Month Two Down... Ahhh D: its only a month till september

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!! So the realisation that September is only a month away has been quite bizarre to say the least. Manic-ly planning, asset listing and concepting the Turner environment!

I feel like I have done a lot more in the past month than the month before, this is probably due to having acclimatised somewhat to the heat and life here which is really cool. I've been given some responsibility at Ubisoft and my mentality seems to have got me in the usual mess of having loads of different things to do. I hope I'm on top of them all though so mess is probably just how its feeling in the brain area.

Achievment: Work on every project in the building = 3/4... wait no 3/5 last week that other team moved in and took our desks, Merde!

This may sound weird but as I am a marketing art intern it's fitting that I wouldn't necessarily have just one project to work on. At the start this really got to me as I wanted to be working with a team and be given work to do and everything be clean and nice and get to know the team really well and... This didn't happen, instead I am pretty much working as kind of a consultant within the building, one team will come and ask for something another will ask for something else. So things are somewhat tricky to keep track of and feel quite bitty as some of the things asked of me are very simple and quick but easily forgotten. However I am growing to really like this independence within the studio, working on 3 projects is pretty cool and the art is incredibly different between all 3 so I'm experiencing a lot of different things. The other thing is that my lack of confidence, because of my appalling French and lowly position, is somewhat improving. My French on the other hand is being dragged along behind me getting its footing every now and then.

I thought when I started that my skills weren't really going to be nurtured or improved a great deal from doing the internship but this meant that I was very psyched to make sure they were and perhaps that helped push me to talk to more people and find more things to do for different people. For example on Tuesday I finished unwrapping a high poly mesh which was interesting, I had to unwrap it to a pre made texture sheet. Having never unwrapped something more than around 10,000 tris it was interesting and definately taught me some cool things about unwrapping, the fact that it only took around an afternoon was quite cool as well. Afterwards I let the person who gave me the task know that anymore things like this would be cool and he gave me one of those "Hmmm okay I might have some stuff for you to do" looks as he left.

Something that I can not forget is that there was a concept artist working on the project next to me (before I was moved) and he has said that he'd be able to spare sometime to work with me a bit. Last week he talked to me for an hour or so and really helped me out. After talking with him I started doing some character concepts for the project in my free time and have now got to near the end of the 3rd concept, noticed an improvement in my ability and understanding which is cool. I'm just going to have to continue the improvements and do some of my own characters so that I can show this improvement to the teachers. Unfortunately I can't talk about the project and I doubt that showing the concepts to anyone will be allowed for quite a while.

That's enough of that! Here's my Lunch Crunching from the past few weeks, really not very happy with it but it was good practice and definitely good practice in UE4 PBR. This is without global illumination turned on and with out baked lighting so the shadows are far too dark, something that I will be looking into for the Turner project that is now in asset list/planning phase.

Start of the Podiums...

I decided to work on some smaller projects as Lunchcrunches, basically an hour or two a day on a small environment, I decided to do three podiums of environments. The idea behind the podiums is that the podiums will reflect the environment with the material or state. I don't know how many I will do, after the first one I think I'm going crack on with the Turner environment again.

 The first is a Greek ruins podium, with a damaged wooden podium, below is the current state of it.

Problems at the moment:

- Scale isn't quite right, looks confusing

- Smoothing issues with vegetation.

- Podium needs more loops to better create circular silhouette.

- Textures on the podium and sand are a bit blurry and low quality.
- Fix floor stone mask.

To Do:

- Fix smoothing on foliage

- More loops for podium

- Break up sand texture with small patches of vegetation

- Small foliage and remove cow parsley

- Grunge up pillars more

To Try:

- Try name carvings into pillars

- Try tiling textures for wood and sand
- Wind bending vegetation

Updating Meshes and Alt-Tabbing

One of the main areas that was bugging me about our group project is that there was some designer (bsp) left in the level and so I "Hi-Rezed" the designer from a random floor texture and like 24 tris to this :) its not perfect and could be worked into a lot but this is it as it is.

This is the start to an environment which is going to have a nice small playable area but a lot of vista stuff. I should learn a lot from this the first thing I learnt is how to set up UE4 so that I can alt-tab (between UE4 and the painting) between the start position of the level and Turner's "Caligula's Palace and Bridge". This was really helpful as I can line things up and work on the terrain to try and get it right so that I can create this environment to test the idea of going inside a painting. I think I'm going to need to paint a skybox because the procedural skybox in UE4 is difficult to manipulate quite as much as I need to.

Next thing to work out is fog... Fog is going to be important...

First Month Down...

So I finished my first month working at Ubisoft and living in France. It has been good, I think acclimatising to the heat will be slow and difficult, the language has also been a tough thing to sort out.

Art-wise I've been working on marketing art for Valiant Hearts whether that be gifs for journalists to use or perfecting screenshots. I'm nots sure what I'll be working on from now on but the launch party was last week and although I only worked on it for a month I went along and met some new people in the company. As Valiant Hearts is all painted and drawn by one artist its been difficult to meet other artists so far. Also Valiant Hearts has an awesome story and I really recommend it, if you haven't seen the trailer prepare yourself.

Aside from that I've been trying to finish off the Cart project but unfortunately I really don't like where it has gone, it simply looks poor and messy, so I think I'm going to go more towards a small turntable idea with a hatch on the floor and some wires and cables dragging around the floor but the cart will be central and focused. Making these changes will allow me to learn more and spend my time better, I'm going to rig and animate the cart, make particle effects for the thrusters, work on materials especially the forcefield and I'm going to try and use matinee to record it a turntable. Below are some images of how its looking at the moment and as you can see its not really working even though its early days, so I think I'm going to try and make more of a turntable for it.

Alongside this I am also working on some of the planning stages for my summer project, I chose the title Ruins to work on and have decided to create an environment based off Turner's "Caligula's Palace and Bridge" painting. The idea is to create the environment so that the spawn position is framing the environment in the same way as Turner's painting. The reason for this is so that I can use this project as a test for an idea I have for my Final Major Project that I'm not sure about. I want to create a gallery space where you can enter into famous/master's paintings. With Turner and constable style paintings I feel that the visual style shouldn't be too far off realism however I am uncertain about certain things such as lighting and fog.

"Caligula's Palace and Bridge" by J M W Turner

An engraving based on Turner's painting by Edward Goodwill. Found here

As you can see Turner's painting is very foggy and interesting, this will be pretty tough to replicate and I will update soon as I have started to play about with this idea. Fortunately for me some other artists used Turner's paintings for some more refined pieces allowing me to use them as reference for the architecture.

Lastly, working hard is difficult here for some reason I don't know why but in Leicester I could work all day at uni and then carry on. Here I'm finding that mentality pretty difficult to find. Lets hope I can get it back because I NEED to get better and I NEED to improve my portfolio and I NEED to make the most of working for the likes of Ubisoft...

Montpellier and Day One at Ubisoft

So last Thursday I got on the plane and left my comfort zone behind, I said good bye to it hoping to meet it again sometime soon. Since then I've been living, exploring and taking photos in Montpellier. The south of France is nice but dusty. I flew not having anything more than a week of accommodation, I had a lead for a possible room and I knew that I needed to make a French bank account and get a French sim card but all of this had to be done with poor GCSE standard French and not much money. Below are a selection of photos from my first few days.

I'm happy to say so far things have gone more smoothly than I was expecting, I have accommodation for the first 3 months and maybe more, I have set up a French bank account, I have a French phone number and I have finished my first day as a Ubisoft employee! I saw some cool stuff, no more shall be said of it, but it was cool, however because it was my first day I didn't get much to done or much to do. I have been told that during the first period of my internship I am to show them what I am capable of so that I can assist with the correct area. I don't think I've ever felt so motivated to create awesome things and show what I am able to do. I will say if there's anything I was scared of, it was this. I was hoping to be the bottom of the ladder and being told what to do because well I suppose that's easier, how ever tough the work may be, you know what you're meant to do. However this has been handed to me so I have some ideas of what I can do to show. I just hope they're enough and they are as desired. Its on my back to do stuff! this means I might be quite busy for the next couple of weeks, here is where I got to with the cart project, I have changed a fair amount and I'm nearly done with the crates.

Review of Second Year

Its only just setting in that my penultimate year of education is pretty much over. It has been a weird but great year and I feel that I understand University education a great deal better now. During first year I sounded really keen and dedicated but I don't think I necessarily proved to be so. I wasn't doing extra work, I was barely teaching myself on the side, self-motivated learning wasn't particularly high up on my to do lists.

With more interesting projects came a desire to learn above and beyond what we were being taught. I feel working above and beyond what you are told to do is what university education is about. Also a job in the industry seemed a lot closer at hand and I knew that I would have to really work hard to secure one this year or next. This drove me to be continuously making extra things or learning about new techniques in my spare time. Most people go to university having experienced a fairly spoon-fed school system and expect that to continue especially with the amount we are in debt for the fees. I hear a lot of "this isn't worth £9,000 a year" and I used to be one of those people but from the start of this year I had realised that we truly have a brilliant course with a brilliant selection of tutors who put the hours in. If you see this and show that you are inquisitive and excited to learn you can easily get your money’s worth. Neil deGrasse Tyson is very good at explaining how I feel education works best. He talks about how you should let children break things, drop things and generally make mistakes. The idea is that experiential learning is essential and the idea that play and learning things aren’t different things. From a young age my brother attempted to make me teach myself pieces of software, hardware… well I guess he just wanted me to teach myself anything rather than being taught things by someone else. Obviously teachers still play a pivotal role in education and below is Neil deGrasse Tyson explaining the importance of teachers.
My university work itself has been alright although I don't feel I've seen the improvement within Visual Design that I would have liked and in Game Production the group project sapped away a great deal of time and I don't feel I have much to show for it. Critical Studies on the other hand yet again I started off well with posting quite regularly about what I was doing and new and interesting things alongside the required tasks but this tailed off around the time I got a job in a restaurant and doesn't seem to have picked up again. This again is where I want to improve and I'm trying to work out a way to do this and keep the productivity going.

That being said, the private company side of universities seems to actually let them down. Having seen the influx of first years and the effect on the course I became worried that the desire for money from the university ruined the idea of educating people. However the lecturers on the course seem particularly capable of not letting this happen, and no matter what, manage to provide some very in depth tuition.

My goals for the course are to learn as much as possible and to get into the industry and continue learning. I am lucky enough to have secured an internship at Ubisoft Montpellier in the south of France and feel that I am ready for this next step in my learning.

Life Changing or Career Building?

With the games industry being what it is, a fringe of the creative industry it is very tricky to know how to educate people for the industry. There is a great deal of technical knowledge, understanding and thought process which you need to have to be successful within the industry. Much of this is also quite specific to this creative industry however this can definitely be taught and probably in less time than 3 years which leaves the possibility of a great artist or programmer being hired and taught the skills while working or while on an internship. While that may have been the technique used at the start of the industry its got to the point now where that isn't necessarily the most efficient way of hiring people.

Why would you hire someone who has less experience of the technology and techniques over someone who has spent 3 years learning how to do things and has been able to play with these techniques to find out new and interesting ways to do things or find out how definitely not to do things? Under the guise of needing people with a good liberal arts background? Well personally I feel that the views displayed in the brief are not as opposing as they seem.

"Some game companies want highly trained graduate artists and programmers. 

Some claim they really prefer creative individuals with a good Liberal Arts 

background. They can’t both be right can they? How can education meet these 

opposing views and yet provide a valid and fulfilling experience to students?"

Is a master painter not both a highly trained artist and a creative individual with a good liberal art background? I'm not saying that people on this course end as master painters but I'm meaning to question the idea that you can't be both highly trained and have a good liberal arts background. I feel having been on the course for 2 years now that we aren't being taught to focus on games and nothing else; if anything we're being persuaded to open out to more than games, and focus on art in general, focus on politics and life. We are learning the technical skills and being taught how to learn. The later being something that I wish I had had better earlier on in my life, the course goes a bit further than my brother telling me to play with software if I want to achieve a certain result, "the more you play around the more you'll learn" he said. Well that has been explained further while on this course 13 years later.

With the whole degree or no degree thing there has been an interesting article floating around recently which made me think about this a great deal more than I had previously. This article discusses what developers think of education, however this is more looking at game design instead of game art. I found it very interesting as I have never felt that University puts you above anyone or that having a degree in game art would make me a better hire than anyone else however I did think that I may be given 3 years to focus on becoming a better artist. That is the important thing, university/a degree is what you make it, it is 3 years to make mistakes to learn techniques to gain a better understanding of both the fundamentals of art and the technical aspects of game creation and pipelines.