Group Project - The End

The group project is finally over, thank god. Its not even that I didn't enjoy or disliked working with others, but more just how long it went on for.

It was my role as the group art director to make sure the level had an overall look and feel, and was unified. This wasn’t an easy job as everyone has their own ‘style’ and their own way of working, which makes it very difficult to make sure all the assets and textures look unified and flow.

My personal aim within the project was to great something that I felt matched my original ideas and concepts. I didn’t want my idea and the project to fall to pieces because I hadn’t explained what we were aiming for properly.

I’m not a very good ‘people person’ however and managing people and really trying to push them towards a style became very difficult for me. In this respect I had to trust people to try stick to the style but incorporate their own strengths and working methods into their work.
I was really pleased when my project idea got picked, I had put a lot of thought into it and taken the time to do concepts to get the idea across and considered various pros and cons involved. I was chuffed everyone else saw the potential in it and thought it was a good idea.

I was apprehensive about being art director to begin with as I didn’t think I would be good at it but think it worked out well. Being art director gave me the ability to push the style of the project in a way that I enjoyed and thought looked good. This meant I could get more involved with the project and I appreciated it much more. I would of liked to of had the chance to do more concepts and artwork towards the project but spent 95% of the time working on 3D as there was just so much of it to do.
 
The pace the group worked at as a whole was relatively slow and I think as a group we could have got a lot more done and we would’ve had a more polished finished level as a result. I worked really hard towards the group project and got a lot done in the time frame, so I’m pleased with my contribution towards the level.  

However I’m really disappointed with my personal submission. I contributed a lot of time and effort into the group project but not all of that is visible in the level and none of it so in my own hand-in. I didn’t personally make any of the scenery for the level which means I’d have to model, unwrap, texture and import all new objects to make a scene/map from and due to various reasons just don’t have the time to do this. All my completed in-game assets, with the vertex painting, has been removed off drop box, as I wasn’t expecting this to happen I didn’t take a copy off. I have placed the textures I made onto my models in my UDK map but they look terrible as they were designed to be vertex painted on, rather than just being applied.

I don’t feel my personal submission is in anyway a good representation of the effort and time I put into the group project. It is also not an accurate depiction of how my completed models looked when in the level. If I had more time I would of created a much more suitable level for my personal submission which showed my contribution in a more accurate way.