Personal review of my first year

Its weird to think that my first year is coming to an end. It seems to have flown by. Fighting through the loads of work has had results though. At times it felt as though I was making no progress but now I can really see how much I have improved. And this was due to some of the great curriculum.

In the first term I was taught basic skills that during my time at sixth form was never once explained to me. Perspective basics, rendering techniques and composition. Silly stuff like that I shouldn't use HB pencils for rendering even though in sixth form I was specifically told to use them and nothing else. I have issues with contrast in my work and often I'm too afraid to commit to tone, but I'm slowly gaining confidence in my rendering and improving my work.

My favourite projects were the ones where we had to go out and draw. It meant I was having to leave and go out. When I'm stuck in my room I often find distractions but when I'm out drawing I'm able to concentrate for much longer periods and get a lot more work done and improve faster. I really enjoyed the museum rendering projects. As one we were indoors, drawing interesting things though surrounded by noisy children it was a very memorable project. All the random times we had to go out and draw and strangers would ask us about our work, some strangers being stranger than others but all these experiences are great memories that i likely would not have experienced on any other course.

Some of the weirdest things I saw was at the archway with film crews and models showing up and confusing me.

Yet some of the more difficult things for me to try and do was to design. I know its silly. I'm trying to be a designer and to be able to create great scenes, yet when it came to designing a vehicle or character based off a real person I quickly went off route and didn't know where to take it exactly. The scope was so broad that I could have designed almost anything I wanted but this made me waste time trying to work out so many possibilities, in which case I would have preferred to have more restrictions placed upon me. This improved however later in the year where we were given the coral reef character and 70s character which were much more specific.

It was difficult to design a character as I had no idea how to tweak them to make them interesting

The first term of game production also started really well. Difficult as we were dropped into the deep end but it was a great learning curve. As the weeks progressed I was able to look at past work and see where I was making mistakes and how to correct them. Yet in the later terms there were certain techniques such as baking normal's using high poly models and using Z brush to create them. I still have no idea how to do this and really want to learn how to but have been given no opportunity or optional extra blackboard pdf tutorials that might cover it. 

Another project I enjoyed but found difficult because of a lack of tutorials was creating a scene in UDK. With only an introduction on how to import assets and turn them into packages we were then left to our own devices. I got very confused with opening my levels as I was always greeted with error messages as it could not find the packages and all my work wouldn't show up. Yet all I needed to do was import my packages before opening the level but I wasn't told this and was left stranded for a week until I could get help. So I wish we could have had more UDK tutorials on making terrains and how to navigate and save our levels and packages correctly. And I have no idea what baking lighting is.

I had so many issues with UDK and it was often silly mistakes like here I just hadn't saved the material.

Yet using UDK was a great project. It allowed us to look over our work so far and see how good / bad it was in a game engine and how specular and bump maps can really make a difference on an asset. 

Lastly I'm really glad we were given the opportunity to do presentations as I personally don't enjoy doing them so the practice is very useful even though I dread doing them. Supposedly I'm getting better at them so practice makes ... me less likely to have a panic attacks.

So its been a great year on the course and I think I have improved a great deal. I'm still struggling with my 3D and certain elements of my visual design but I plan on practicing over the summer and improving for next year. A lot of things have changed for me over the past year so I'm very glad for this course keeping me looking forward and helping me improve exponentially.