Straight away this project frightened the living day lights out of me because firstly I am terrible at designing vehicles and secondly I knew nothing about shaders and half of the content of the brief. So I already felt like I had a challenge ahead of me.
The first thing I did was to open the example scene and try to get my head around what I actually needed to do and how I would achieve it. I'm trying to get into the same mindset of the person that made the scene and I have a serious poke about in the scene trying to see how it is different to how I set mine up. As it turns out its VERY different, overwhelmingly so which put me off even further. So I decided before I manage to talk myself out of actually doing any work I would throw myself into the design process.
I started off looking at existing cars and vehicles as designing and concepting vehicles was never my strong point. At first I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do as I'm not a massive car/plane/boat person but after speaking to one of my more enthusiastic colleagues he got the ball rolling on some feasible ideas.
At first I was think of doing a mini cooper because I love those little cars but then I thought that's not really a good enough reason to do something and it probably not going to be that interesting to look at.
Then I went on to think about 1930/1940's cars as I love anything from that time. Everything seemed so elegant and classy. I looked at many different cars from this era but I couldn't seem to settle on just one.
Then another colleague sent me a picture of this really cute vespa car. I thought it was a really neat idea especially with its cute little picnic basket, I felt like it had a lot of character. Which I know is something codies was after, so I went with it. I thought it would probably be different in comparison to every ones super sexy vehicles and I quite liked that.
I gathered a lot of imagery in the first week and prepared my orthographics to start modelling from I needed to try and get as far ahead as possible so I would have time at the end to face the things that worried me the most.
After throwing myself into modelling I found that due to my orthographics and using the symmetry modifier I was able to create the basic shape of the vehicle relatively quickly. After showing my mesh to some colleagues and tutors it turned out I had a lot of perfecting to do in order to really nail the vehicle for this project. I had to be more careful with the distribution of the poly's and I spent some time trying to make them as even as possible. I also then spent some time adding detail and trying to make the most out of the tri budget.
Looking back I perhaps too the criticism too literally and spent too much time on the mesh, especially since this project was more about the textures than anything.
Unwrapping was relatively easy due to the vehicles boxy shape. I made sure to take the symmetry modifier off for this as I wanted the textures to be unique. The hard part for me was packing all the UV's into the space because although the shape was quiet simple there was a lot of faces to fit into that tiny square but I managed it in the end.
I had seen many of my colleges texture pages were very matte and lacked some details, they seemed to rely on the shader too much so I wanted to avoid this wherever possible. I used a lot of reference photographs to help me with the lighting and shadows on my textures and I think it made a difference, saying this I didn't really know hoe to utilise my bump maps this time around as I felt that most of the detailing was done in the actual mesh. I kind of felt that my spec maps were a bit lack lustre too because I wasn't so sure what work the shader would do and what the spec map would have to make up for.
As for setting up the scene this is what I struggled with the most. I really didn't understand it at all and when I asked for help off James he didn't have time so I just kind of sunk into despair. The only help I received in the end was in a Skype call with my best friend in Germany. She managed to clear a few things up for me but I still don't feel like I grasped this project very well at all. I think I managed to change my materials into ones compatible with the Direct 3D shader or is it a view port shaders? I have no idea. I don't even know if I added the shaders correctly or in fact at all.
In the end I had to abandon my country street scene in favour for a studio lights set up just to show what I had managed to do. I was pretty upset about this but I really couldn't get my scene to work. If I'm honest I don't know what I would have done differently except for spending less time on my mesh as I don't really feel like I understood the project all that well. If anything this really proves to me that this isn't the career path for me as I tried to rise to the challenge and kind of crashed and burned rather spectacularly. I honestly can't wait to get away from all of this as it really doesn't suit me at all, I have tried really hard and I have felt like I have put my all into it and I still can't do it. It's the first time in my life that I have wanted and tried so hard for something that wasn't meant to be and it is a little soul destroying to be fair. Although I pretty much despise what I have to do on the course and how ill the stress and pressure I have put on myself has made me I am very greatful towards my teachers and the university for the journey I have been on and the skills they have tried to teach me.
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