wanted the environment to have clean white / grey metals, with the other primary colour being purple. The only problem was is that I couldn't decide how much to use the purple to make use of it effectively, that and I was unsure of an accent colour to make use of.

After a little playing around in photoshop, I decided upon a blue of the same saturation and brightness as the purple. I originally started applying this to the wall asset, but found I wasn't really getting anywhere that was helping me. I decided to work on a compact asset like the Crystal tube. This went much better, and I got it to the stage where I had made use of the purple to draw lines and guide the eye, with dotted blues used in the emissive areas such as screens and one or two subtle stripes. This asset viewed quite nicely, but the next step was to try and make this coherent in the rest of the environment.

Sunday / August 19th :

So during the course of the project, I have been timing myself and jotting down small notes on my Hack'N'Plan board. These notes would consist of things such as, "18/07/2018 - 6 Hours & 23 Minutes - Door asset unwrapped, chamfered and baked. One hour of research on texturing.".

These allowed me to keep track of my progress in the instance that I didn't have time each week to update the blog. I thought instead of just leaving it all to the end and having to figure out what portions were done when, I could gather my selection of notes to bring together a coherent blog entry if not written up. This ended up being the approach I took, I was more focused and worried about the project progression, that I felt it better to make sure to keep track in a personal fashion to bring together at a later date, allowing me to focus on the task at hand. So today was spent working on most of the blog entries past week 03, so that they could all be placed into proper entries. Although the blogs were all placed up in a bundle, the actual keeping track of my progress has been done on my Hack'N'Plan. Keeping these things dated and brief in description has helped me to not create extra work for myself in the scenario of not being able to upload blog entries at earlier dates.

Monday / August 20th : In preparation for the hand in, I thought that some degree of colour would be needed to help push the vision that I originally intended for the scene. I spent a large portion of the day attempting to place the colours chosen in patterns or places that were consistent among all assets. The tube I had coloured the day before had too much of the colours that were meant to act as accents to the greys and whites. This however was helpful, as I could see that I was overdoing the use of my vibrant colours, and needed to use them sparingly to correctly draw the attention of the viewer. I applied base metal colours and vibrant coloured patches to all the assets that were in the Marmoset scene. This helped guide me into how to actually approach texturing each of the individual pieces seeing them together and working in unison. It also set in stone the fact that the colour palette I had chosen would work if the use of the saturated colours was contained.

Tuesday / August 21st : This day was spent working through the reflective report which had to be handed in alongside the project. My plan was to write out the areas I felt were most important to discuss, break them into manageable categories, and then order the categories to make sure that the flow of the report was consistent. The next step was to just type out whatever I felt was relevant in these areas regardless of the 1500 word count. This allowed me to write out points and pieces that were relevant without getting caught up in the specifics of the guidelines yet. Once this was accomplished, I read through the paragraphs, noting down what pieces sounded incorrect or had bad grammar and structuring. I opened another word document and copy and pasted the pieces I liked, while also editing as I went along to create my second draft. Around three quarters of the paper was reworded or written using this process. The last step was for me to read it again, but making sure to bundle or delete areas that I started repeating myself, make sure I didn't go on tangents to other topics of the paper in another area. And lastly, reading through slowly to see if I had added extra words and puffed out the text for no good reason to save space. This was accomplished by the evening in a fairly comfortable state. I spent the rest of the evening formatting the paper, adding a title, borders and such, before adding base colours to the ceiling asset to prepare for texturing the next day.

Week Conclusion:

By the end of this week i'm very panicked, I understand at this point that I'm not going to be finished by a long shot because of my choices during the project. But this week was an attempt to prepare myself to do whatever I can in the remaining time. Writing out the blog entries and doing the paper a few days early is so that I can solely focus on getting as much done as possible for the Breakdown sheets, and the actual hand in of the scene itself. Disappointment keeps welling up inside myself, and pausing my progress briefly, but for the last week or so I knew that this was the kind of state the scene would end up being in. All I can do is keep doing work to add more and more to my submission. My goal is hand everything in to some degree, and to show a handful of assets that can display what this scene could have been with more time available to me, or better planning.