ANC220 - Week 4

Last week was busy busy. I've been working my ass off trying to get models done both for Nigel, as well as for Studio.

That's a good place to start - in studio we broke up into teams and were basically put to work building assets. This was fun - I like to make things and the first half of the class was quite slow as different student made their way into the class room to pitch their ideas. That was pretty cool actually - I wanted to collaborate with the Multimedia students the other week and even more so with a particular one of the games students - but I don't have the time. I couldn't possible get that extra curriculum work done when I'm already struggling just to get my shit together for my personal study. Phil has mentioned that it can count towards your personal study but I've pitched that I want to make 3D models because I believe that's what is necessary for the industry and the projects I want to work on with the other departments are all based around my initial love: 2D animation and Character Design. Of course, some of the students in my class have decided that they'll jump on board but I have no idea whether directly opposing their pitches will be allowed - I assume that it will eventually as it'll be more trouble than it's worth for Phil to try and have that discussion with the students. Anyway, there's no need to harp on how I wanted ot be a 2D character artist any further as I've made mention of it a number of times in my blogs. The industry doesn't need another concept artist and Japan is full of Full time anime artists so I'm content (not happy) with my decision

to follow the 3D path which I have been told is actually a safe (financially speaking) place to work.

That makes me think: Do 3D artists get paid well?

*hold on*

OK so there we go - I mean it's not the best research that I've done, but I've used payscale.com in the past to compare how my Job is paying me in comparison to their data and it's usually pretty accurate. And in sofar as I'm concerned, this is probably a good thing - because based on the applications below, I feel confident that I'll be well equipped in the future (although I should play around with 3DS Max a little...and ZBrush. I really need to play with ZBrush)

I guess, looking into this week, I'll need to place emphasis on the personal study component of this thing. I still haven't had the chance to look at my idea since the last iteration. Ok, the first iteration. But that's mainly because I really loved the idea that I came up with! I'll probably raise that with Phil on Wednesday - if he feels that I should model realism then that's what I'll do, but I don't see how my idea won't be helpful - Ok I did go the Luma thing when they came down to bullshit us int he lecture theater and one of the guys did mention they wanted hyper realisim - but TBH, I want to make games - but at the same time I don't have a gig making anything so it's the whole 'beggars can't be choosers' argument, so I should go and polish up my skills that people like Luma want and then try and move horizontally within the industry. Eh, I know all this in my head and translating it to this blog is time consuming.

As for putting some of this into practice - well I'm up tot he point where I need to texture my models for Nigel's workshop class - so I'll get to test out my hyper realisim texturing abilities there and if it turns out that I don't utterly suck at it then I can go forth and practice it for my personal study project - although that would involve rehashing my idea completely - not that i haven't given it an ounce of though - I have decided that I'll try and stick to my original idea of recreating the town from the game I wanted to make, but instead of trying to take the original 2.5 game art and convert it into a fully realised 3D space, I'll dot he same thing but with realistic textures - I guess that my fear =was that I couldn't do the realistic textures and instead pull off the more cartoony textures better, which would mean that my recreation would be faithful and I' could be proud of it - because I really love the games series that I wanted to pay homage too, i wanted to be able to recreate something I could be proud of and show off to peers and include in my folio - of course I'm making big assumptions here - I really do think that my abilioty to paint textures is shithouse - even though I feel that at the same time, my ability to conceptualize and draw is quite strong - those talents dont' seem to translate very well into creating wall and floor textures for buildings...anyway I've completely lost my train of thought. Again, I'm really just wasting time here - I'm going to go and actually do some work that'll get assessed.

- Ryan