Final blog: in summary

This report will summarise my contribution to the project as well as my personal thoughts throughout.

At the beginning of the project, I went after the role of art director, responsible for managing visual look, concepts and paintovers. I got this role, along with 2 other people. While I did lots of concepts, and paintovers when we were trying to imagine what areas should look like, I never really felt like I was a big contribution in dictating what the level should look like, but rather I was in agreement with the group on most topics, and just continued to pitch in ideas wherever appropriate, despite feeling like my input was dismissed on occasion. 

Our ambition in the beginning later proved to be far too big, as we planned to have not only the main theatre room, but multiple rooms leading off, including a prop room, storage room, dressing room, tea room and even an outside alleyway area. With this is mind I initially created a concept for the tea room. This is a good example of how being too ambitious cost us time that we could have spent on more assets or the like, since these additional rooms never made it to the level. Despite this, I did enjoy the concepting very much. 

As seen in my asset zoo, my contribution was primarily through assets, including a fortune teller character that consumed a bulk of the time. I created all the big curtains you see on the main stage, including the backdrop and curtain frame, complete with pulley system. As well as the bar stools, till, plant, fortune cards, coins and gramophone, then collaborated on cardboard boxes, popcorn bags, a bucket and theatre programmes with Holly, through completing the UVs and texturing.  

The Fortune Teller character was pitched by me as one of the two main assets in the level, as our focus was largely on Victorian automatons. After my team approved the idea, I went ahead with much research and several pages of concepts before beginning the model in Zbrush. I went through the same process I did to create my character in the previous 10-week project, but was proud to say that the whole fortune teller (booth included) took me significantly less time to complete. 

After I was done with the fortune teller, I was able to contribute and dress the level with more assets, and created a set of objects, with particular focus on the classic ornate style the Victorians are known for. I often chose to spend more time perfecting objects and creating detailed patterning in my high polys, than keeping them simple and creating more of them. While I could have created more with this method, during the project I kept the motto in mind, ‘quality over quantity’, and thought it better to create fewer high quality assets, than more of a lesser quality.

Although asset creation was my main form of contribution, I also assisted with setting up the sound in the level. While Beth chose and brought in appropriate music for the level, I brought in my gramophone and set up a sound attenuation for it, so it sounds like the music is actually playing from the gramophone, with the volume lessening the further away the player gets from it.

Overall I’m happy with my contribution, with my only gripe, if any, being that I wish I could have done more, or that we could have created something on a bigger scale than just one room.