Postmortem

I started off this project all other the place, switching ideas every week from asset creation to character design back to asset creation. I feel that if I hadn't been so unsure of what I wanted to do then I would have been able to get a lot more work done earlier in the project and hit all of my milestones. But there was always one thing that I knew I wanted to do and that was modelling and texturing.

When I settled on character design I was looking forward to it as Warframe is a game which I enjoy, this however turned out to be a burden as I would find myself getting distracted by the game itself. Also wanting to learn ZBrush to create the character was a bad choice as it is a very complicated program that would take years to perfect my skills in.

After the first presentation I was recommended to scale back my project and focus on single assets. This recommendation allowed me to focus on a more constrained goal and complete the project on time. Shortly after setting these goals however I found myself disliking anything that I made and I just didn't want to carry on doing something that I didn't like, which caused me to prioritise my other assignments over this one. When i did finally concentrate on this project I ended up really enjoying what i was doing and that in turn helped me create assets that I liked.

When setting out to texture my models I originally thought that Substance Painter would be amazing as on the surface it looks simple to use and the Warframe developers use it. However when it came to me actually using it to texture my model I just felt lost and confused. This is where I reverted back to doing things the way I know how and not trying to learn something new, but this was kind of good as it allowed me to regain some knowledge that I had forgotten.

What I think went well:

• Learning how to sort the UVs for characters.
• I have refreshed myself on how to make certain materials for textures such as normal maps and specular level maps.
• I have leant to become more patient when texturing as now I know the more time I put into unwrapping the UVs the easier making each material will be.

What I think went bad:

• I was not consistent with the blog as there was a few large gaps where there was no visibility.
• I realised how much I had over scoped far too late and had to cut out an asset that I was going to make.
• My research was very weak which caused many problems for me such as not creating any textures in substance painter in the end.

What I will take away from this project:

• If you don't plan and research carefully you will have many problems.
• If you aren't consistent you will fall out of the habit and get less done.
• I found that once I had started working it was easier for me to keep working, I just found it hard to get myself to start anything. I will definitely remember this in the future.

I am quite disappointed by the fact that I couldn't get any in-game screenshots of any of my work due to steam workshop not allowing me to put my assets in the game, but this is okay as everything can easily be viewed in the Warframe TennoGen.

I feel that I could have pushed myself harder to keep on going with this project rather than leaving it on the back burner for so long, this would have allowed me to create better quality models/textures and be able to create all of my intended assets. Overall I think that if I was more consistent with blogging my work I would have realised my mistakes sooner, allowing me to move forward in the right direction instead of wasting as much time as I did fixating on the wrong things.

- Peter Howell