Joseph Long

Critical Review

A short self reflective analysis of my work

As seen in my early work I started off with a severe lack of knowledge on all aspects of 3D including software and practices, this lead me through a difficult time with the assignments. However, they forced me to push myself to learn more  about the software and what it takes to create a good piece of 3D work. With each assignment my work reached a better standard. The only thing that held me back was time constrains and the speed at which I worked at the time, these forced me to leave out certain aspects or gave me little time to learn an entire area of 3D for example, advanced rigging or how to create a good looking texture, although I have been learning to do so on this current project as it requires a high quality look.

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      There is one  problematic element in my early work that still remained until my second year of university, I had an issue with keeping everything in scale with each other. For example in the 'Fray' project the character was supposed to be a child but the limbs were too extended and the kitchen he walks into is incredibly big for what little it has in. This is the same issue that can be seen within the first environment I had made. I did not make the building tall enough for what it was, this is seen when looking at the doorway in the centre of the building, the scale of it is not relative to the buildings size, neither was the grass.

Since then I have learnt better how to use Maya's unit system. However, it is still difficult to keep Zbrush in scale with Maya, this is still a mystery to me as well as my peers and those around the internet as it seems there is no clear scaling within the software. The only way to keep scaling seems to be if you import geometry from Maya to Zbrush but this is not always the workflow being used, leaving the alternative which is just to re scale the geometry after importing it into Maya.

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     At first I thought I wanted to be an environment artist, taking any chance I could to work on an environment for a project. However after a bit of time and a few projects I enjoyed animating and character/organic modelling more than anything else, this eventually lead to my third year project in which i made sure I was modelling a character and animating it. Though with that came the task of rigging, something that I still have difficulties with due to how many things factor into making a good usable rig meaning it gets very technical very fast which though i'm certain if I put myself to it I could learn how to make a very good rig but this is just not something I enjoy, i prefer the more creative aspect of 3D. Currently my 3D character work is at it's best, I have been able to make a good looking character within zbrush although the detail was lost due to issues between cutting up the geo as to get rid of the body underneath the clothes and creating the normal maps. An issue than another who used the exact same method as myself had used yet did not run into the same issue, perhaps there was another issue somewhere within the file that i was unable to find, I would have been able to fix this issues if I had caught it early on but unfortunately I hadn't realised until I had prepped the character for texturing and was running out of time in my schedule for textures and normal maps.

This is something I will be sure to look out for in the future.

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To better myself at character design I will have to improve my drawing skills, as at the moment they are not the best skill set I have. I find it difficult to draw correct shapes/features particularly for faces that don't look flat, leaving the designs looking rather basic but still somewhat understandable. To improve this during the summer time where I haven't got such a high work load, I plan on using tutorials and lessons that will help me improve as well as trying to incorporate 3D into my drawing, for example; Pose a 3D mannequin, save an image of it and make the image a layer within Photoshop to draw over. Hopefully in time I will be able to produce good quality designs which will help when it comes to modelling them as well as increase my employability.

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