Reflection

Reflection

    During my time spent in a game making environment, with Interactive Systems Studio (ISS), I feel like I have developed a lot of skills, from the basic organisation of work, following and sticking to simple steps set out in the work process, traditional drawing, as well as digital painting, used for concept art, 3D modelling, as well as how to use and implement Agile project management, through the use of Pivotal Tracker.

    First of all, when I am talking about organisation of work, I am referring to constant team meetings, where we set out tasks for each team member. The process was split in section, we each took ownership of a certain part of it, and had to organise ourselves in such a way, to make sure the tasks set out were delivered in the time set out from the beginning, and with a high standard of quality. In this step, I realised that there are many acceptable compromises that can be made, and one very good example for me, was to find really good reference images that could afterwards be used as starting point for modelling. 10 minutes spent looking for the references needed, saved me at least half an hour, up to an hour of concept drawing the model I wanted to build. 

    Another very important aspect of 3D modeling, is that once the concept has been accepted, approved and locked, there is no more room for being imaginative, but the art will now be shown in how clean the model built is, in how all the polygons create nice flowing lines, and most importantly, in how, as a 3D artist, you work with that model, to make sure it can be included in the platform aimed at. In my case, the game I worked on, was for the lowest spec platform (iOS), and because of this, my models needed to be quite low polygons. This meant, that, once the model was finished and the general shape was approved, I had to analyse where polygons could be removed, without having a detrimental effect on the overall shape. This was a very interesting and useful exercise, and I feel that I have learnt a lot from it, and gained a lot of confidence when it comes to modelling and taking decisions in this process.

    I have mentioned traditional and digital drawing. I have learned quite a few tricks in traditional drawing, but during my time with ISS, I have worked mainly in Photoshop, and I have mainly done painting for textures. All the textures I have done were painted manually, so I feel I have improved my blending skills, I have learned how to organise my layers in folders, how to merge more files.

    I have also mentioned the Agile Project Management. In ISS, we are using Pivotal Tracker to set tasks for each other, as well as to follow the development of the project. We can easily see what the others are doing, where they are with their work, and how the whole project is unfolding. At the end of each week, we are doing a "round-up" where we each brief the other members of the team, on the progress of our work, and show / bring them up to date with what we have done that week. I found this very useful, for more that one reason. First one is obvious: we all know where we are, what stage the whole project is, and know what deadline we need to set for the following week. The second reason, however, is gaining presentation skills. Because we are presenting to the other members of the team, we need to prepare ourselves for it, all the work needs to be nicely organised, so that when everyone is gathered round your computer, you can just click and show, while talking and explaining. These presentations last 3 minutes each, so we have to organise them in such a way, not to go over, but to have enough to talk about in the time allocated.

    Another very useful aspect of my internship with ISS is backing up my work. We all use the same server, work is backed up constantly, as well as locally (on each individual machine), on the main server as well. And with this comes another brilliant part of organising our work - naming our files using conventional names. Everyone in the art team is using the same naming structure, so that when it comes to using each others files, or combining all files into the final product, everyone can figure out what the other one did, etc.

   All in all, after only a few months, I can say that I have learned a lot and improved my skills greatly. There are still a lot of aspects of a 3D artists job, that I need to learn, there are a lot of tricks I will most probably figure out, the more I practice, but I can certainly say that I have enjoyed and still am enjoying, my time as a junior 3D artist, and looking forward to improving, developing and applying everything I know in other projects too.

(Many thanks to the team at Interactive Systems Studio for all the help and support they have given me these past few months.)