Major: Final reflective statement

For me, my Major project has been one of the biggest learning curves I’ve had on this course, as its one of the most complete projects I think I’ve done. Originally my plans for major were to get the garden and kitchen modelled, textured, lit and animated, along with the witch being textured, rigged and animated. I learnt a lot about my own abilities and working speeds, and I now know that this was way too ambitious. However, I still would have liked to get more done for the final film, specifically the garden, although I am happy with what I was able to do. I think one of my weakest areas is still time management, although I think I did make some improvements in this project which I can continue to work on after the course. I would have also liked to get the witch UV’d and textured for hand in, but was unable to do so, which I think was due to me putting it off because UVing and texturing characters is one of the areas I am least experienced in, so I did everything else until I ran out of time to do them. I will get her Uv’d and textured in my own time as I think that it would be a good learning experience and look good in my portfolio. I think my strongest areas of the project were the modelling and texturing, as I was able to capture the idea I had in my head for a stylised, more cartoony look in the models and textures, with everything being consistent in shapes and style. I was able to learn a lot about substance painter in this project, even creating my own wood texture for the wood items. Even though I struggled a lot with the lighting, in the end I was happy with it as it gave off the Dawn/Dusk atmosphere I wanted, and made the textures look great. I think I did quite well at cluttering up the scene and using the clutter to aid my storytelling. While I like the 2D concept work I did for the project and I found it very helpful when I went on to model and texture, I would have liked to produce some more polished 2D concepts. One of the biggest problem areas for this project was the rendering, which failed on the first attempt because the exposure camera settings didn’t save, then the actual rendering was taking an hour instead of 20 minutes like the render tests, then there were technical difficulties with the computers at university. All of this meant I wasn’t able to get everything rendered in time for the hand in, which was really disappointing.

Overall, I’m very happy with how far I’ve come with this project and what I was able to produce, but I wish I was able to achieve more and have better time management skills.