Mid-Point Evaluation

So far in the project I feel that things are going smoothly enough, however, I also feel a bit behind in my work. To make up for the time left I am prepared to work more and get on with it more in my spare time if needed. I feel that I have spent my time more or less so on idea development and research but I don’t think this is a bad thing it just distracts me from continuing on. I feel that my research is good for now, but there are some things I need to work on, such as getting more and more examples of the kind of character I am looking for and just giving a brief comment on the good and bad, as well as comment how I would implement the different parts. As for the ideas I feel that with my ideas and the developments that I am very close to begin the actual production, if not I will still start it in my spare time. I also feel that I should still continue some drawings along side the production as this will give me more ideas that I can experiment with in the future but I don’t plan on letting it be a distraction for me. I also think that I should include most, if not all, previous drawings I have made into the ideas part of the project as this will give more insight into how I have thought about the different things for my characters. I also plan to do a lot more peer review sessions as this will help a lot for decision making and it will help with keeping the character within the brief I had set myself.

Final Evaluation

I feel that this project has been a great experience and a stepping stone for me in my skills of character sculpting, rigging, posing and developing my understanding of Blender as well as developing my own style of character and developing it, as this is something I wish to continue to learn about and take with me to university. Although I didn’t achieve the desired outcome in the way I originally planned it in my first ideas, I am still very happy about the overall outcome as what I made was something new for me, and something I really enjoyed doing too. I felt like, with more time and guidance, I could have done a little bit more with the outcome, for example, had more poses for the character, or perhaps had a small animation. But, I have developed my knowledge and skills quite a lot through the process(sculpting, rigging and posing), and it would have been hard for me to go further within the time frame and finish doing a variety of poses etc in that time. I felt that I took a bit too much time with the research and ideas creation despite the fact that these were vital steps. I felt, in the end, I could have done them a bit quicker. I also need to mention that I originally started off with wanting my character to be one exclusively from a Victorian era influence, which I spent time researching. However, after making the character ideas, I chose differently and went with a Viking and Medieval Knight influence instead. I felt that I made the right choice here as I didn’t really have many ideas and thoughts about how I wanted a Victorian character to look, and I had done more hobby work on armoured warriors, than Victorian-fashioned Englishmen. I do feel that because of this experience that I will continue to make new characters as a new hobby and will continue to develop my skills and develop them further at university, to improved these ideas more. I did have a few things that happened to hinder me along the way, these included having difficulty with textures not being properly applied to the model, and the model having extra unnecessary pieces extruding out from the model too, which were a problem to solve. I did deal with these nearer to the end by learning how to manage this aspect of the Blender programme, as this is when they became more of a problem. I do see that this was something I should have done sooner, but I also feel that at the time it was unnecessary. Another point I felt like I should improve on was my skills in making a time management plan, as I personally don’t like making plans and like to ‘go with the flow’ essentially. However, when I did create a plan, it did help me get on with my work and helped me keep up with what I wanted done by the ends of each week. I do feel that I didn’t keep up with making the plans near the end of the project as I felt like it was more of an obstacle to my work than something that would benefit me. I also feel that the way I made my plans, which I made at the starts or ends of each week, was an inadequate way to make them and I need to work on that, as I also feel that because of this my enjoyment of the project decreased each time I realised that I needed to make them. Making a plan is necessary and helpful but not as enjoyable as actually developing the character and using the programme to develop it.