Personal Review of Second Year

Its almost the end of my second year and its time to start thinking about if my time at university is worth it. University is an institution made to educate people on more specific topics which will allow them to get jobs in specific fields. This can be things like medicine and law which are not taught at an adequate level at sixth form, college or secondary school. However this education comes at a price, for me its £9000 a year and living costs to boot. In the past religion was one of the main driving forces of universities but today its money. This means that in some cases certain courses which are successful at a university are more financed than others because they gather larger numbers of students which in turn bring money to the university.

From my University education I expect certain things, such as adequate education in the correct fields, lab equipment and lectures which teach me the necessary skills to use the equipment and because I am doing an art course I require areas where I can draw and enhance my abilities in art. Honestly my course has offered all the things to me, more so this year with special studios for practicing digital art, life drawing studios, dual screen computer labs and really good lecturers. So if I have a similar environment next year n my course I think I will have got a lot out of my 3 years at university.

Now to how my year has gone with all the new equipment and lecturers. Honestly I think its gone well more so in game production than in Visual design however. This is probably because I still don't feel confident with digital art and this year has concentrated heavily on it. I have made progress in improving however but over the next few weeks until my hand in I am going to be re doing some of my projects in order to improve them. So I will be making another blog post on how that goes. But for the moment my visual design is a bit bad, but on the good side my 3d is going a lot better and a struggles a bit last year with it.

So I think because I struggled with certain things last year like texturing and hiding seam lines this year I have tried to master it. A project I had a lot of fun doing was the mortal engines character as I got to experiment and learn different ways of texturing. I used new programs like Z brush and Marvelous Designer to experiment with creating projection maps. Of which Z brush ended up being the more useful tool.  Yet using projection maps in turn caused issues with seam lines which I had to hand paint out.

I still made errors.. hands and feet are a little small... just a little 

We also got given an extra project to texture and make some assets for a captains desk. Though at first the project irritated me as it seemed badly made, I now appreciate it as it was fun to just have a texturing based project and to work more with material definition. This later assisted me in my group project.

So then we had the group project which as well as being infuriating, was a great learning experience. Due to a lack of confirmation with what the actual topic of the competition was, our group was not sure exactly where we wanted to spearhead the project. A couple of us in the first week made good progress on a pristine Cathedral idea which would have now fitted better with the competition but certain people in the group managed to change the project to be about Perfume and wasting a week of concepts. Somehow mainly due to a really good teammate we managed to pull off the Perfume idea really well. Not only that but recently it was even showcased on the CryDev website. 

The group project has been great, but has also completely sidetracked me from my visual design to a point now where I am worried if I can catch up by the deadline. I was also sidetracked by an internship opportunity which I unfortunately failed to get, but it allowed me to create a CV and a quick portfolio. I feel like I have had a much more successful year with my 3d work. This was also helped with the larger number of lecturers to teach us, especially with engine work as not all the lecturers could teach it but some of the new staff could. Yet even though my digital work hasn't been very successful the life drawing classes have been much more tutored this year and we are learning more of the principles and tricks to life drawing which has helped a great deal. This year has also allowed me to work out that I want to try and become an environment artist. So heres hoping that next year will be as educative as this one. 

Life changing or career building

What skills are really useful to graduates once they are out in industry? Just the necessary skills that they would use in industry or other skills like communication?
 There is always however the possibility to teach both or allow for experiential learning where individuals can gain certain "soft skills". For example team work skills can be enhanced by placing students in situations where they must work in groups to achieve an end goal. In this way students could be continuing studies they need to learn for industry whilst also gaining other skills. Some courses don't do this, but the students can have similar experiences if they joined university societies, especially sport societies as they can often require teamwork and communication.

This could also depend on the working environments the student would be going into however and to what skills they would possibly need most. Would they be having to do presentations often, or simply working in an office and sending emails or talking to patients and customers often. The courses should understand the roles that the students will have to go into and accommodate the course accordingly.

For a game artist a good knowledge of the software and artistic skill is crucial, no amazing teamwork and presentation skills would get you the job. Though they would be useful, they are needed with the technical skills of the trade. Yet companies won't just want a bunch of clones who can do the job, those that exceed expectations and have done extra things in their spare times are more valued. So courses need to balance out how to teach the trade whilst giving the students enough opportunities to learn other skills that will assists them. I get the opportunity to go to many different places to draw, opportunities to present my work to others and have had the chance to work in a group project, all which are experiences that I find very valuable.

The issue of that the technical skills I am learning could possibly be outdated by the time I entered industry isn't a large worry. The 3d technology has not changed much other than that now the consoles can handle higher poly assets and larger textures. The basic skills of using programs like 3ds Max are crucial and can be applied to other software's which the companies might use. Artistic skills as well have only changed to use digital media more in order to create art faster the basic ways of teaching it don't need to change drastically.

The main issue that may face students trying to find a job after the course is their own knowledge and skills and if they are good enough to compete with the thousand of other graduates leaving their similar courses. If their courses have given them the skills they need and they themselves have gone out of their way and perfected their skills and have good social skills they have all the capabilities of making it into industry. It is not just the course but the students own determination to succeed is what would determine if the student can make it.

Creativity, the talent myth or craft

The definition of Creativity is "the ability to transcend ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, ect." It is unknown if some people are born with more creativity than others but there is correlations within parts of the brains having stronger connections to one another and those individuals being more creative. These being the frontal lobes (responsible for idea generation) and temporal lobes (responsible for evaluating and editing ideas). Furthermore there is a pattern of creative people being more likely to have mood disorders like depression and bipolar disorder and that schizophrenic individuals are often more creative. Famous painter Vincent Van Gough is suspected to have been suffering from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder which backed up the theory of creative individuals being more likely to suffer from these conditions. 

Creativity is an essential skill in most fields including things such as engineering and business. It is believed a variety of elements can affect creativity. One of which is that the person has creative freedom and freedom in their lifestyle and don't have to conform to certain ideas and can create their own. Another is to have exploratory nature where an individual possibly more so at a young age will go out and explore areas and experience new things. Autonomy is another good attribute to have probably because the person will willingly go out of there way to try and create things.

For me creativity is something that can be nurtured, more so at a young age where we are not to stuck in our ways. Travelling is a great thing to experience and people should probably visit more countries and places than they would usually do rather than the seaside towns where just go and get drunk for a week. 

A good understanding of the natural world would also be very beneficial as natures designs are the best and many can take inspiration and knowledge from that. As fora more artistic stand point I think reading more books can be beneficial as it allows the brain to create its own imagery.  

There are cases of young geniuses. In some cases they can be autistic and in turn will learn there preferred skill more quickly. Supposedly a lot of the greatest minds were partially autistic and this allowed them to excel in their fields. But for most great artists they are taught from a young age. Even with the recent case of Kieron Williamson is his talent just brought on by himself or has he been tutored. From what I can tell he has been allowed to draw and paint much more than most children his age and has been tutored by a local artist. Not only that he visited beautiful places like Cornwall to gain inspiration which helps his creativity. He still makes mistakes in his work and due to his young age has possibly been over hyped.

Creativity to me is something that can be nurtured and crafted. Anyone can become a great artist or musician it just takes hard work but sometimes people are hindered by their creative level and that is why there are some people that are better than others.  

Gaming Industry: Generalist or Specialist

So for the past year and a bit I've been learning how to use 3ds Max, import into engine, texture, rig and at the same time retaining and enhancing my drawing skills with life drawing and concepting designs. How does this help me get a job in Industry however well....

At the moment there is a large mobile gaming market which has allowed many small gaming companies to start up. These companies only hire a small amount of staff and they often hire freelance artists and modelers during certain parts of development to make up for skill shortages in their staff. But staff for a mobile game company needs to have a diverse set of skills so staff have to be able to complete multiple tasks. This means that being able to model, texture, rig, animate and code the characters movements would be extremely useful for the company than someone who can just model characters extremely well. Coding however isn't something that we particularly get taught but could be a very useful skill to have when going into a small company as you could become very useful. Another good way to apply for a position in a small company is to have made a game yourself in your free time. It helps show that you can do multiple tasks and understand what you need to do for a mobile game.


















Their is also a demand currently for UI (user interface) designers. This is because a lot of mobile games need an interface that is easy to navigate and isn't to clunky. A lot of consideration has to be put into account when designing the interface such as the size of the screen they would be using and how everything should be spaced out correctly. Even things such as the colour of certain buttons or text to make things clearer. Its a job not many people would consider specializing in but one that is currently very in demand.













However the opposite is often needed if your working for a large scale company. You would need to be proficient in one role, this could be concept art, modelling foliage, modelling character or buildings. This I believe is because it helps the larger companies manage there workers and each of there roles and tasks efficiently to reach there deadlines. For a role like concept artist or character designer, you must be extremely good at it and fast and efficient. This is because they only hire a small number of these people and only hire the best so if your starting out and expecting to become one of these roles, possibly re-think that decision as you will have to be one of the best starting out which is very unlikely.

More promising roles are that of environment artists as large scale games obviously have to make large numbers of assets and this means they will need to hire larger numbers of people to create them. In this way there are more positions available and you would be more likely to be employed. This is what I am considering trying to work towards as I have been enjoying environment work and creating assets for scenes.

There are of course also the programming people and even those that program the engines that the game runs in. Other roles even include special effects artists and lighting artists. If there is often something you enjoy doing and are good at you can find a role that will fit you well. You like making cars? How about vehicle designer. Like making trees? You could be assigned to create most of the trees for the game. There is quite a lot of flexibility in what you can do, but its having the necessary skills and abilities to be able to get the job you want.

Interaction Design

The way we play games has dramatically changed over the past few years to incorporate many more features. But are they really necessary or just a gimmick to make us buy there consoles?
An example would be the virtual boy, a console made to fill in the gap between the N64 being released. It was a virtual reality headset with a controller. It used two screens each for one eye to simulate a 3d effect. For the time it was new and innovative yet it was poorly designed with it being very difficult to place the virtual boy in a comfortable position and it would cause eye strain and headaches. Due to its bad design and lack of good games for it caused it to be one of Nintendo's worse consoles. Yet today there is new hope for virtual reality in the Oculus Rift. So far its received a reasonably good response and its still under development, though there are still complaints of nausea and headaches which may be unavoidable. It uses a similar interface to the virtual boy with a headset and then it can be attached to controllers to move but they are also developing a walking system where players are placed in a harness and can walk in their virtual reality.

 Though a story that captivated me recently about it was of a terminal bedridden cancer sufferer using it to experience visiting places she had always wanted to with the Oculus Rift. It is a great new way of using gaming technology and just shows that this technology could have lots of uses for many different people.

In recent years motion controllers and detectors were used in most consoles after the success of the wii. Motion controls allowed players to feel more immersed as there actions were directly affecting the game in a sense so players felt like they were wielding swords or guns instead of just the controller.

As for handheld consoles a feature I found quite interactive was the voice recognition on the Nintendo DS. My first game for this console was nintendogs where voice commands are quite important and it made the experience much more fun because of it, though infuriating at times with how picky the voice recognition is. In other games you could also blow into the microphone and it would blow objects in the game which was also a fun feature. Today both the PS4 and Xbox One make use of voice commands for many of the games menus, simply turning the console on and off is a simple voice command... and so is being transported to the search engine Bing. 

With mobile and tablet gaming becoming increasingly popular the use of touch screen capabilities has allowed for a diverse variety of games, from fruit ninja to angry birds. The mobile market has also allowed for many more smaller companies to make games as they don't need to be as complex and are smaller as the technology they run on is relatively limiting. For these games its almost a step back graphically but there games need to be more innovative to stand out in the mobile market.

Or not in some cases, just being featured on a certain you tubers channel can make a hit.

Another feature that is also quite popular at the moment is the "share" button function on the PS4 controller, allowing players to quickly share their gaming experiences onto the internet. Other systems have similar features like the Wii U allowing you to leave comments in game and they will pop up on other peoples games when they play through them. The main components of most gaming devices haven't changed much however with the same use of analog sticks, buttons and triggers but with the future of possible virtual reality this might change back to more motion controllers. 

Game Engines

For the past few months I have been working with the most recent version of cry engine, and to be honest I love it. Though importing assets can be quite complicated at first and it just doesn't make sense sometimes why objects don't seem to be importing, I quickly figured out efficient ways to import objects. Once in the engine I found it very easy to work out the interface and enjoyed that you can also play and edit their example maps to show you what you can actually achieve.

It has some clever terrain modifiers though I haven't truly had enough time to experiment the extent of what it possible with them. I was however able to create a randomly generated island. Yet I struggled to texture the terrain correctly as my textures would be far too large on the terrain and have been unable to work out how to scale my textures to the correct size to work. Though I have seen on video tutorial that the textures can blend very seamlessly and create very realistic terrains.











Of course I have also been using UDK this year but I still struggles to use the engine. I have trouble trying to compile my materials and I still don't know how to make my alphas semi transparent. It is also slightly more limiting with its lighting conditions from what I can tell unlike with CryEngine where date, time and location of the sun can be modified. However I find editing the terrain easier in UDK though some of the foliage features won't include collision within trees and other foliage that may require it. But here is a quick example of one of my assets in CryEngine and then in UDK.

        CryEngine screenshot                                                      UDK screenshot

Within UDK the normals became very strong from far away and would only render to a more realistic degree when the player is closer to the building. This gave the bricks and windows a very "pudgy" look which I didn't like and due to the complicated material editor I couldn't work out a way to fix it. Furthermore I was unable to make glossiness work as it would make things turn unusual colours and look wrong. 

The CryEngine screenshot feels a lot cleaner and closer resembles my original model. The normals work subtly and the added bonus of being able to customize my materials in engine by adjusting their specular, gloss levels and even the overall colours of the texture sheet makes using the engine very fun. 

For example here is another of my assets. On the left is it with its original unedited texture in generic lighting, whilst the screenshot on the right is with the colours tweaked to a more orange hue to fit in better with the surrounding buildings and with spot lights close to the building which help to show the normals on the building. This feature in CryEngine is so useful and means editing textures to work better in the scene is so much easier than having to redo them and re-import them into the engine. 

UDK has a much more editable shader technology in comparison to CryEngine and depending on what you want to create could determine what engine you will want to use. But for the time being I'm much more comfortable using Cry Engine.

Just look at some of the pretty lighting you can do

Sound of Games

Sound in games is integral. It helps the player understand the situation they might be in and can be used to add suspense. Space Invaders; one of the first games to use music; even had its music increase in tempo as you progressed in levels to help show the heightened difficulty. Since then video game music has progressed soundtracks of a similar level to that of films. But even with the limitations of the consoles games still created iconic music scores. By the 1980's music soundtracks had progressed significantly with individual levels having different music instead of the whole game consisting of one repeating track. Game soundtracks have also been popular since the mid 1980's in Japan but after the success of Final Fantasy, soundtracks began to gain a more global popularity.

Games such as The legend of Zelda: Ocarina of time allowed players to use an ocarina to use melodies which would have effects in the world. It was a very clever idea for the time and was a great example of ways in which music could be used in games. Innovative Rhythm games like Vib-Ribbon even created levels based around music you enjoy by reading CDs you enter into the game. And today Symphony uses your music library to create mini shooting levels. More commonly games such as Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero are extremely popular rhythm based games.

Composers will take the central themes of the game into account when creating the soundtrack. For example, Grant Kirkhope who worked on the soundtrack of the first two Banjo Kazooie games Based many of the melodies around the tri-tone, the furthest apart two notes can be in an attempt to highlight the difference in personality between the characters Banjo and Kazooie. He's been quoted saying "I ended up going mad with that idea and using it everywhere."

By the PlayStation 1 era, games were well known to have background music as a standard feature. Therefore for some horror games a lack of music/sound in certain areas of the games could be used to cause discomfort in a key story point of the game. This helped highlight a feeling of alienation and isolation to unsettle the player for upcoming events in the game to catch them off guard.

Today with the latest generation of consoles, games can produce much more realistic and convincing sounds allowing the player to become far more immersed in the game. This allowed things such as voice acting. Before there wasn't enough memory available to have voiced characters but now most big titles have voice acting in all parts. The game La Noire even uses voice acting and reading characters expression as part of its main game mechanic which would have been much more difficult in the past. The introduction to voice acting has allowed for much more cinematic games that can gain a great response.