If you could turn back time what would you do for your final major project at university, around 8 months plus you could use 3 months in the summer.
Would you make a Homage?
Maybe a single showreel piece like the showroom car model in the cryengine 3 demo.
A short game trailer.
Tell me you're ideas, I would really like to hear them no matter how crazy.
Replies
Why would you have to turn back time to do this?
I guess I would focus less on animation/ film making, more on modelling/texturing. Nothing in particular though.
If there was such a thing back then and I was dumb enough to take it...
I would have eneded up doing the same thing I was doing in my spare time. Half Life had just come out, so I would do a small environment with some simple objectives, no combat, maybe I would do some simple FPS hand/weapon models to go with it just to give it a different feel. If we could team up with others we would do a mod.
If I was to do a final project now...
I would be tossed up between doing the same thing in UDK or Unity probably aimed at mobile so I could take it into a peer review or interview.
Or...
Doing an animated short to real-time specs. Probably of a short song or poem that told a short, simple funny story. Nothing too elaborate.
Or...
Pick an interesting photo probably from Shorpy, opacity.us or some underground/urban explore site and recreate it in a real time engine, probably UDK.
As for projects, my school never had anything like that. It wasn't a very good school. It was cheap though.
:thumbup:
amen
Nail on the head. Couldn't agree more.
Yep that about sums it up...
Turns out it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I don't have unmanageable debt (which is not to say no debt, but it's nothing I can't overcome soon), I'm taking care of myself without financial help from anybody, and everything I know I've learned through my own hard work and from asking other people for help. It's taught me how to retain information and how to get over myself and ask other people to help me. Those two skills are things that modern colleges wouldn't teach me.
If I could go back in time, though, I'd tell myself to start using Zbrush much earlier. Playing catch up is never fun when you need to do it in the middle of production work.
As for final projects, I didnt finish my final project to the point where I wanted it when school ended, but it was by then I already knew grades and all that jazz were unimportant. I spent another month working on it to make it awesome and make it something that would get me a job and in the end it did.
The only people I can see who would want to go back and "change" things in the past are people who are unhappy with there life in the present and instead of looking back and wishing you did things differently, change them now for the present.
If I could go back to change that, I would have tried to switch groups so I could be with a more 3d game/animation focused group and then attempted to do some sort of 3D game level. We had to write research papers (comparing normal maps to non normal maps probably wouldn't have worked...) I recall one recent group doing research on 3D Vision versus non 3D Vision in a game environment in UDK. I think, can't say for sure.
OR!! I would have gone to an even easier group project and worked on my portfolio.
I'd make a 3D game where you can mine and farm stuff and build stuff and everything is cubes with pixel art textures. And zombies and skeletons and freaky green dudes on 4 legs come out at night. ;P
I'd definately not do a space invaders animation that requires me to print out every frame (about 2500) on A4 paper and trace over every single one to give it a hand drawn look... The pain!
With that in mind, I wanted to make an animation of a full-sized gundam being built, using the pieces of a gunpla kit as reference for every single component. There's something about giant mechs being built piece by piece just makes me think "oooh, cool"
At the end I also wanted to animate it taking off. I imagined it to be all epic and stuff. A little bit like the SC2 intro with the marine getting his armor put on, or Iron Man (movies).
MW2 did this in the credits, it was awesome No hologram/wireframes though, but they were animated!
I like it when games include 3d model viewers in their bonus sections, like in the latest batman and spiderman games.
Amusingly, we did get Paul Steed, who I think was still at id at that point, to play it. He played it for a couple of minutes then made some vague excuse and walked away very quickly.
Instead of wasting so much time working on things I hated to 'broaden my horizons'.
Massive Echo, don't let your parents talk you into this... unless It WILL progress you further, do a lot of research.
Still working hard tho to get in
got a b due to poor formatting
Thanks everyone there are some great ideas, I love the idea of huge Gundam being built.
I will tell my students your thoughts, for those of you that chose not to go to University and taught yourself then I will change the question for you.
The boss says "you have around 10 months to do any showreel plus any short project you wish to do, so what is it you are going to make?"
Plus he says" if you fail or give a stupid answer he will make you do karaoke every friday"