Thoughts so far....

The first few weeks of my game art have has been one giant learning curve to be honest. To begin with I thought I had all the fundamental drawing skills within visual design to be able to cope with what we were asked to draw, but I was tested in more ways than I thought. I have covered areas like one and two point perspective, rendering techniques, crating techniques for vehicles and lighting methods.  I have visited the local canal, Bradgate park, a local museum to focus on dinosaur bones and the surrounding university area to look at perspective of buildings. Perspective is something that I have always struggled with, so learning useful tips about plotting off the vanishing points and following the lines with your pencil have changed my work dramatically.

My favourite task so far in visual design has been the dinosaur bones. It was a nice change to focus on something with a more natural form, and in my opinion they turned out to be some of my best work so far. The particular areas I have struggled on in visual design are the drawing of the vehicles, not so much the perspective but capturing the realism of the metal surface through rendering. I will have to work on this because I know I'm rendering too heavily. Overall though I think I have made a good start to visual design.

Game production on the other hand, was an absolute nightmare to begin with. On top of having no experience on 3ds Max at all, I've always found it hard to translate things into 3D and my initial models showed it. The first model which was a dalek, I was embarrassed to even open the file if there were people in eye shot. A second year helped me to start it off by showing me the use of reference images on planes. This has been a valuable technique ever since.  Looking on the positive side though, i guess i can only improve from here. The next model was a wheelie bin. I found  the modelling of this a lot easier than the dalek, but unfortunately it was spoiled when I made a disaster of the texture. I can see where i went wrong though, i need to focus on the texture more by setting it up better and using the texture space more efficiently. The next project is to build a house, I'm dreading it, but to get the result I suppose I'm going to have to knuckle down and put some serious hours in.