Year 2 - Week 11 - January 9th 2012 - 13th

This week counts as a part of the last semester, so there’s not really too much to say. Over the Christmas break I had drawn myself for our self portrait project. I said at the start of the year I wanted to get better at drawing the human figure, I spent quite a bit of time on my portrait but I thought it turned out really well, maybe the best piece of work I’ve ever produced.

Me.

Looking at skin tones and colours I layered over and over using the peachy/orangey and red colours of my face. Instead of using black and white to make things look darker and brighter, I’m well into the habit of using darker tones of colours to bring out the darker and lighter areas. I used this to create pixel density to the image, especially on the nose, hair and eyes in particular. I used this project opportunity to eliminate all defects on my face just before I say it can be improved because there are details on my face that I know are there but didn’t want to add them in. Overall I’m really happy with the outcome.

Group project teams have been announced this week. A lot of the overall level design seems to have been decided upon already. The idea of having a huge tree in the middle seems like a cool idea but I don’t want anything to do with it… I just cannot stand trees. I had totally different ideas about the project; a lot was decided without me and I want to be either a game designer or level designer but the problem is I don’t want to cause arguments and have the group fall apart, so I’m just trying to take in on the chin with whatever is suggested but it would have been nice to have taken a lead role possibly and have more of my own ideas taken into account (though there is still time as its early days, I’m not complaining). So far actually I’ve put together a few images of what the final thing could look like. We’ve so far painted over some of the photos we’ve taken to get some ideas flowing and to help generate more.

So far we’ve made an overhead view of the building plans and put together a plan of starting the level and ending the level, we’ve also one some white boxing for a more clearer view on how we should go about modelling certain things. I’ve also compiled an asset list. Communication is important within this project so we’ve set up groups on FaceBook and another blog specifically for the project.

This for me is the main event of the course or the ‘golden age’ if you like; this is the one thing I’ve been looking forward to the most since I first heard about it, it’s really exciting but its going to be a lot of hard work, can’t wait to get going properly next week.

Had to cut this down from 938 triangles.