Week 1: Starting Second Year

After a painfully long summer it feels good to be thrown back into work. It's nice to see the course adapting to changes in the industry, it reassures me that I'm on the right course. Right off the bat we're now learning PBR, it isn't much harder than what I'm used to, and it makes more sense, trying to make things look metal is now super easy because of metalness maps, makes it so much easier.

We're also put into groups for this first project which as far as I know is new, it's really great to see how other people work and picking up techniques to use in my own work. For the project we made a Viking style room where we each worked on a portion of each asset, passing it to the next person when you're done.

For our room I concepted the barrel, modelled the table, unwrapped the bench, textured the hog, reviewed the shield and corrected the textures on the barrel. And also we all made small assets to further populate the space, I made the cutlery.

Everyone is strong in different areas, for instance I enjoy modelling in 3Ds max, but I struggle with texturing. But other members were much better at texturing and helped me out, and also I felt like I was helping the others in areas I am more comfortable with.

So this is how the scene ended up, I'm pretty happy with it, there's nothing that stands out as being terrible. It's in Unreal 4 in this image, I was the one who chucked it all in engine and arranged it, so I've managed to grasp the basics of the engine. I'm glad that the way you import and texture assets hasn't changed much since UDK, the software is just generally nicer to use with the exception of the occasional bugs which require "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" method to fix.