Week 2 - Wednesday: Symposium Session 1

Today I had my first symposium session where I discussed with my peers how we would each be documenting our projects. I and a few other students brought up that we would be adopting a habitual approach where we would follow a rigid structure in regards to blog posts. You can see below an image from my presentation where I highlight my posting schedule:

Here you can see that I have suggested dedicating some days to a specific theme. I feel this style could help me keep things organised and also make it easy to summarise my development when it comes to my major project presentation as all the relevant posts can be organised by week and day.

To my surprise lots of people really liked the idea of dedicating certain days to a theme, such as my "Forefront Friday" posts. It was interesting to note that a lot of people weren't going to adopt this structure for their documentation and it was nice that I inspired some people to try my approach!

Whilst I feel segmenting the days like this is useful, I will most likely talk about different topics on some days depending on what I have achieved that week and my overall progress. I also won't be posting on the weekends because it seems unnecessary to do so when I discuss my project planning during the week.

I think my biggest takeaway from the symposia session was that forcing myself to take an almost ritualistic approach to documenting my work is the right way for me to go about doing things. This way I am forcing myself to constantly examine the forefront every week and not just when I feel inspired to do so. I think this is important for me as I tend to get too absorbed in my projects, and I believe it would be beneficial for me to take a step back and consider my work in relation to the front runners of the industry.

Tutorial Feedback

During my tutorial session I got an answer to an issue that was causing a lot of slowdown in my workflow. I was shown a method for surface transferring details without the need for baking each component of a model separately. This had been quite time consuming when creating the first part of my fireplace as I was having details being projected onto the wrong surfaces. My solution had been to bake the individual pieces separately which worked, but cost a lot of time when I had to edit the individual maps back together in Photoshop.

Fortunately with this new method I can bake all my details at once by moving the individual components of the model further apart from one another. This way I don't have to worry about projecting undesired details onto the wrong surfaces.

For the upper part of my fireplace model I have moved the individual details apart from another so that the surfaces do not overlap once I bake them in Substance Painter. The Red line represents the distance of the projection around the geometry. The further apart, the less likely the projections will overlap.

This technique is called "exploding" and in the image above you can see how I have moved the objects of the top part of my fireplace far apart so that the cage distance between them does not overlap. You can see the results of the bake below:

This is the Occlusion, Roughness and Metallic map that was created in Substance Painter from my exploded geometry. It was made without the need for cleaning it up in Photoshop as I had to do with the lower part of the fireplace.

I will be using this technique for the majority of my assets and I am SO glad I learnt this early on as it was a huge time saver for this asset. I am confident in the utility of this technique and will be permanently adding it to my creative arsenal.