Cart Final Thoughts

 10/01/22 - Hand In

I have now completed the cart project and here is my final thoughts and evaluation on the project as a whole. 

Starting the cart project, I was quite ambitious and wanted to make a nice shop front scene. I do think, though there ended up being a lot to do, that this was a good idea and it has really improved my scene adding a lot of interest and story to it. I managed to get the block out and base of the high poly for the cart done quickly, though I think the sense of confidence and lack of consideration is what caused this project to have problems and unsolvable problems (for the timeframe, anyway).

Sculpting the cart and fruit was really fun and I enjoyed adding small details and blemishes to both. I definitely am stronger with natural materials and objects rather than hard surface. I tried to make the cart and fruit as accurate as possible so I spent a lot of time adjusting the cart's base to get it correct to the reference photos. I did the same with the fruit and added a lot of small blemishes as well as tried to get the shape of each one as realistic as possible. Wanting this, I spent a long time on the pineapple and decided in the end that I would make the skin a texture, this, I think, was a mistake as the texture warps a lot and doesn't look as accurate as I could have made it as a sculpt in zbrush. Overall, I think the fruit sculpts and cart sculpt is definitely the most successful part of the project and was definitely the most enjoyable part.

Unwrapping really was the start of my problems. I decided to use the budget given as 1x 2048 texture sheet for both the fruit and the cart. Ideally, I would have split this up into 4x512 texture sheets as this would have allowed me to separate a lot of the items, such as the fruit from the baskets. The way I did it just meant that I had issues with baking and importing into painter and was just needlessly complicated especially as I had to add on the baked fruit planes onto the main sheet which just added time for no reason. In the scene overall, it would have also allowed me to have the glass on a separate sheet which would have easily allowed me to add a shader.

I managed to get the lighting done early in the project which was super helpful. I am quite pleased with the lighting though obviously I did change it from this point. I went through a couple of variations for the lighting in the beginning though I found a couple tutorials on how to light night time scenes and this was very helpful, the warm glows with the purple/blue looks really nice. I do doubt that it looks realistic enough though and if this would cause problems with the brief.

Texturing, especially for the fruit and cart, was alright. I enjoyed those two parts but the rest of it seemed long and tedious. I didn't get on too well with the wicker basket texture and it took me a very long time to figure it out to a standard that I felt was somewhat good, I still would like to improve this texture. The cart is definitely my best bit of texturing here as it was of course what I spent the most time on. Eventually I ran out of time and the rest of the scene was a bit rushed and some of it is not up to a standard I am very happy with.

The method I approached with baking the fruit was most likely, wrong. I used the low poly to bake with, which was better in terms of poly count in max but it made it so I lost quite a lot of detail after they were baked. It was, however, my first time baking in marmoset and this taught me a lot about baking using this program and the benefit of it. It worked very well for specifically the shop front, though I wish I'd baked in an emissive.

Another major issue was that I kept forgetting bits and pieces of the project, this was down to lack of detailed planning and its definitely something I've learnt is very important over these past couple of projects. The main one was the foliage which I had to texture very quickly and they do suffer from looking rushed. 

As I closed off this project, I started to notice a lot of these mentioned things and how I could improve and do things a lot better if I were to do it again. This is good as it shows progress but I think things such as the glass, foliage and technical quality pushed this project down quality wise and I wish I has a little more time to fix these things. Though in some ways I feel I would need to redo a lot of this project to fix parts of it.

I don't plan to do environments for my FMP as I just don't enjoy most of it, I mainly enjoy texturing and sculpting which I feel is a much more major part of characters.

Overall, this was a very telling project and though I feel that the quality in some areas such as the fruit and cart itself has potential, I don't feel the overall quality is up to the standard that I initially wanted.