Week Uno - Asset Swappet

Weekly blog updates! This is the first of many, 30 if I remember correctly. I'm going to be updating this every week if all goes to plan.

So this was the first week back. Scary times. But I'm very happy with the week, its been good. A new year complete with brand new time tables and brand new techniques. Take for example, PBR. Now, finding out about PBR I was terrified. Physically Based Rending. Hell, does that sound scary. But in actual fact, it wasn't scary at all.

We were given an Asset Swap project to test out this new-fangled PBR technique. It also was made to test our group working skills as it is as far as I can remember our first group projects ever for Game Art. Which means working with people, and people suck.

It didn't actually suck though. It was kinda fun. Basically it's a relay race. Without the race. One person designs an object, next person makes it then the next unwraps it and it keeps on going. Admittedly our group communication was WAY off so we ended up doing alot more stuff ourselves, but honestly thats what this project was for. It gave us all a chance to really learn how we would act in a group, and now I think (or hope) that everyone has a better idea on how to work as a group effectively for this kind of project.

This is the table I concepted, for our viking scene. Its not the best in the world but ended up cool in the end.

PBR, was awesome. Its actually far easier than the old ways with confusing specular maps! I'm a big fan of it. This combined with the brand new Unreal Engine 4 makes Oli a happy Oli. Its so fun and everything works in an easy and actually logical way! I only ever had one issue building up the scene and I could fix it with logic instead of crazy blood magic rituals like the last UDK. The only annoying part was trying to get all the parts of the scene together. That had me slightly salty. Some voices were raised to encourage working. Maybe I should invest in a whip.

And then theres the Film Room Project. Given the task to take a scene from a movie and make it in 3D! Well eventually. We haven't got there yet. Right now we're still struggling with scenes. We were very fond of Django Unchained but as we were informed. Its brown. And boring. And my heart died alittle that day. 5 hours of work wasted on a movie we wont use!

 But I dont mind. I learnt alot while doing that work, and really thats what matters. Honestly I think this has been a good week. The Asset Swap was a great warm up back into working. I'm also a huge fan of this new approach where all of the modules are joined together. This makes me happy, and also makes everything far easier to organize and comprehend. Which is always good.