final assignment 1st blog post

Since the assignment was given the group has co-ordinated reasonably well with the odd exception which was ultimately out of that person's control, however everyone contributed to some degree.
The work ethic was good and the amount / quality of work was also good, hopefully this ethic will continue over the Christmas holidays and on through to the end of the semester.

The group has been together for past group assignments and the end product as always been of satisfactory quality, all team members contributed well, our time keeping is good.
On the whole we work well as a team, we always do and as such we pour all our effort into our assignments to hopefully achieve optimal marks and as such are optimistic about this new assignment.

2 Man matinee script assignment

This project came together acceptably at the end, sadly several of the plans made went wrong during the construction, and the final sequence of the matinee was totally different than the origional plan. based on the feedback, our camera work could have been better, and there were too many pauses during the sequence, something i agree with, however because of poor planning on my part the sequence was running a little short, so it was nessisarry to... lengthen it. however to some extent this did spoil the matinee. one of the other issues was sound effects coming out too quiet, next time having the main character play them might prove more effective.

Basic Matinee Sequence assignment

This task was reasonably simple and not excessively time consuming, however I did find several difficulties while building. A major part of this was the fact I have not used the unreal editor toolset since level design 1 a year ago, however in spite of being a little rusty, the level came together better than other levels I have previously built in UT. The levels basic construction I technically cheated on a little, using the base outline of the final assignment for level design 1 and tailoring it for the new purpose I had for it. When I was done clearing it I simply had 5 rooms in an interesting layout ready to work with. The bigges construction problem I had while building the level was, as it always is in Unreal ED, finding the right sort of static meshes thanks to epic’s fantastic naming conventions for static mesh folders. Because it was inevitable that most people would make Egyptian themed levels since those statics are in ready supply and easy to find, and more importantly because real museums are never a single large exibit of just one culture/part of history, I wanted to make a multi themed museum. With 5 rooms ready for this purpose I attempted to find 5 different kinds of static that would be appropriate for a museum exibit. I ended up with a cave themed room, an Egyptian themed room, an industrial gothic themed room, an alien tech themed room and finally an eastern themed room. Of course the main task of the assignment wasn’t the actual level build, but the camera work within it. Since we were limited to camera techniques only, and no scripted sequences or trigger work for this assignment, the cameras were fairly simple to make. Unfortunately I left starting work a little too late and as a result was somewhat rushed when it came to completing the camera work which meant it was a little less intricate than I would have liked.
When looking back and reflecting upon this particular task I can see several things, the first and most important is that my ability to build levels has improved compared to last year, and while it still isn’t up to a standard I would like it to be I can improve further as this year goes. One of the main criticisms of my matinee sequence was that the camera paths were too mechanic, and had a certain rollercoaster feel to it, this was a fair criticism, and useful for future reference. One of the other important things I picked up during the feedback is that its better to try and give the camera a personality, rather than just having it be a camera.