Year 2 Begins...PBR, Flims and Group Havoc

Right, so first off I'm sorry that I haven't updated over the summer holidays but, it's also a good thing because it means that I have been busy doing work, research and going to events like industry workshops in London. I have also been drawing as much as I can to push myself further forward and I even got to do some Life Drawing!

However the Summer has ended, so I have returned to Leicester where the first week of my new academic year is almost over and we have already been given some big fun projects. The first project is an Asset Swap Project where we work in groups. The purpose is getting us used to working in the same styles, use naming conventions and the new PBR (Physics Based Rendering) system in UE4. We each had to make a section of an object before passing it on, this could be a texture, model, feedback and other stages involved in the creation. As you passed on that asset you would be tasked with doing the next part of another object in a round robin format.

While this project was fun, because we learnt about the new roughness and metalness textures which are used to create the materials in UDK, it was also annoying in some ways as you could end up waiting for other people to finish or they might wait for you to finish your section before the project could move forward and we couldn't see it come together until the end of the project.

The next project we have been given is the film room project which is to accurately recreate a room from a film, looking first at what makes a room in a film interesting weather it be the lighting, colours, identity or atmosphere. The group I was in actually spent along time deciding and couldn't agree for along time settling on some things before changing our minds. We have however now chosen our final film room which will be Andy's room from Toy Story. The natural lighting and opportunity to make awesome PBR materials is a strong element of the room. The stylization in some of the props is also a good opportunity to learn about how these styles can make assets pop which can be transferred subtly into other projects even if they are hyper realistic.

Made by my group mate Dom Shaw

So far I'm Happy to be back and excited to do some awesome projects this year as well as learn the more technical aspects of visualization and asset creation on some ambitious projects in groups. I would prefer much more single projects though only because after a group project it can be hard to identify the input each person has made and would rather be marked based on my own skills instead of someone else's whether its for better or for worse.