Busy Busy Busy....

Wow... almost two months since my last blog post, I used to be so good at keeping these up to date. I've been so busy that it has been slightly neglected so I imagine this blog post is going to be a biggy.

My last blog posted showed the end of my major project work at university, despite numerous difficulties the grade eventually came out as a 68, a high 2:1, which is what I wanted to get as this left me with a 2:1 overall for the year.

The last week I graduated, woo hoo! It was a pretty surreal experience, it feels like only yesterday that I believed I was never going to get into uni and here I am graduating with an upper second class honours. When I first got into uni I obviously wanted a first, but knew it would be difficult, my ultimate goal was to get a 2:1, so overall I'm pretty happy, and a high 2:1, although it doesn't show up on the grade, gives me a confidence boost in my work.

The hats are still stupid though...

Between finishing my major project and graduating I had the amazing experinece of doing a two week Erasmus program called Inform.Animation in Sardinia where students from universities around Europe worked together to produce an informative animation for a client. I had the pleasure of working with students from The University of Liverpool, Universidade Do Algarve in Portugal, Facolta Di Architettura Di Alghero in Italy and The Technological Education Institute of Athens in Greece. I met some truly amazing and inspiring people while I was there and it was a once in a lifetime experience. We had to generate a short informative video about the positive aspects of natural cork and highlight why wine buyers should by bottles of wine with natural cork to support in industry and protect endangered animals. The brief was from Portugal and we had constant feedback throughout the project so we knew exactly what the client wanted. My role within the team was to use After Effects to animate the drawings given to me by other members of the team.

So... where does this leave me now?

I'm currently getting my CV and showreel sorted out so that I can start applying for jobs as soon as possible. I'm getting really excited seeing all the jobs I can apply for, I expect it will be a while before any show interest but I might as well stick with the motivation while it's still here. I've also got a summer project planned with some of the other graduates from The University of Glamorgan, or University of South Wales as it's now known. This project is going to be a short movie although it is still very early on in it's infancy.

I'm also creating a mermaid designed by Jess to help me with female anatomy, as somehow I've managed to avoid female characters up until this point. I was a bit intimidated as I always find the more subtle forms of the female body harder to draw than the male body, but I'm pretty pleased with how this has turned out for only a few days work. This is still very much a WIP and the face and tail fins are still very undeveloped but it seems to be going fairly well so far.

After the mermaid is completed I intend to look further into scripting as it';s something I've touched on quite a bit but something I think could be worked on to help improve my work.

So, I have plenty to keep me busy, and fingers crossed I might get an interview or two sometime in the near future. Who knows what the future holds, but I have a feeling it's going to be good.

and rest...

Finally... major project has been handed in. It's been fun and a brilliant learning experience that has set me up for next years project and I'm kinda sad it's over. But now I have this thing called free time, I don't know if you've heard of it or not, its quite enjoyable.

For now all I have to do is make an industry standard showreel by tomorrow evening in preparation for this years Glammies in case we get a nomination, not going to happen but making the show reel should be a decent experience so I'm not complaining.

During this free time I'm going to start working on my 3rd year project to get a nice big head start so there is less stress and more time for polish. We've already gathered our group together and we are having a meeting tomorrow after the showreel hand in to get everything sorted out and come up with our initial idea so we can dish out the work and get going. Also over summer I'll be working on a few of my personal projects just to improve my work and keep me busy. For one I would like to take someone's concept images and model a character based on them, this is a test as I feel many of my models and textures are lacking and this is probably due to my pre production, so I will test this theory and see what happens...

But enough about theoretical futures... here is the course showreel I handed in for my major project.



Credit also goes to Matt Watson and Hollie Sheppard who provided some of the Ogre animations and to Joe Hornsby who created Ogre animations as well as setting up all of the UDK stuff for characters and animations and helped to set up the weapons and game.

Deadline No.1 Complete

So the first submittal has been handed in, and we get feedback on that on Friday... Hopefully it will be positive. Feedback from tutors since I have got back seemed to have gone well, but when the submittal is mostly concentrated on individual models rather than the game as a whole I fear it may fall short...

Most of my models have been quick and not particularly detailed, with many textures still needing to be completed so they may look unimpressive on their own, I also paid more attention to how the models and textures look in UDK rather than 3DS Max so they look slightly different, shouldn't be a problem though

I haven't got much more in the way of major project done since the last post, mostly been working on Visual Studies which needs to be submitted before I head of to Germany on Monday

We managed to get the Ogres and Mongolians I made and the female Mongolian Joe made and set up into the game on my level and with my script for weapons and everything working, so we had a semi-completed game running in time for the first submittal and we managed to get some screen recordings done to be submitted so the tutors can see everything is working fine rather than just having a load of assets

I have also managed to locate the code that was overriding the material for the flag base. So that's all sorted. Nothing major but a nice little find for me to get the ball rolling on sorting out the flag base.

On a side note, I'm heading of to Germany on Monday to go to the FMX animation festival in Stuttgart. I cannot wait for this, it's going to be awesome! My first time in Germany and my first animation festival, and there is so much there to see. Glamorgan University also has a stall set up there advertising the course and the work of it's students, and I will have to man the stand from time to time. Although it means I may miss out of seeing a thing or two I don't mind as I think it will be interesting to meet new people and talk about the course.

This does mean I lose a week of major project...which is a pain...but I feel I'm in a comfortable position with it as I've gotten loads of work done in the past few weeks so I hopefully wont get hit to hard taking a week off.