Reflective response

This trimester was very tough for me. Being exposed to a major group project, I learned the seriousness of putting in your weight and team effort. The project will only come together if everyone is putting in honest hours into the project.

At the beginning of the project in weeks three and four I started modelling the character and wasn't taking it very seriously. It was by the beginning of week five I submitted a sub standard mesh to the team that didn’t really follow the art style of the characters model sheets. What made it worse was that there were technical issues were it complained about faces with zero geometry area and turning on subD preview crashed maya. This made it difficult to skin the character and so the only thing the team was able to do was create the skeleton of the mesh without skinning it. My team then gave me another job and I thought that this would be the chance to redeem myself but sadly there were technical issues again and it was my fault. I created 12 blendshapes sculpting different facial poses in zbrush for the team to use. Having deleted 1 edge loop on 8 of the blendshapes screwed us over and so I learned that my actions and participation had a major impact on the team.

It's fair to say that by week 6 I lost allot of ‘cool points’ from the team.

Week 7 I had the KPI meeting and the producer gave me the task of remodeling the character and to submit it by next Wednesday(week 8). The mesh had to show a stronger relationship with the characters model sheets and had to contain better topology then the last mesh. It also needed more cloth tapering. To be safe I modeled without subD preview and only work with soft/hard edges. If the meshes requirements were not delivered by Wednesday week 8 then I was going to be fired by the executive producer.What I did to save myself was do some research on low poly characters specifically characters who had similar shirts and share with everyone on slack my plan of attack. I made sure I was having proper communication with the director while working on this to lock in any decisions on its aesthetic. (His micromanaging saved me and I thank him for that)

The mistake I made with my first character was that I did minimal research on low poly characters and there was a lack of testing. This is was also the first time I came across the issues of zera face area and subD preview crashing maya. I only thought of these issues as trivial and I didn’t consider how it would effect my teammates. Even when I completed the blendshapes I didn’t bother to test each one before handing them over.

Whenever modelling or doing any kind of 3D art I need to know what the assets I create are going to be used for. Not every 3D asset I create is going to be used as still life. There will be assets I create which will be animated and I need to make sure everything works for them, outliner is clean and there are no technical issues before handing over.Later down the track of the major project I slowly started gaining back my cool points as I was developing still assets in zbrush for my team to implement into their scenes. Not all the zbrush assets I made were used in the short film but I had a lot of fun learning zbrush and finding out good methodologies to be used later which is what happened. Having shown my team my research and development in zbrush they gave me the responsibility of sculpting a monster for one of the scenes. So I did a base low poly sculpt in zbrush and then imported the mesh to mudbox for texturing. It was actually the texturing in mudbox which made it more detailed because I painted bump map onto the sculpt. 

Throughout this project I did many different tasks and half the tasks I did were outside my speciality. I was texturing, Base matte painting (which I struggled in) and compositing. I was glad to be an extra pairs of hands for areas that weren’t my speciality. We didn’t have much time left so I did what I could to help.

As a 3D artist I am aiming for photoreal rendering in my future career so I’d be looking at Ray Tracing instead of NPR. But this trimester I had to work with a project that was not my style and we were using npr rendering and this is not the field I’m aiming for. Even though this project was not my style I still had a job to do and I made sure I did what I could to not only to redeem myself but to also have initiative helping produce something beautiful for the team. When working in studios I don’t doubt I will be asked to do tasks that are outside my of department or even my comfort zone.