A New Term - A New Year

We came in today for the PPD Summative Assessment. It went supprisingly well. We managed to wing it quite well with a lot of babbling on by Alec, Simon and myself. Our work was generally enjoyed I think and therefore I think it was a success. Given three different briefs we are allowed to chose or make up our own. I went for the first as I am quite keen to work within Games.

THE NEW BRIEF:

Brief A: Game Design

Source: Nik Taylor

“I want your students to design, build, and texture a “chop-shop” for us. In case any of the students are wondering, a chop-shop is a garage where stolen cars are taken to be either re-sprayed and given new number plates, or broken up for spare parts. If they want to come up with a name for the chop-shop and appropriate signage then that would also help us out.”“They should use a 3D modelling package that is preferably Max or Maya. The submitted work should consist of both an exterior and an interior.”

“When they model the interior then they should use a 20,000 polygon limit as the game engine won’t be displaying anything other than the interior and characters at a fixed LOD (Level Of Detail).”“When they model the exterior then they will have to build three different LODs, high (5000 polys), medium (2,500 polys), and low (500 polys), for viewing at three different distances within the game engine.”“The texturing of their models is as important as the geometry; their models should be textured using TGA format image files of 256 x 256, 512 x 512, or 1024 x 1024 resolutions.”

Within this brief I have to chose two of the four specialities:

Which of the four possible areas do I concentrate on?
a) 2D conceptualization
b) character animation
c) visualisation (and modelling)
d) visualisation (texturing and rendering)

I think I quite like the Conceptualization however I am quite a visualisation person (and modelling) so I might split across the two. Concept work I find difficult so this will be challenging for me yet engaging. Modelling I am quite good at and therefore am not afriad to attempt the Chop Shop single handedly however I would like someone to work with to create a more impressive piece than if I was working on my own