Wednesday 19 May 2010

Final week! D:

This week's posts have been sparse because I've been slaving away making the showreels for our degree show. A quick re-cap of the first half is as follows:

Monday - gave my presentation, which I think went quite well. I had prepared a nice slideshow and covered all the bases I think. After that I collected some stray submissions for the showreel before going home and proceeding to build the short version. Problems ensued with a virus from somebody's pendrive and After Effects being a bit difficult.

Tuesday - printed the dissertation, rendered the short showreel and made a start on the longer show reel. After discussing matters with the group I decided to split the longer showreel according to group - ie CA, VC and CSP in their own chapters, and within those the work was grouped in alphabetical order by surname. Had to switch to a different video editor, since the one I usually use was refusing a lot of the files - naturally this delayed things further.

Wednesday - Jody burnt the short showreel to a DVD and it was well received at the final degree show meeting. Got my dissertation bound and submitted (phew!) then went home to continue making the long show reel. I also re-rendered the short showreel to put online - I fixed a spelling mistake and added Virgin Media as a sponsor, since they have agreed to display our short showreel in the Overgate. I aim to have the long footage ready to give to David tomorrow, for putting on the DVD.

Monday 10 May 2010

Week 17

10/5/10 - Okay! So the work is essentially done. This week will be about preparing my presentation and submitting things for the degree show. I will also need to buy some CD cases and pretty folders for coursework submissions.

But as far as the project work goes, I feel like I am pretty much done. Perhaps there will be a more interesting technical game progress video at the end of the week.

11/5/10 - Received the draft disseration back and will be working on that for the rest of the week; also need to re-work one of the learning contracts. Made my submission to the Interface group today, and will be preparing submissions for 2 of the 3 modules to hand in on Friday.

12/5/10 and 13/5/10 - Worked away at preparing for submissions on Friday, finished making the powerpoint slideshow for Monday, did most of the work needed for the dissertation.

Monday 3 May 2010

Week 16


3/5/10 - Drafted a design for the business cards, front and back.




I just opted for something simple that would match the aesthetic of my folio (on the front) and the project (on the back). Lifting from the poster design seemed to work quite well.

4/5/10 - Finished touching up the poster. Minimal changes: a different font and slight tidying of the hexagons. I was always happy with the original design :)


5/5/10 - today was the degree show meeting as usual, which took up a large part of the day. Afterwards I put together my materials for the Interface group: my details and widescreen films in the correct format. It is very important that my work is complete and ready ASAP, because it is my duty to put together the final showreel between May 14th and 19th (with my presentation on the 17th).

Since there is so very little time left, I am working under the assumption that the videos I currently have will be the ones I submit - I am happy with this. The first two videos are complete and it will be easy to add a final tech demo to the third video after this week's development day if I choose to; however, the video is already a good length and can be submitted as it is.

My main focus at the moment is on collecting the right work to submit on time; as I mentioned, next week is essentially going to be off limits. I may even start to write my report for Professional Practice this weekend. Tomorrow and Friday will be taken up with game development.

6/5/10 - We developed today in preparation for our meeting tomorrow; the level meshes were exported for Unity and the tutorial level assets were implemented. I updated my tech demos video, which can be seen below.



There is now more footage of a complete tutorial level; unfortunately we were unable to implement level 1 today, but here is what the mesh looked like:

This mesh was exported as a single object; there is also a large dandelion in the layout but this needs to be exported seperately as it has a very high polycount.

7/5/10 - I checked and printed my draft dissertation, ready for submission on Monday. I also printed the learning contracts to get them approved and signed ASAP, and started writing my report for Professional Practice. I plan to sort every submission into folders soon just so that I can track my progress - whilst keeping an eye on a suitable cut-off point for the last tech demo, that is.

8/5/10 - I decided to make a promotional showreel for my project: one video which includes all the work I've done, as well as a couple of the technical clips. I think some sort of showreel is required for Professional Practice, and it certainly wouldn't hurt to have one anyway - so here it is!



Music: Veridis Quo by Daft Punk, naturally.

Also designed a simple sleeve for the CD cases I'll be using - it's not a big deal but keeps with the theme of the poster. Could probably be jazzed up a little if I have the time.


I'm still working on collecting things together for submission, whilst trying not to forget about relevent submissions for the degree show such as Interface, poster image files etc.

9/5/10 - I looked over the dissertation one last time before making it into a PDF for emailing tomorrow. I've also worked on making sure each of the videos I want to submit is in the right format (ie .mov for everything but the Interface submission) and generally keeping things up to date. I posted on degree show Ning to make some comfirmations about our final deadlines for the showreel.