The First Semester - Brief project reflection

Well end of the first semester and what better time to reflect on the 2 projects we were assigned than now.

The first project being the rooftop, my initial reaction to the brief was quite shocked. 20,000 triangles was a tight budget so realistically i should have gone for a format that was better suited to such a low amount like Wii or psp but nooo i thought 'ah what the hell make it Xbox 360 it will be a nice challenge'... I can tell you know that it really really was.

The first obstacle i hit was the piping as i knew this would take up allot of valuable triangles, so i addressed it by using a Lego style system and creating higher poly ends for the pipes to give the impression that the rest of them were allot rounder than they are. Even with this the sheer amount of piping on the rooftop was to much so i did have to make alterations from the reference just so it would make some sense.



I had other issues and had to try my best to get
the assets the lowest i could and bake the detail on. One of the biggest problems i had was the dam water pumps which you can see in the the picture the left. Other than this everything else was relatively straight forward, sure it all needed to be monitored but for the most part it was a breeze.

This still isn't 100% finished as i need to add some polishing touches such as fixing seams and adding some decals which i have factored into my texture budget but its almost there

.
The second project was a choice between doing either a sculpt or a vehicle of your choice. Id already been playing around with Zbrush previously and had made a sculpt of Winston Churchill's head so i was more or less fed up of that sort so i chose to make a vehicle. But that wasn't the only reason! I also knew that it was pretty much to me like kryptonite was to superman! I hated modelling cars and planes it just really was my thing so i thought what better way to improve than by taking a gamble on my grades.

If i struggled id have got a bad grade in what is a very important year, this pushed me to better myself in this area and to succeed i needed to make something that i knew i would enjoy making and at first i chose the Honda Civic because its my favourite car and overall its a bit weird, that was until i seen what Amy was doing and from the moment i seen the Wallace and Gromit bike i thought wow what an awesome idea so with her permission i stole the idea but instead made their car.

Amy had a fantastic book which was really a joke book as it was the Haynes manual for Wallace's inventions but it had everything in it that i needed. The budget was 9000 which i actually thought was bang on to create something really nice yet sensible and enough that i could actually try and do the car justice.

So the car is more or less finished just a few polishing bits, the destroyed one is still in the shop having work done but its not far off i guess here's a screenshot of it in unreal. I plan on putting the hierarchy in it over the next week or so so it will be drivable in time for hand in :-).

All i can say is i have thoroughly enjoyed this project and it picked me up from a bout of depression due to the rooftop ha, so all good. The final count for this was 8999 tris so i used almost every triangle to get the best shape i could.