Sprint 2 went really well for my CAGD 495 class, I got lots of work done and have improved a lot on my abilities for creating characters.
This sprint's focus was finishing up Zayden's textures as well as completing the our wolf character and textures.
First I'll go over what went wrong this sprint. Kade and I were quite ambitious right out the gates for this sprint, and I accepted too much work. Therefore, I have left 3 points of work assigned as well as 3 points of work in progress. While I don't think this is too large of a problem, since I still completed a good amount of work this sprint, I do think it can be dangerous to be so ambitious out of the gates. I definitely want to understand my limits to work that I can complete so I can better advise my producer on what I am capable of. I think this is something I will gain an understanding of throughout this class. Being able to tell my producer how long one character will take versus an entirely different one is an important skill, even for improving my own time management.
What went really well this sprint was the amount of work I completed and the speed at which I did it. I completed 10 points of work this sprint, which is more than last sprint. Additionally, Kade and I managed to improve upon the way we handle points for characters, since I believed that my work wasn't getting enough points last sprint. Even with this in mind, last sprint I completed only one character without textures. This sprint, I completed 3 textured characters, and 1 new mesh for a character. So its safe to say I've improved my personal speed of work by a lot. While working in this class I maintained not just a sense of focus but also a sense of diligence, choosing to work on important things and tactfully leaving out less important pursuits. I think this has been very helpful in managing my speed, and I'm sure this discipline and understanding of the resource of time is appreciated even more in the industry. I plan to continue to improve my understanding of my workflow and discerning between necessary and unnecessary pursuits.
Firstly this sprint, I tackled Zayden's texture. This was simple and didn't take more than a day. While actually texturing Zayden was a breeze, it did take a longer amount of time to solve baking issues, which I frequently forget to take into account when scheduling my work periods. I'll have to start remembering that there's generally an hour of troubleshooting and tweaking to perfect the texture bake process. I did two other character textures this sprint and in those cases this was also true.
It was also important for me to test my textures in-engine with a toon shader applied. This helped me gauge if a texture was actually finished. In the future, it will also help me compare different character models and achieve a similar look and style.
Next I started on my second character for this game, our wolf enemy. Initially I was planning on doing a wizard character first, but Kade let me know that changes were made and we had to prioritize our wolf character in order to get our animator started on animations. Not only did this require me to change my work and goals for the sprint, but I also had to quickly build a wolf block-out mesh that would share similar proportions with the final wolf model, which had not been completed yet. I think I did really well in setting this up and allowing for Mel, our animator, to build a rig for a character that wasn't completed. My help and understanding of character and animation absolutely helped us speed up our pipeline and team.
This wolf enemy didn't have any concept art, so I was able to take creative freedoms. However, I find this more difficult because it requires me to build a large reference sheet as well as personally sketch out shapes and decisions for our character, all while making sure our designer was happy with decisions I make, slowing the process down considerably. This all happened very early due to our rush for a rig, so I am lucky and grateful that the shapes and proportions I settled on ended up looking good in our final high poly. My work here is the reason we should have a smooth transition for this wolf, from a stationary model to a lively animated creature.
At the end of this sprint I textured the wolf. However the wolf would have two different materials, as there is an enemy wolf that is dirty and covered in toxic sludge, and a friendly one that has been cleaned by the player. It was also my decision to make two instances of each of these versions of the wolf so that wolves in the scene wouldn't look too repetitive.
Overall I think this sprint went really well and is reflecting a pattern for me for the future of this class. I really want to become a more disciplined and diligent worker within this class. I really hope I can keep improving on my ability, not to cut corners, but to avoid tunnel-visioning and hyper focusing on work. There are absolutely many pitfalls to a good character artist, and I know a slow pace of work is not acceptable. I am absolutely a victim of this and am excited to keep finding ways to optimize my workflow and produce more characters more quickly. My goal for this class is to get to a place where I can produce two characters every sprint. A character every week would be wonderful and I think that would really provide a lot for my team and help me stand out as a developer.
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