Reflection

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It was a great project, and I learned plenty of new skills and methods of work. I consider this project to be successful; I mostly managed to achieve what I established in the proposal document. I think that I will never be entirely pleased with my work; however, I believe that what I have created meets the industry standards and works well in the engine.
Now at the end of this project, I can see all the mistakes I have made, and ideas of how to fix them. In the beginning, I knew that I want to create a chicken leg house; however, I was really struggling with the decision of how to approach this. I was somewhere between the character and environment art, and I wasn't sure of what to stick to. This led me to have a project that is somehow between the two, but more towards character art. My initial idea was to make a house as a centrepiece of the environment. However, after the feedback that I received and my thoughts, I decided to go for the character art. My idea was to create a set of modular models that will allow me to build the house. This way, I have created a few version of logs, support columns, windows and roof pieces. This approach may work very well for environment building, but I think that a different approach should be taken when making the character like this. The second issue was that the initial build of the house lacked the personality and character features like some sort of eyes and mouth. This was changed with the second build, and I think that the overall product looks like a character. The biggest problem, I believe, are textures, there should be more variety as well as some wear and tear. If I were about to redo it I wouldn't go for modularity, and I would rather create the whole building from scratch having the texture more personalized, rather than repetitive.
I think that I should spend more time creating Baba Yaga and make her the fully rigged and playable character, but I was running out of time, so I decided to keep it simple. I was really struggling with her animation and to make it look smooth, so it is not perfect, but I can accept the result.
In the beginning, I was thinking to go for a fully realistic style with real-world based textures. However,  during the project, I decided that it would be better to make it more stylized because the overall theme is very fantasy-based, so this stylization may help to enhance the fantasy feeling.
I had a great time creating the animation. I used the method that I'm familiar with because it was efficient, and it allowed me to manipulate the geometry in various ways. I am quite pleased with the animation itself, and I think that I was able to achieve the feeling of heaviness and instability, which I was going for. The use of clothing system inside Unreal also seems to work perfectly for this animation. I should spend more time tweaking certain parts of the animation like roots and herbs; however, overall, I think it looks good.
I know that there are many parts that I could do differently and better; however, I haven't thought about it early enough, so I would run out of time trying to redo it.


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