Wednesday 19th October 2022:
Some of the other assets I worked on the most included the chairs and torches that are in the throne room. I decided to actually push myself and try to make the chair in Maya instead of taking it into Zbrush, as I want to improve my skills at organic shapes in Maya. I also wanted to follow the same approach for the torches, but after trying to improve the smooth edges of the torch, I will likely still take it into Zbrush to make the high poly version.
As I created these assets, I made sure to update my scene in Unreal and replace the old blockouts with the new assets. I began to add some basic lighting to highlight elements of my scene, but think that the most effective lighting will be visible in my scene once the windows are textured behind the throne, so some of my lighting is a placeholder currently.
This mid point in the project was also a good stage for me to stop and re-organise myself completely. After having some health issues, I was feeling a bit behind and wanted to refocus myself to make sure I knew exactly what tasks I had to catch up on, and which tasks I was meant to be working on. As well as updating my Unreal scene and this blog, I also decided to go back and remake my Trello board a bit. After attending the weekly Agile workshops and reading the book "Scrum: A breathtakingly brief and agile introduction" (Sims and Johnson, 2012), which was recommended to us by our lecturers, I have found that I really like the workflow of using sprints, even for individual projects like these where elements of scrum, like daily stand up meetings, become less important.
Having this updated also allowed me to look ahead and think about tasks that I had not yet considered into my timescale yet, like the fire VFX that I want to do for the torches in the scene. While I have done some VFX before in Unreal, it had slipped my mind as a task but having this re-organised really allowed me to see everything in the backlog and keep it in mind while doing each sprint of work.
I also realised at this point that I had not been making sure to regularly back up my work to my repository, so took the time to make sure I moved some of my work over. This mid-project reorganisation really helped me to focus my mind and feel more prepared for each week, as I knew exactly which goals I wanted to complete by the end of each sprint.
Feeling more organised and with almost all of my assets fully modelled, I decided to move onto one of the most important parts of the project: texturing.
References:
SIMS, Chris and Hillary Louise JOHNSON. 2012. Scrum: a Breathtakingly Brief and Agile Introduction. Dymaxicon. Available through Falmouth University Library [accessed: 20th October 2022]
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