Friday 30 April 2010

I still don't know the Lecturers!

To be slightly more concise than my last opinionated blog:

I’ve found pretty much all aspects of the course this year to be useful or rewarding in some way or another. As Critical studies goes, writing these blogs has helped me take a step back and actually consider not only what it is I’m doing, where I’m going, what I’m walking into, but It’s helped me reshape my time management, hone my presentation skills and learn to assess myself and other things properly. Part of that is also due to the brilliant idea of having a Facebook account strictly for work. The amount of constructive criticism from peers caught me off guard at first and it took me a certain Giygas incident to appreciate it, but it has been vital in the improvement of my Photoshop skills and has also provided a source of competition. It’s always good to keep an eye my peers to make sure I’m stepping up to the mark. Lol.

As far as 2D is concerned, I can defiantly see where it links into developing your skills into transferring 3D information into 2D and back again for the 3D module, but I would like to see more emphasis on this as appose to the 3D module, particularly as far as Photoshop is concerned. Before I came onto this course, my software skills stretched as far as Paint. To suddenly be surrounded by all these people who know how to use all these programs was a bit of a shock and to then realise that this was a program I needed, I busted my balls to try n get it to work but I’m still nowhere near as good as most people on the course with it. Maybe it’s just that I’m more traditional minded but this over use of Photoshop seems like a bit of an easy way out. I can see that in industry, Photoshop and other software like it will be used for many concept sketches and merchandise but it clashes with the ethos of the 2D part of course: to train your brain into transferring 3D into 2D and vice versa. No one who used Photoshop can tell me that they do their work on sight.

Unfortunately, it seems that the whole point of developing the 2D is to get good at 3D. I do appreciate that having skills in 3D as well as 2D is important in selling yourself, and I’m having great fun with 3D, as much as it nearly killed me at the start of the year, I don’t want to actually be a 3D modeller. It makes sense that the first year developers the ground skills for all aspects of being a Game artist, but it would make equal sense for the second year to allow you to begin to specialize your skills in the direction you want to go into. As we first years all desperately need Heather time, we all know that she can’t possibly see all of us one on one all the time, so it’s a god send that she’s posted up all her demos onto blackboard, but I still don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to put into a design document. If she was to go through it just once with the class then I’m sure that would help on people’s final grades.

Finally, the last thing I’d want to add is...I still don’t know the lecturers! I’d like to see more banter time with the staff and hopefully over the next 2 years I will see some.

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