Day 2 - Wednesday 7th September

Today i had a meeting with Lynn to talk about my project and what i want to aim towards.

We talked about what i would see my self doing in 5 years, and if i decide to work in the industry, then the role of character and creature modeller always seemed appealing to me. So i will take that as an aim, and make sure that as part of my world building i do some extra work in characters, specifically the AAA pipeline.

She gave me some names to look up from previous students, Alistair Glenn and Alex Graham both have aspects of their dissertations that i could learn from.

We also talked about dividing up time, and how 60% of the grade is practical, so ~60% of my time should be making things, and the rest can be used to read and reflect, and craft a question that fits in with my practical knowledge.

It was reassuring that in comparison to my last year im already much more prepared, and tackling problems much more head on.

Also found an amazing creature designer called Ken Barthelmey, whos work i have been looking at for the past hour, noticing that he does a lot of concepting in Zbrush.

Day 1 - Tuesday 6th September.

So we have just had our first lecture about our honours project. Immediately i started panicking, concerned that i didn't have a solid idea or rationale for my project yet, and i needed to reassure myself that it is just week 1, and that i still have time to figure out what i want to do.

For now i need to focus on what to do next, i know that i would like to incorporate digital sculpture in some way, and I'm immediately drawn towards character design and modelling, I've always wanted to model creatures and characters, so that may be the direction i end up heading in.

For questions that i can raise about it, I've been concerned that the rise of face scanning for game characters may be something i would be interested in looking at, how does it work? do you still need to change the model manually or is most of the creation done for you? how does it apply to creatures. Could i set up a system that will allow people to control a 3D model of a face, either human or creature, using their own expressions.

That is probably well outside the realm of realistic ideas, but is an interesting thought. It would require a lot of technical knowledge and skills, that i would need to learn on the fly.

Or could i go more down the character and creature design route, how can i create compelling designs that fit into a world, how would that world be created, do i want to involve some elements of environment modelling into the project. Perhaps my project could be to create and model a cohesive world containing monsters and characters, a diorama. Perhaps one that could be explored in virtual reality.

But again it soon balloons out of proportion, and i need to tread the line between achievable and challenging, that still leaves me with my sanity at the end of the year.