Week 3 Personal Journal

This is the third week of our project. However, this is one of my worst weeks of this project. For this week, our team was able to complete the GDD and related concept arts. However, outside of that, we were not able to complete much. It doesn't mean that we didn't try, it is just things does not go as planned.

So as the character modeler, I wanted to push myself to finish the rigging process within this week. However, after 30-40 hours forcing myself to create a perfect rig, it was simply not working. I was able to perfectly skin the legs, but the arms and shoulders were just simply out of my skill range. I was forced to redo all the clothing since it adds too many new vertexes on top of an already complicated model, and I also needed to recreate some new clothing for our character. I tried multiple methods, which includes coding it (youtube tutorial), simply rigging it, and last but not least, using MAYA 2016 extension 2's quick rig. Nothing worked. It cost a huge burnout. And hopefully, with a new week, I would able to reset myself and figure out a way to progress the project.

As the group manager, I started my week by writing a document of individual task and group task for our members. I think I am doing a better job of understanding each member's strength and weaknesses, allowing them to shine on their own field. I was also able to guide our object modeler on how I wanted the refined weapon to look like. I was also able to complete our GDD with my members in an efficient manner. Lastly, I have updated our group blog for this week as well.

As for the reflection of myself, I think I need to slow down my pacing of work since it greatly damaged my mood and enthusiasm when I hit the roadblock (rigging). I also want to improve communication skill since I refused to ask for my team member's time to help me out with the rigging process which wasted a lot of time of my own. As for my team, this was a slow week unfortunately, I totally understand, because we had multiple long writing due. They were great this week. The only thing I would still want my team to improve on is giving out ideas and suggestions.

Update: There are some other tasks that I have done in the past day. I was able to rewrote part of the GDD to make them from point form to complete sentences. I also help created our presentation slides.

(Newest rigging process photo, new clothes, not working)