CAGD 495 - Advance Production

 

Sprint 1

I’m a 3D artist. This kick off and sprint was shorter for me in my experience with other sprints. Usually I think they are the same amount of time between each other, but this one was a little shorter for me. I am not sure if it is because I have never been on a dev team bigger than just 3 people, but to try to organize everyone and having more people with the same job as you is weird for me. I think this may have been the reason why it felt shorter. I think this would become the norm when working in a more professional environment for now on, so it is a good experience to have. 

But letting aside my feelings on rewarding bigger or smaller teams; to my work.

The kickoff was fun to have. A lot of people giving their ideas on how to make the different levels, animation, models and more made it easier to have ideas for future models for me. I was in charge of doing the 3 main keys that the player would need to  be able to escape the pie factory in the game. At first I was not sure what to make of them since it is something so simple as a key. After talking with my lead designer, we came up with the idea of having them be more creepy looking to fit with the aesthetics of the game, which would be a horror game. This allowed me to have a lot of fun with the concept art. 

First I gathered all my reference images that I was going to use to create the keys. I decided to make each key different from the other one to make it more obvious that they are for different locks. With the concept art, I experimented with creepy concepts like severed fingers and eyeballs. I incorporated them like they were shoved by force into the key, to make it more demon-like activity from Perry’s part. And for the last one I decided to do a key that represented Perry’s love for pies, which ended up looking like a keepsake for a pie.

After receiving the approval of the concept art, I started modeling. The pie and eyeball keys were not a problem at all, since they had pretty simple shapes. On the other hand, the finger key was more of a challenge to make, since I had never done fingers before and they had more natural/irregular shapes than the other two. This took me longer than what I expected to do, but the results were good in my opinion.

But then, a tragedy happened. When I wanted to export the models for texturing, Maya decided to act up and denied my access to it. My certification was verified but it acted like it was not activated. This set me behind by a lot, not only in this class, but the rest of my classes too. In the end, I was able to solve the problem with the Autodesk customer support, but it still made me get behind by a lot. To compensate, this sprint I hope to be able to work a lot more and, now that I also have a new computer, I hope to be able to work faster without any issues. 

For the next sprint, I’ll finish the UV sets and textures for the keys, as well as starting with the concept art for the Ouija board and its respective 3D model. I just hope to not get any more technical problems like this sprint again, since that could affect not only me, but my team members too.