NEXT-GEN Nescot Year 3 HND - Personal and Professional Developments to support growth to a Career of interest

I believe the improvements I made to the 'Making of a Monster' poster have personally improved my skills to a more professional degree.

This is because the use of higher grade texture and mapping is widely used in the industry and is incredibly important to develop. The VFX and Video-game industries require these high quality effects to sustain its audiences.

This leads to employment being highly competitive and I would need more developments in my work for when I enter it.

Because of this, I've been improving my skills at both home and college by using tutorials to learn new softwares that specialize in different areas of video-game development and VFX. This is so that I could eventually get a job in the Video-game industry, due to my well rounded skills while also having a fallback industry of VFX because they share many of the same skills and softwares.

Examples of what I have done to improve my skills on a personal and professonal level include:

• Experimenting with code in 'Unity' to create a rag-doll-based movement script and using tutorials in movement code from 'YouTube' and 'Unity's' official website as a starting point before experimenting and branching out from there, leading to my code being nearly completely from scratch.

• Starting to use 'Blender', which is a free modeling and VFX software that is known for its realistic fluid and rag-doll simulation abilities, with the ability to auto-generate destruction of models such as doors and fully render realistic water with foam and impacts to surrounding objects. I did this by using the automatic tools available for breaking models and creating water and also using tutorials to create small models, more detailed water effects and more effective breaking effects such as the model turning to sand. These tutorials have mainly been from 'YouTube' because the official website doesn't have many tutorials to go by other than the bare basics.

• Using 'Unreal Engine' to experiment with level layout, by using models and pre-existing textures to create maps, buildings and to experiment with player interaction with levels. As well as adding animations to characters/models. I did this by looking through many different tutorials on both 'YouTube' and their official website, trying my hand at making a few textures and models in the process as well.

• Honing my skills in 'Maya' by creating many different models, textures and experimenting with the X-Gen editor by trying to create accurate hair or hair effected by wind and gravity. Meanwhile I experimented with  N-Cloth by using gravity and realistic movement of cloth. I did this by watching tutorials on 'YouTube' for X-Gen hair and N-Cloth physics, as well as modeling tutorials for more sophisticated tasks. Unfortunately, the Autodesk website doesn't give detailed enough tutorials so I had most of my help from there in text form.

The models I made in 'Maya' would often differ however. I often centered around Norse or Viking themes. For example: I created a Viking helm, boat, sword and sheild alongside an assortment of plates, bowls and cups.

• Using 'Sculptris' to create/sculpt models such as a large sculpted T-Rex. This was by mostly learning it in class, however, I watched a few tutorials on 'YouTube' to master the software to its full potential. Unfortunately, I never looked through their website for tutorials but I believe I know the softwares full capibilities.

• Using 'Mudbox' to sculpt models from existing meshes and to create normal and bump maps. This was done by looking at both the official website for information as well as some 'YouTube' videos too. Despite this, I still have some difficulty with the software, but with the use of tutorials I find it much easier to use.