Unit 5 was another collaboration project. We worked with Yellow Design and Westminster City council to design an augmented reality instilattion.
I found this unit difficult to navigate my way through, the main reason being that I was far away from campus and I had to work remotely. From this experience I learnt to appreciate how difficult team work can be in the Design Industry. Sometime you may have an idea that you think is good and would benefit the project but if you are absent from team meetings and rely on messaging applications, you lose the ability to quickly explain and clarify ideas.
Looking back on this unit I do not believe I leant anything new in terms of technical and practical design skills but it was very interesting to learn what completing a design brief for a client could look like. University design briefs will rarely change from week to week. However working on a life brief with a real world client is much more difficult.
We had to think about things that we didn't need to think about in the last unit. For example previously we could use premade assets but this time we had to think about copyright issues of us g work that isn't our own for a public installation. We also had to me mindful of the size of the files because our models will have to be put into a small, easily downloadable mobile application.
The most frustrating lesson was that sometimes you have to repeat yourself multiple times and change your language so that people from non-design backgrounds understand. For example something as simple as saying "pre-vis" would have to be legnthed back to "pre-visualisation". I found myself presenting on behalf of my group a few times. Which made me learn how to communicate with clients. To show that we were taking on their feedback and to show we do respect their wants I found myself saying " based on last weeks feedback which was to ..... we changed/ we added" I also learnt that as much as you can respect the clients wants, and desires, it is important to manage expectations and find a middle ground.
We started as a few small groups of 5 people and after two weeks we ended up as 2 big groups. It was hard to keep a track of everyone including myself at times. We did not have team leaders but as Nathan and Anna and were part of the original group they ended up somewhat leading group. I like to think that we all did our best to include every one which is difficult in a group of 15. Even though in the end everyone ended up producing varying amounts of work, but everyone managed to produce work that relates to their strengths. For example Robyn drew all the shop front designs, Sarah modelled the shop fronts, Nathan put together all the assets and animated the pre-vis with the help of sarah and Alexa. Joey and Stan designed and drew the characters. Phoebe put together the research for the information panels. The rest of us did most of the modelling for the street. This is included making street lights, the sweets in the Sweet shop, the medicine bottle etc. I made the road an the manequin.
When our group was still small, I made designed a template for the vistorian shopping panel. We did not end up using them but I belive it helped us to visualize how we wanted the panels to appear.
Pre-Vis Trial 1:
For the second presentation I tried to make it look a bit more polishes. I added an image as the background and the layer effect Nathan had come up with. Rough pre-vis model are very useful for quickly communicating your ideas whilst the more detailed models are still being built.
Final Pre- Visualisation:
Rough Panel designs:
Before the brief was adapted, I had designed these to fit the 1000 by 3000 pixel constraint. This design has a place holder character, whilst I waited for Stan to finish the character drawings
I added Stan's character once it had been drawn.
Making the road was frustrating because I started trying to scult a cobble stone road from scratch. I started with a single plane and added lots of edge loops and extruded each face .
After discussing my progress with my teammates they concluded that it would really increase the file size. This wasn't actually the case but it looked better as a texture image.
To make it look more realistic I changed the roughness and metallic levels. I also added a slightly yellow light which made it look realistic enough but less photo realistic.
I also made the mannequin for the shop front. I used an image of an old Victorian mannequin as a reference image. I didn't get many opportunities to model in this unit so I really enjoyed making this.
UV Unwrapping :
Mannequin Model :
Because I didn't get to do a lot of modelling I tried to make more object for our scene. It didn't work out but it was fun to try and make a Victorian dress.
I used the Cloth and Collision Modifiers to help shape the fabric.
When I got frustrated with Blender I looked for software that made it easier to model clothes and work with fabric. I found "Marvelous Creator" Although I never finished my models it was a fun introduction to cloth simulations and transferring my Blender Skills into a similar software.
In conclusion I enjoyed this Unit. It was different to the others but still very useful to my development as a designer. This year I have learnt that I am a bit of a perfectionist when it come to group work. I noticed this when I would volunteer to present for my group because I felt that I was the only one able to best explain everything. This is not true because for the most part my teammates were amazing hard working and very capable of presenting but I guess everybody played to their strengths and I think presenting to clients ( strangers ) is mine.
In future Team work units, I aim to learn to be more assertive because I found at times my ideas were't being listened to. This may be due to my lack of confidence in team discussions but this is something I can improve on.
These are some of our final Scene's Renders:
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