Week 4

It's been a rather productive weeks so far, I've managed to finish all my assets related to the room project with every texture put through bitmap2material and edited to give textures some better detail and realistic lighting using PBR. I was dreading this process as I've never created any texture other then diffuse maps before; just the thought of something such as a normal, or roughness map made me shudder, but after researching the topic, the different maps, and how to create them, I realised that it's actually pretty intuitive. During this week I've been able to understand a fair amount about the texturing process and how everything works, I always considered myself hopeless when it came down to texturing and just settled with the idea that I would have to specialise in other areas such as modelling to balance my inability out, but now I feel quite confident about my understanding of the process. I've improved majorly since last year, last year just the thought of UV unwrapping made me feel a physically sick, but now I find it almost relaxing and look forward to process, now that I'm having fun with the whole process I've come to considering to take texturing art as a possible career choice, obviously I have a long way to go yet until I'm near industry standard but I know it's something if can work towards.

I'm still working on polishing up my drawing abilities, and still starting from the basics, this week I've been focusing on single point perspective, and what sucks is that I forgot how freeing and relaxing it is to just walk out your front door and just find places to draw. I spent hours just sitting out in public and drawing trees, building and people; I can't believe I've been missing out on this for almost half a year, obviously I'm going to have alter my work schedule and incorporate as much drawing in as physically possible.

Life drawing was interesting this week, I felt that it was the first time I've come away from a session feeling positive and almost proud of my work. We were taught a new technique (blocking in), in which the model's anatomy is broken down and formed out of blocks; this really helped me with understanding the measurements and proportions of human anatomy, although most of the class felt it wasn't useful as they seem to be much more advanced in drawing then myself, but for me it's worked perfectly, and by using it I can definitely see a vast improvement in my life drawing ability.