This sprint I completed a our antagonist character. I didn't get as much as I wanted this sprint as all my classes stacked up. The main problem this sprint was not forseeing this. I did however get work done right from the start but was unable to consistently move cards throughout the sprint. I had two characters assigned and only completed one.
I built this character the same as others. I made sure to reuse older assets to speed up the process, such as with the hands and base mesh. I had to use multiple references for this character, which mostly went smoothly. In the future I think it would be much easier to assign me tasks for completing concept art or providing me with sufficient concept art beforehand. I started this character's face with the styling I normally had done however our lead wasn't happy with it at first. I had to spend a lot of time rethinking our current concepts to finalize a structure for this face, and I think that is what resulted in an overall unimpressive face for this character. Zayn's face is very basic and I wish I could have achieved a face that stood out more and had more character.
The existing art for this character was very rough and not very descriptive for things like his nose, hair, ears, and jawline. I only had one front angle of the character and it would have been nice to have at least two so that the 2D design was more thought out for a 3D rendering. I had to fill in most of the gaps for this and I think this is why the face seems forgettable in my view. However, I understood these cards just needed to be moved along, so I just carried the character forward down the pipeline. Next I moved to retopology, which always takes a bit of time, however my process has sped up over the course of this class.
I got to texturing quite quickly, however this process was slowed down due to a lot of errors I faced. These errors were new and never were solved, so I had to do lots of hand painting for cleaning up of masks. Every time I used a new ID to mask a material, the previous masks would get ruined in quality, which was really frustrating and slowed my process down.
The resulting character is good however I am still unimpressed with the styling and look. I do think making art for games can be a smooth process, however this entire class has been a struggle to maintain consistency between these characters and the rest of the art team. Communication has helped, but at the end of the day concept art and initial visions of the game didn't have much direction for taking these 2D characters to 3D, which I think really hindered our process for a consistent look.
Next sprint I will need to finish the character I didn't get to this sprint, however luckily this will be my last character. I will put a good amount of effort in to wrap up the characters there, and then I will be spending most of my time animating our characters in 3D space within the Unity engine. This should be an interesting transition and I will need to be ready to enter a new space for our game. I will likely need to spend a lot of time learning how our code works and researching good methods for animating characters will multiple animation masks, or parts of the body that can move at once.
Overall I do wish I could have completed more this sprint. It is hard to pinpoint the exact reason why this happened, it was rather unexpected and my workload wasn't much heavier than previous sprints. It comes down to knowing if other classes and projects are going well and if things are coming up. While things might seem routine, if I have five other projects going on and all of them have small things going on this can quickly build up into an unrelenting crunch.
Another obstacle that is beginning to stand in my way is burnout, I am quite tired of the ZBrush interface and workflow. I don't mean to complain about it, I am just observing it as it presents itself as I will need to learn to deal with it. Perhaps compartmentalizing my life better would allow for me to take breaks and get away from doing the same things hour. This burnout is also likely what has led to this decrease in quality. I am aiming to better structure my days so that I can have time at the end of the day to wind down and do something other than work on 3D art. Me changing my tasks next sprint will also help with this, however I will need to be prepared for one final push for our last character. I do not want to slack on this and have the style suffer for one of, in my opinion, our most interesting characters. This will be a modular NPC again so it will be a decent amount of work.
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