Mentor Advice.

I've heard back from two of my mentors this week: Mike (Traveller's Tales), and Alex (2000AD).

Both have provided great insights into their professional practice, and as such I now have a few experiments I want to try out over the next few days.

I won't go into the detail of the e-mails for obvious reasons, but Alex did explain his production methodologies. He explained his process at the beginning of a project, and went on to describe inspirations, and general practice.

All this can be seen across on his blog.

So from his advice I decided I would explore the 3D side of early design benefits. In my PDP action points I addressed an interest in "Designing through 3D" and so I hope this will help me in that part.

From Alex's advice I think I'm going to attempt this pipeline:

Thumbnails > 3D staging & lighting > Final paint.

This is something I've never tried before, and so I'm really excited to see how it turns out. It probably won't be great, but I'm sure it'll benefit my research.

Mike also gave incredibly useful advice. He referred all his practice to the famous LEGO series. His perspective is from the role of Technical Animator, so this actually ended up being a great help to further connect my project for this with my animation module.

Action points for the next week

- Thumbnails for my character.
- Select thumbnail to mock up in 3D with an emphasis on speed. No point sketching in 3D if it takes all day.
- Create effective lighting in scene.
- paint over and replicate lighting in Photoshop.
- Analyse work.