Open Project - Evaluation

Open Project Evaluation

For this project I decided to do a 3D Environment as can be seen from my final product and the planning. Personally, I think that this is the best I could do, given the time frame and also the amount of work that I made for my self.

By the time that I had finished the planning and was part way though the work, I realised that I had given my self way more work than I thought, so I became overloaded with the amount that I had to do. But by this time I had already gotten too far into the work and also the timeline to be able to change what I was going to do.

So I have had to scrimp on some detail in the textures of most of the assets in the project, this is because of how bit the environment is. This is something that I would change the next time, I would make sure that the spaces were more snug so that the assets were not so separated that the spaces looked empty.

What went well:

I think the theme and the idea are the two things that are the best about this project, I feel as though they link very clearly and it is also rather plain that the idea is of something to do with dragons.
I like this because I think that this is a unique idea, not so much the idea of a dragon, but the idea of making it a reserve for them.

I also think that all the assets made for project are rather well put together and also I thought about all polygons that went into making most of them with the least amount, I was trying to keep the poly count down, so that it would not overload the engine with a load of unnecessary data that would not need to be there.

What did I find difficult:

I found doing all the textures for the assets to be the most difficult thing. I find it hard to be able to use the UVs to there full potential. So my textures pretty much always have seems and they are stretched and some other things also happen every now and again. I also do not know how to optimize the space within the UV area.
This is something that was also really time consuming, and I did not leave myself time to do them any better than they are, unless there is time for rework, and if it is worth it. I makes me disappointed in my work when I see that I could not put 100% into everything, mostly due to the time scale.

Did I encounter any problems:

One problem I encountered was that of the sizing of the environment in relation to both humans and dragons. So at some points I was not sure what some parts should be in relation too, like the gates of the dragon enclosure and also the assets that would be for dragons, so it was quite tricky.

Making the sky, this is something that I found to be a problem, I wish that I thought about about this before I started a blank map because this made it difficult.




Getting textures for all the assets was hard, and some of my work as suffered for it.

How did I overcome them:

I used a skeletal meah that is already in UDK and then sized most things by this, or I would open up the game in the preview, so that I could look at it for a "1st Person" point of view, to see if it felt right from that preview#
 
I did not really overcome this probelm, I personally could not find away to make this happen the way that I wanted, so I just added an emmisive moon to the black scene.

I just basically reused and made really basic textures, just to make sure that everything was done, this was something that I was not happy with. It dissapointed me greatly that I skimped on detail.
What would I change if I did the project again:

Time management is something that I would look into more, and I would also make sure that I would to things in a more linear order, so that I would not have to keep going back and having to re-impor things, This was something that both annoyed me and sometimes confused me, since i wasn't always sure, what needed to be done.

I would make sure that I would not give myself as much work for such a small time period again. so that I do not get swamped by all the work again.