Over this project, I managed to learn some new skills and expand on the skills I already have. I had some feedback from my FMP that said I should explore outside of my interests for when I do research, so I tried my best to do so. I researched some games I haven't played, looked at cultures, and applied various different inspirations that I found out about during the research. This ended up being extremely useful to me, I think researching outside of my interests and knowledge I already have is important so that I am not restricted to a set amount of information to influence my work, therefore giving me a wider variety to work with and more knowledge to inspire my future work. Doing this also helped me to understand and apply something I have struggled with for a while: time management. Though it wasn't as improved as I hoped to be, it has gotten much better. Researching different workflows and how game developers/artists organise their schedules and order of working helped me to apply this knowledge into how I worked on my current project and I noticed an improvement in comparison to my other projects in Year 1. It will also be useful for the next project where I will be working in a group and everyone must be at the same pace for efficiency. However, I think I could improve by researching different genres and types of art to broaden my options even more. I will also try to create a schedule with set amount of times for each section of work to improve my time management as much as I can.

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During my designing process I went through several stages to come up with the final piece. At first, I was stuck on what I should do for the environment design because so many ideas were popping up into my head, creating concepts helped with this and I was able to have all my ideas in front of me so I could decide which one I was the most interested in. I created my story as I was researching different ideas to use within my design as I went along, I should improve on this by creating it beforehand so I do not waste time researching things that I cannot apply to my work. In the future I should also create a final plan to base my work off of, I kept adding things on as I went and created models I didn't even get to use so it wasted precious time I could have used to make my final piece even better. 

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Along the way I ran into some struggles. Some things didn't look how I wanted them to, animating each crystals individually in the final scene instead of a quicker method, but most importantly, the rendering. Rendering is the most important part of my project, since without it, the end result would be completely different due to my use of lights and textures. After finishing my scene I started rendering the animation at home but this ended up taking a while and I ended up having to render my animation very last minute in college, which also required me to reapply half of my textures. In the future I really need to plan things out properly instead of jumping straight in and going with the flow, structure is needed for me to complete my projects to the fullest efficiency. Compared to my 1st year, this year has a larger workload so I was not used to it at all, however now that I have experienced it, it will be helpful for my next projects as I know how to react.

 

Overall, I am starting to hit the targets I set myself at the beginning of the year and I am quite happy with this. 3D animation is becoming a lot more enjoyable to me, asking questions helped me with this as I learned different skills and techniques I did not know before and can apply it to any other work I do from now on.