Gart230 Blog- Final thoughts and reflection 

This project has been a fun one to work on, the incredibly broad brief has been nice but a lot more challenging than I had initially envisaged. not having creative restrictions meant that the start of the project was very slow for me as I spent much longer than I ideally should nailing down what I wanted to achieve however once I was set on making an environment that made use of ray tracing as much as possible and I had sourced a floor plan to work to, the limitations I was craving had been put in place and I was able to work in a much more focused manner. The choice to use ray tracing was certainly a pivotal one in this project and even though it threw a good number of curveballs at me and I would have probably done better to wait for the university standard version of unreal engine to progress slightly further before undertaking a project like this, I don’t regret pushing for ray tracing as, being a VR student, I wont get to experiment with this technology much within my specialism so it was nice to have a break from the highly optimized modelmaking associated with VR. I also feel as a creative choice ray tracing brought a significant aesthetic quality to the model which set it apart from much of my previous work which has primarily been low poly or heavily stylized and thus the more realistic reflections lighting and refraction really stand out amongst my portfolio.

I am happy with how the scene turned out as a whole although I accept that it is not film accurate but is instead a hybrid creation of both the actual location and the film scene which I happen to quite enjoy as it showcases some of the best aspects of both by having the interesting colour pallet of John wick but without some of the more tacky elements which have been replaced with the more luxurious features present within the ancient baths themselves.his combination is exactly how I had envisaged the environment coming together and I wouldn’t want to push the environment any further towards either realism or film accuracy as I feel then it would lose the influence of myself as the artist. The biggest mistake I made on this project was not UV unwrapping the models as I went along towards the beginning of the project as this set me back a good week which could have been used creating more assets or textures as opposed to going over existing ones. As the project progressed I did get into the habit of unwrapping models as they were being created so I feel it highly unlikely I will make this same mistake again in a future project. If I were to continue adding to this project (which I most likely will at some point) I would add more set decoration items such as towels, vases and pipes as these all feature quite heavily in my reference material but I deemed them of secondary importance to the assets I actually included as they were not as obvious in the film scene and I would only have added them had I had lots of time left over at the end of the project. To conclude, whilst there have been some setbacks in the project I managed to overcome virtually all obstacles that I encountered and the final cinematic looks how I envisaged it would so I feel that even though I know there is more I could do to improve the project I don’t think there is anything that I needed to get done before now that I haven’t achieved.