evaluation

Evaluation of final project

For my Fmp  project i decided to make a mask based on Roman and Venetian influences. The reason why i wanted to make a mask was because i really liked the way they just looked so cool, how they looked on someone face and not knowing who they where or what they where, i also really liked the many types of masks there were in real life and in games and films that i could use as reference for my own mask.
For my own reference I looked mostly at games and real life masks from games such as Dishonerd  and zelda aswell as a range of real life masks based on different cultures.
It was useful because i could find out what different shapes and sizes of mask there where there in world and how they are used in there day to day lives like in Africa they still use mask in there ceremony it tradition,
The way it affected my work was when i was doing my designs i was looking at Greek masks  and wanted to do something Greek but i could not get the wings right was annoying so i gave up,
it helped me because i was having trouble with size and topology so when looking at makes people had done helped with the shape of the head as well.
 What inspired me the most was the masks in games i just found them really cool to look at, the one mask that gave me the most was Corves mask from Dishonored, its made of metal and brass and its all Steam-Punky and very creepy. Another was the raider mask from Fallout 4 which was just a bag with a tube in it but reminded me of leather face.
Another influence was the mask from Hitman contracts, where you have to sneak in to a party.
For Corves mask they made the mask out of metal with brass tubes in the mouth and copper in the eyes which made them shiny.  With the raider, its just a bag, so its dull and brown, its all scratched as well so they used cross-hatch on the bag and put the detail in mud box.
When making my mask i wanted to come up with something creepy, so i used the smudge tool in Photoshop to create smoky eyes and put shadows under the eyes as well to make it look gaunt and sunken.

Over the course of this project i had come across some problems
One of the problems was trying to come up with one single idea, i found myself flitting form one thing to another and not staying consistent to my proposal.  I was going to do a mask based of a country like Africa or China, but i had other ideas and then changed them to a more sci fi mask and had a full final mask idea ready, But i then looked at renaissance  masks from Italy and changed it from a full face mask to a half face mask that you could wear to a ball.

Another problem i encountered was that i was struggling to find reference on artists and what they worked on, but i looked really hard and eventfully i found were 5 people that represented what i wanted to achieve in my project and i also found some really good images as well.
First i wanted to make a physical mask that you could wear, but i used clay and it took ages to make, and had problems but in the end it fell apart because it dyed out to much as i couldn't fire it.
My work changed throughout the project a lot,  i did a lot of experiments, which helped me to understand what i didn't want to do but i still struggled with what i did want to do. First I wanted to do a 2D mask on Photoshop, but found it hard to get the topology right so then attempted to do a 3D  mask on Mudbox.  It was a big change to go from 2D to 3D but i also found it fun as well.

I would like to of looked at more real life masks form other country's, I did look at some like Africa and Japan but not that many. There are probably loads of masks out there i just was having trouble to find it, another one was artist as well there was only a few that i looked at but that was just in rush to find some. Some of the visual language elements i used were looking at some different shapes and colours for my mask because people have different head-shapes and colour preferences so I wanted to see what people liked as well as.
The meaning in my designs was to convey a simple style that wasnt too complicated but fun to wear, so with my final it was just black and white. I did try colour but because of my colour blindness i really struggled to get the colours to look right.

I am kind of happy with my final piece, i feel like i could of done better with it and just checked the UV's a bit more and not taken so long on the head and having to restart all the time but i feel like its come out ok and look better as it also look very mechanical, which relates to my reference of being Steam-Punky.
What i really like with some of  my Mud box experiments  is i think i did really well with modelling the eyes and i really enjoyed this process. It was really fun to make.
I would of changed in my design workflow the making of the head, this i felt was as a waste of time and kept me from doing the mask and spending time on it more.
I learned a lot in this project like how to UV and to transfer map my textures onto my work was hard to do but i feel like that can help me later on in my career,
Its important to understand what i did right  and wrong if i just did things right i would not really learn anything new so was important to understand what is needed to do things right.
I feel like i could of done better with this assignment i did well at the start but i just got to distracted and took to much time off due to personal matters.

There where lots of mistakes i made like having to re do my head three times and breaking my Mudbox with over 3,000 polys, I had to reduce the amount of Poly's using the levels and this helped to fix the problem.

 Some of my drawings did not go to plan as well. I found it really hard to get the shading right and found it difficult to get a good standard.

The classroom activates I did helped was using clay,  this was fun because i did use it after all to make a mask.
Problems i encountered were when having so may poly,s in my mud box piece and MAYA did not open so i had to revert back to my low poly model another was when doing my head i could not do the ears so i just restarted the head. |My tutor Simon helped me to sculpt my own head so that i could more easily build my mask off of this. This helped as I struggled to create my own mudbox head.

Overall I felt that I did ok, I could have managed time better and up dated the blog more so that i would not get behind like i did and then i wouldn't have felt so rushed at the end. I like my concept of my mask and i am fairly pleased with my Mudbox model though i am not happy with my Maya model. This was because i found the tools hard to remember and struggled to remember the user interface.