BA3b - Week 13 Summary/Self Evaluation

BA3b - Week 13 Summary and Self Evaluation

This is the final week of the project and my focus has been on finishing the Pirate Cove. I created a video of the final version to both use for the university exhibition and also for my portfolio,which now have been updated with the latest images and this video. 

Youtube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIokM_G11mU

I have also shared my work on social media to both increase my presence and also hopefully get some feedback that I can apply to it after the hand in. After just a few hours of it being up I have received 500+ views on Youtube and lots of great response! My environment got very quickly into the trending section of ArtStation which was a delight to see my scene around so many other beautiful environments!

Artstation: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/6DEE5

I also decided to create a post on the official Unreal Engine subreddit and this was definitely a success! At the point of the following screenshots it had just been up for almost a day and it already has loads of great comments and it's on top of the 'hot' section!

Reddit Post: HERE

Self Evaluation

This has definitely been one of the most interesting projects so far and the reason why I think that is because what I have been doing exactly what I love to do within this industry, which is creating environments. 

I am very pleased with the outcome of my pirate cove and it was great to finally make an environment where I could apply all the techniques I’ve learnt over the last couple of years. As always there are things that could be improved, but all the mistakes I have done with this environment I see as a lesson for my next environment where I won’t be repeating the same mistakes. If there is one thing I have learnt from my 10 years of working with 3D, it's that you definitely learn from your mistakes in this industry. 

I ended up changing a lot of the project but that’s because as always, when I plan projects I tend to think way to big and gradually narrow it down to something more realistic. This definitely applied to the project as well and is something I have to get better at. Although I do believe that it’s better to overthink something than to restrict yourself too much into a small scope. 

I believe the approach I chose to create the environment as if it were a dungeon in a game such as The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim really paid off. It made the whole level feel like it fits more into a game and therefor gives the whole environment a more familiar style, I have had multiple people tell me that they can definitely imagine it inside a video game and that makes me feel like I have accomplished my goal.

Unfortunately I had to do a lot of sacrifices during the creation of this environment, but this is to be expected when the quality I wanted to reach would be the same as modern AAA titles. While they have multiple experienced people working over the course of a number of years, I am a just one person with 7-8 months’ time. The areas that got hit the most were unfortunately optimisation and game-play. While the environment is running smooth on my machine, it does require a rather beast PC to run it at the moment. It was down to either focusing on it being high quality in the time I had or optimising it, I choose the former since that’s the most important of the two when it comes to a portfolio piece. When it comes to game-play I decided to take out that part completely. The reason for this is because when applying to jobs, the odds of a games company to actually download my environment and walk around in it is super low so it was much wiser to spend my time on enhancing the quality of the environment instead. I am definitely glad I made this choice.

Overall this project has been a great experience and it was such as pleasure to spend a longer period of time on creating a larger piece of work than just single assets. I was very fortunate to receive invitations to multiple interviews in the games industry and I am SUPER excited to start my new adventure as an Environment Artist Intern at Rare LTD. This has been a great way to finish my time here at NUA and I believe that this environment is a great summary of all the skills I have learnt from my 3 years of studying.