Finally back down in London ready to tackle the looming deadlines head on! The first deadline to meet is for Experience Design and I’ve only just finished the screens for the app. I still feel somewhat unconfident with regards to my design skills especially with something I’ve never before and where the reputations of team-mates also hanging in the line! However, these is a part of me that is proud of the final look of the app because I was anticipating it to look really amateur or like a child made it!  I hope to apply these new-found graphic design skills to making my own personal web site sometime in the near future…

Here’s a taster of what the app is going to look like! I wish I knew proper programming so I can actually make a commercial phone app!

I’m working on this project with fellow Digital Media Kingston students Jack, Tan and Wlodek.

The User Experience Design 1 module has been interesting but I haven’t enjoyed it very much…though I do think critically and theoretically in terms of my practice the fun part is in the creating! Less words and more pictures is my motto…sort of! I’ve never really done any serious graphic design work so it’s all pretty new to me and I have learnt a lot about the design process in the graphic design/web/interface context.

My group decided to create a web app that is accessible via Internet enabled mobile devices – to the rest of the class designing an app is probably boring and easy but for me it was all a very new and enlightening experience and I am happy to have been involved in such a project. I decided to take the visual design into my hands and my inexperience shows in the design – still…not too terrible for a first-time graphic designer! (I like to think)

These are obviously just the first set of polished visuals for the app – there’s plenty of room for improvements and I hope my team mates with more experience in design can help me out my learning experience.

Hmm…it’s rather crazy that we had about a month for an easy assignment and just over 2 weeks for a much more difficult one but oh well, it was still doable. This course is getting intense!

Second assignment for the Fundamentals of CGI module. We were required to model a real object, texture it realistically then composite a rendered image of the object into a photograph; replacing the real object it was based on. I encountered a lot of problems with this but I’m overjoyed at finding a simple way to produce such a realistic chrome texture for the alarm clock I modelled.

I rushed it quite a lot…the learning curve on this course is extremely steep I spent more time reading up on how to do things more than actually doing them but it’s worth it in the end…I’m here to learn (self study). As a result the compositing isn’t flawless – funny thing is for some reason I included a plane under the clock model as a surface…why? Who knows I was obviously not thinking properly – due to racing against the clock (no pun intended) I didn’t have time to re-render the images for a clean alpha channel and had to cut the clock away from the plane (wasn’t too difficult in the end) Now to get a move on with my User Experience Design assignments!

I had 4 weeks to complete my first deadline of this course – though I have dabbled in 3D modelling, animation and rendering in Maya about 2 years ago I have not kept up the practice so am extremely rusty. Luckily I don’t think I’ve done too bad with my model of a vacuum cleaner – lighting and texturing needs a bit of work but overall I don’t think it’s too shabby for a warm-up exercise

So it has been a week or since starting this Masters – hope things go well for me this year and I learn lots about the Games industry! Keep your eyes open for updates on my assignment work or if you’re curious to my personal work please check out my other blog here:

http://anna-jonyi.chen.blogspot.com