Final Evaluation!

The project overall was great I liked working with Maya although not as planned but close enough to make me proud. Creating a historical ship was quite challenging but using the whole 6 weeks to take a gradual approach to modelling and reusing models which I have created. A lot of new and very completed skills were learnt during the process, I learnt a lot about CV curves and how they can be such great help. I also learnt how to model fast and this project also polished my modelling skills to produce clean typology models.  Reference was the key to my project and I think I found very good reference, enough to get my idea flowing and into a 3d model.

Some problems in the model are that very small things don't line up properly in the -X axis because the ship wasn't mirrored correctly so the small mistake at the start caused a huge distress at the end which is something I learnt from. I did my best to try to keep everything in line. Another problem was that the modelling process took too long even though I worked on it pretty much everyday since the start of the project. But the target of getting the ship textured and presented in UDK had to dropped because it would take too long and if I get time after the project I might consider texturing and presenting it properly. Also, I wanted my ship to be very low resolution at around 30k maximum which unfortunately was almost fifteen times as high. Mainly due to the CV curves and the cannons (cannons were 10k triangles and I have 12 in the scene). If I wanted to drop the resolution dramatically I would start with cutting down some of the extra rings in the rigging and than focus on the cannons because this could half the resolution (449k triangles at the moment).

I liked working alone n this project if I had any sort of help that would be with texturing and I would be able to deliver the project perfectly textured and also modelled. If I was to do this project again the main focus would be on modelling faster and also focusing on UV's earlier rather than at a later stage. If I UV'ed each model I created than when it was to be duplicated and positioned somewhere else it wouldn't take long to just get a texture on it. When going back into a scene to UV it becomes very tedious to think about where to start because for example the barrels in my scene could of been uv'ed and then textured easy now it seems impossible. Also, I would not set myself such high targets which are unachievable this is something that I also learnt during this project.

Rendering was also a issue which I will overcome soon because it's something that I never looked into so closely before. If I had some more time about another 4 weeks than I would definitely have the whole ship with every component textured and presented in a very high standard way.

I am very pleased with the result and I have put together a render for my FMP. The first video which is around the ship didn't turn out very well the lighting wasn't that good and it created a very awful render but I still put it in because it shows some highlights of my model.

To help my work and to keep on top of the work I used Google calender which was great help it did help me a lot so I didn't fall behind my work. It also helped me organise what I need to get done first and what can be done after. I did fall behind on the last week of the project was not able to finish the model and I supposed to be able to export the model into UDK but that idea was dropped but I still tried to import it into UDK which didn't work out. That was very unfortunate.