New Year, New... Start?

    My first week back and we weren’t eased back in. We were given a project in Game Production, in groups of six and produce assets for a Nordic theme tavern. We were each to concept an item for the scene, being a bench, a table, a shield, a cooked hog, cutlery with tankard and plate, with the final asset being a barrel. We would pass the concept to the next person who would model it, then pass the model to the next person who would unwrap it, with this process continuing through the texturing stages and feedback stage, until placement into the new engine, Unreal 4. The creators of the engine did an amazing job with the software with it being more user friendly and more aesthetically pleasing. Not only did we have an upgrade to a new engine, Photoshop and 3DS Max was upgraded becoming creative cloud and 2014. But this new engine also brought a new way of texturing assets. Rest in Peace diffuse, I’ll always remember you, but now Albedo takes your place, while specularity has now become two maps, roughness and metals. My opinion of when I first saw this change, was that it was going to be easier to texture assets, and have a more accurate and aesthetically pleasing results. 

 

Ignore the metal. Dat wood texture though.

    This change came around due to the new PBR in Unreal 4 which is quickly becoming an industry standard. 3ds Max currently cannot render the new way of texturing and so we use Marmoset to see our end result without placing it in engine. 3ds Max 2016 should be scripted with the ability to see the new PBR rendering, as it’s one of the main asset building tools. And with all of this going on, I managed to get to play with Z Brush which is an incredibly fun and brilliant tool to use which produces amazing results.
    Along side this weeks project, in visual design we were introduced to our next project for three weeks, recreating a scene from a film still. After many film ideas, we settled on Stanley Kubrick’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’, home evasion scene. I really like the open plan design of the house, and the panning shot helped to reveal more of the room, allowing for a more complete idea to create it.

    With this new uni year, a lot has changed, not only in where the industry is moving to, but the whole structure of the course. Game production and visual design has become more intertwined, instead of separate projects for each part of the course. I fear for the first years though. In my first year, we had a new project every week where we would draw something different in Visual Design, I’ve heard that the students this year will have less time to develop their visual library, which I feel with negatively impact on them in the long run. But I do believe that the course changes will be beneficial for the second and third years, and the change in critical studies to writing every week about the week is an improvement. No research, no surfing the web to try to discover the source material, no long, boring blogs on history, but a reflective piece every week to help build up our communication skills.