The Day Before Hand-In Reflection

In this project I have faced a few problems but have been able to overcome all of them, I have learnt a lot of new skills and how to do different things on UDK and 3D Studio Max. Overall I have enjoyed this project but felt that it was a bit too long near the end and started to get a bit fed up of it! Thankfully I had chosen a topic that I have always been interested in, so even in my breaks from work I was watching films and tv dramas that were set in manor houses so could be classed as research.

This project has literally taken over my life for the past few months, resulting in me rarely leaving the house, so I think that after I have handed this in (and celebrated with my classmates) I will be living in the gym, but my main focus will be finding a job! I have already been working on my CV, covering letter and portfolio website to build more of a professional image, but I will put a lot more focus into these and finding a job will be my job for the moment.

I am really looking forward to my upcoming graduation, I am very hopeful that I will get a good degree at the end of this because I feel that I have learnt a massive amount in such a small amount of time. Considering that before I joined this course, I had never touched a 3D program and had very limited Photoshop skills, I feel that what I can create now is actually unbelievable and has definitely made me grow as a person. Initially I never wanted to go to university but after contacting a few games companies, and realising that making games wasn’t just a job that you could learn from shadowing someone in the industry, or having a few weeks of unpaid tea making, I hesitantly joined university not knowing how much there was to be learnt. (Also the prospect of the raised uni fees pushed me in the right direction!)

At the end of this course I am happy that I came to university, I have learnt so many new skills and more about the games industry, also living away from my parents home for a few years has made me more of an adult, and made my confidence grow.

I have gone from a shy and lonely teenager with a few art skills, to a determined, hard-working and industry minded adult with a great knowledge of building 3D games and I cannot wait to get a job!

Comments

Final Major Project [Post 13] ~ Pretty Glowy Things

This week I have mainly just been finishing off everything and making sure everything looks good, I redid the walls in the hall to be more efficient, and made a new texture for the lower part of the walls. Every time I looked at the brickwork on the hall walls I just felt that it never really looked right, I was happy with the normal and specular but not the diffuse. I painted over my diffuse to make it less saturated and more of a brown colour rather than grey. This has made the room feel a lot warmer in my opinion and it compliments the new wallpaper in the seated area quite nicely. I am quite happy with this room now, but I feel that maybe it needs more things in it to make it less empty. I have been researching a lot about animating a glowy material for my logs and embers in the fireplaces and I finally found a solution. Most of the techniques I found previously, required a matinee animation and I thought that there must be a different way to do this, as I have seen...

Final Major Project [Post 11] ~ Working Locks and Melting Brains

I finally found a way to get my library door/key to work correctly, it took a lot of researching and random testing but it finally has the desired effect! Now the player can approach the library door, it wont open but will display [Door Locked] on screen, until the player gets the key. The key is in one of the drawers in the dining room that open when you get near. I had a problem here with the key in the drawer, if the player didn’t pick up the key once the drawer had been open and then closed again, the key would stay floating and clipping through the front of the drawer. I tried a few ways of fixing this but the more I did to it, the worse it got (key was now reappearing and floating in place when player had collected key, secondary key would not go away.) So I took a small break, watched a brain-melting episode of Jeremy Kyle and then came back to the problem, for some reason I managed to fix it straight away, its like all of a sudden it made sense to me. It is very importan...

Rooftop Project ~ Post 2

How the Level Was Made (Continued): I made a springy chicken ride that I wanted to be interactive; I struggled quite a lot with finding the correct thing to search Google for to make this work. All I want it to do is I want the base to stay stationary on the floor and the chicken to move on the spring when the player walks into it or tries to jump on it. I ended up using the InterativeFoliageActor which worked very well apart from the base also springed around all over the place through the floor, and the collision on the chicken had disappeared, so the player can just walk straight through it. I fixed this problem simply by deleting the base off the chicken mesh, and making a separate base with an invisible barrier collision going up through the chicken mesh. After doing some research on what playground items would be around In Tudor times I leant that the only fun past time they actually had was things like skittles and hoopla, so I added some skittles and a ball made of pigskin....

Maffy Lees ~ Third Year

Search This Blog