Toolkit 2 - Reflective statement

Toolkit 2, especially Jetpack Jones has been quite a challenge for me. Since I am not able to use the University's computers at the moment, I had to do some of the work on my own Mac at home - which is not able to run Maya smoothly. A lot of times my Mac would crash for the easiest things like rendering an image or opening  a file. That made it difficult for me to finish some of the tasks.

However, since I have started early with most of the tasks I was in a good place before the lockdown. I had most of the tasks we were given in the lectures finished and already posted, or had to finish a bit up in the last weeks.

Mudbox was an interesting and new program to learn. However it too was a challenge for my Mac, which is why I was not able to create my own model. But I am looking forward to picking up digital sculpting next year and work more with Mudbox or even Zbrush.

The thing I found the most difficult was to follow the Jetpack Jones tutorials. Which is ironic because they are made to work by yourself from home. But still they gave me a harder time than the premise hand in. Maya is such a complex program and one little mistake or one wrong click can have a big influence on the further progress. I definitely was missing the opportunity to just go into the next room, ask Simon or Alan for help or have a quick look over your model and then continue the work. That was sadly not possible in the last weeks. So I often tried to solve problems myself, ask other students for help or tried to move on. But often these problems caught up on me at some point and I had to re-do a lot of things.

But I guess the good thing is, that I now know skinning perfectly after doing the tutorials three times. It got so far that I did not even have to follow the tutorials since I remembered what I had done before.  However, spending time on the same things again caused me to not finish all the tutorials, or even got to the stage I wanted to be by the end of this year.

I will try my best to finish Jetpack Jones over the summer, but I am happy I was able to finish all the other tasks for Toolkit 2 in time.