When first getting into the Final Major Project phase of the course I had to also finish some other blog work for the previous unit. So I wouldn’t necessarily call this the first week, even though this was the week that they initialised it.

This is when I actually started to do the project. Somethings had to get moved around, such as the ideas, I didn’t spend too much time doing the ideas in this week as I prioritised the research more, but I did make some concepts of what I planned to make based on what I had already researched at that point.

In this week I started to more into the concept ideas phase as I had thought I had gathered enough research to put more effort into my concepts. I did, however, get more research from more primary resources such as the Manx Museum. During this week I did receive some good advice from my tutors as to how I should go about doing the concepts. They suggested that I focus on doing a week or so on quick drawings that would help loosen up my drawing ability so that I could come up with some different ideas altogether.

As said above I got some advice to loosen up my drawing ability, this week I planned to do just that and draw various different faces and poses just to get an idea of how I might want my character to look like in the end. By the end of the week I was set a different quick task of coming up with some personality traits for the character. This was to help me get a better understanding of how the character could be posed and how they could behave. This was made better when I got some of my peers to go over the traits and decide on how they wanted the character to be like, as they are essentially part of my target audience.

From the previous week I had finished with my concepts of my character. For this week I moved onto developing a character in one of the many poses I thought of before, along with adding one of the faces to add to the character detail. In the end though I didn’t manage to do the peer reviews for my developments this week but the week after as I was busy with completing both my developments and completing the mid-point evaluation.

This week was quite busy, I had started off with doing the peer reviews of my final developments and started to move towards the sculpting of the character in the programme Blender. I didn’t manage to do any texturing this week but did finalise the sculpting/modelling of my character.

During this week I started off with doing the final parts of the modelling, essentially just cleaning it up so that I could move onto the texturing with ease. I also began getting textures together from the website textures.com. This site provided me with the means to get free textures that I could then manipulate in Photoshop. Once I got the sections selected for each part of the character I applied the certain texture map to it and then proceeded to make sure that each face was cleanly textured as much as possible. At the end of the week I moved onto the weight painting, this allowed me to make certain parts of the character weighted to the sections of the skeleton rig I applied to it (the rig allows me to manipulate the limbs and body so that I can pose it later on). Unfortunately there was a scheduling error with Gary, one of my tutors and I wasn’t able to see him at all this week. However, Will, another of my tutors, was able to figure out any problems alongside with me and come up with solutions.

This week was the last week I could work on my practical work. I did manage to get a tutorial with Gary this week though, in which he helped me get my bearings on the weight painting and the posing of my character. Of which I finished the weight painting and moved onto posing the character, which I also completed early on. I then had to get a camera set up in the programme and key frame certain points and angles so that I could produce the rendered video. After this I went ahead and put the video into Adobe Premiere and applied some ambient sounds to it to make it feel better and to add the added level of environment to the character. Once done I also went ahead and made a title and credits for it so that people knew what it was and who had made it. I had also finished off and sent my essay in as part of the deadline.

This is the final week where I had to complete both the exhibition set-up for myself and to also complete any and all blog work relating to my FMP. I can say that this week in particular has been pretty stressful as I have had other things that required my attention outside of college work, but I managed to get through it with effort. I feel that my exhibition set-up isn’t bad, as it is a big show reel with everyone else’s work being shown off too. But I do have my own display board that I have put screenshots of my process up on. This I feel will get the audience to appreciate my work more, while viewing both my video and my display board.